It can be a good strategy to find your replacement. If you’re grooming someone internal, making sure your boss is on-board with the plan is helpful. If there’s buy-in for that, it can work well - training, including that person in projects, meetings, etc.
I have had direct reports leave (not retire) and recommend their replacement and/or stay to help train their replacement. When they asked for recommendations, it spoke well to their thoughtfulness, commitment to the team, and professionalism. So not a bad move!
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In my case, my awful boss refused to allow me to have any part in the process of finding my replacement … and I had not done anything to make that a wise decision (I was incredibly professional to the end). The replacement had a resume a mile wide and an inch deep. I could go on about how awful that turned out, but both my boss & my replacement are now gone. I met the “new” replacement, who is extremely well qualified, so it eventually worked out (and she thanked me for leaving very detailed policies & procedures, which her predecessor told the old boss that I didn’t leave). Sometimes you just know it’s time to retire!
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It took a lot of phone calls and going up the chain of command but I have finally received approval to retire early. Was able to give 3 months notice instead of the “required” six. I am happy and relieved. I still have 32 years of data, equipment and files in my lab and office to empty out this summer, and the hoarder in me is going to find that difficult, but I am pretty sure it will feel great to move on to new things.
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I plan to retire next March when I turn 67. I told the president and the CFO of the company already. We need a couple of new hires in our accounting department because of growth. I wanted to be honest and let them know that at least one of the new hires should be more senior. This company has been really great to me over the past 11 years and I want to make sure they have the right staff to replace me when the time comes.
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That is exactly what I needed to do. The people I was put in contact with initially were new and inexperienced. It seemed to take each person I was referred to a little while to realize they didn’t know the answer and had to refer me to someone else. Eventually (4th person I was referred to), I got a senior decision-making person who could see that what made sense for me and the university was the same thing, and worked it out.
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My Facebook memory from 16 years ago was when my boss got promoted and they totally reorganized which eliminated my position. I was ready to retire; it had been my second career. I had ten years with them so was vested for retirement benefits plus at the time retiree health care. At some time post Medicare that transitioned into health care credits which still gives me about $1000/year in premiums reimbursement. And I got a lovely watch! (I actually got a choice of many products but liked the watch best.)
I spent the next five years plotting, er planning, our move to San Diego. This mainly involved nagging husband to join in decisions.
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It’s kind of scary how fast retirement goes! 
. I will have been retired 7 years in September. Feels like 3 or 4, at most. I am relieved to find that our net worth has grown since retirement, instead of shrinking, and that is without the addition of DH’s social security, which we will not pull for another 5 years.
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Missed this post the first time round. I retired just about a year ago, a year after my husband. I was a solo practice architect with no employees so really it was a matter of not taking new jobs. My practice was mostly remodeling and small additions. I found my clients got less and less interested in involving me in any of the details, and contractors were considering my drawings as suggestions not things required by code. The building departments were all losing more and more paperwork requiring constant nagging and resending of documents. It just stopped being fun. I kept putting off my continuing education, because the courses are so terrible and useless. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many I took in the course of almost 40 years that were worthwhile. The thought of 36 hours and hundreds of hours of wasted time was just unbearable. So I let my license lapse. It was great.
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That’s what I did with my social work license. All done!
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You sound like me! We had saved, invested, have no debt etc. But I still had anxiety, and going from “saver” to “spender” was a hard concept for me to grasp. And the world feels a little unsettled.
I was in a job that I just couldn’t do any more (a combo of me and it), my parents were getting older, and spouse and I want to do things while we still can.
My spouse was going to go part time at 60 (to keep the health insurance) so I I decided to go part time vs full on retire. It took me like a year to find a a good part time job. I was 59. Love my boss, love the flexibility, and I am fully remote. And actually make decent money!
I feel like going part time is easing me into the “spender” category. I’ll probably continue to work part time a couple of more years (so to age 62). But if the job ends tomorrow, I am ok with it.
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Wow - I just figured out my H has been retired 4 years this month! Well, he really still works a little, but only takes on work he’s really interested in and it keeps his mind active/gives him money to travel.
I’ve now been retired 5+ years. I am happy to report we’ve done lots of nice vacations, but haven’t had to dip into any of our actual “retirement savings” yet. I am thinking about starting to take withdrawals just to keep from having to pay a lot in taxes when we take RMDs. (Still over a decade away for me).
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My H and I are planning to retire in 8 months, but H may decide to be done now (he’s 69). We are both working from home today and he had a call with his boss, the bosses boss and another coworker. I heard the call as the door to my office was opened. The call was basically telling H he would now be reporting to this coworker. H was told this on the meeting and not by his boss beforehand. This coworker is a real ***kisser and does not know what he is doing. There is no way H is going to work for this guy. H and I have previously discussed that if work becomes not what he wants any longer to just go ahead and be done. So it looks like H may get an 8 month head start on me!
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I think for H it just sucks that this is the way his career will end. He has worked for this company for the past 15 years. This has definitely not been a dream job for H and the management has not been good for a number of years. The Finnish company that owned this division sold it off 2 years ago to a Swedish private equity firm and things have gone downhill since then. The hard thing is that H is going to need to figure out what he wants to do to keep busy while I am still working for the next 8 months. I’m hoping that he will contact a couple of his friends that have small companies and maybe do some part time consulting to keep his engineering brain satisfied. We are fortunate that money or healthcare is not an issue for us to worry about at this point.
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Maybe he can make an extra trip to go see your grandbaby and help them around the house! Would y’all travel alone? OR he can spend extended time with his family. I used to love when dh had extra time off and took the boys to spend a week with his mom!
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H would definitely travel on his own. D1 would love her Dad to come stay and help with projects around their house!
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Sadly this often seems to be the case…
It’s sad that it has to be this way for your H, and really it stinks.
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Your H is fortunate, because he was prepared to say goodbye if need be. He will figure out what to do from here. My FIL got the shaft at his company, but he was not ready to retire at the time. He was an executive, and rather than try to find another job in a down economy in his mid-late 50’s, he actually took a job working on the line at his company. It was incredibly physical work, but the man wasn’t going to give in. Eventually, they returned him to a sales engineering job. It really took a toll on him, though. He lived into his 90’s, but he had some tough physical problems.
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I hope if he decides to leave that he will take the opportunity to share how tacky it was to get the information about who he was to report to. They don’t have to agree with him but they should understand how disrespectful it was to an employee.
I had a thought this weekend. I am working part time after retiring from a full time job end of 2024. I expect to fully retire either end of 2026 or March 2027 (get through the winter!). Just as I planned ahead for the last kid to go to college and have an empty house and more time on my hands - so I found some new activities to become involved in- I need to do the same NOW for when I have more time on my hands.
So getting involved in some more interests/activities it shall be. I signed up for a cooking class this morning!
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That’s a bummer of a way to transition to retirement. But I’m betting it will all work out in the end. The consulting sounds like a good idea. Lacking that, there are so many worthy volunteer gigs out there.
My husband retired about a year ahead of me, and I kept working til he got to 65/Medicare. My job was relentless (though often working from home, so sometimes we had a lunch date). So we agreed it made sense for him to do all the cooking / planning / meal prep. (He did a lot of housework too, but our standards are pretty low.)
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