Day 2 - Stephane

Unlike my wife Corrie, who has retired many times, today was the first day of my first retirement. Surprisingly, it was quite an agonizing process to get to the place where I could finally DECIDE to retire.

You would think it would be easy to make that decision. You would think that you would just look at your savings, (your net worth) think about what kind of retirement you can afford, and then just quit your job, get on a plane and hit the beach! Well it certainly was not like that for me. It took months and months of agonizing back and forth discussions, analysis, weighing out the pros and the cons, and all kinds of exhausting thoughts that mostly brought me to paralysis by analysis. I could go on and on about this, but, I will tell you what finally tipped the scale for me to finally be able to make my decision.

Although thinking and talking did help, and was important, I just could not take the plunge. I have to give credit to the guys who wrote the Freakanomics books. I read their books and they also have a podcast that I listen to once in a while. In one of them they discussed the process of quitting. It was fascinating. Without going in to all the details, what helped me was the result of a study they did about the process of deciding to quit. Quit your job; quit a relationship; any important thing. Basically, the result of the extensive study (you can look it up) was that the people who flipped a coin to make that decision were as happy or happier than the people who went through a thorough process to come to their decision. Basically it was a 50-50 split! So why agonize? Another conclusion of the study was that quitting is fun!

So, Day 1, as Corrie said, was just like any other Saturday, but the difference is, if I want, every day from now on can be like Saturday!