I'm not retiring soon, but I did retire kinda early.........I worked from the time I was 16 until I was 34, when I got married, and quit working to be able to travel with my husband who was doing alot of volunteer work for a veterans organization at the time which required a lot of travel. So I guess you could say I retired 16 years ago, when we got married.
My biggest concern at the time was no longer having my own paycheck, it took some getting used to being given a montly "allowance" to handle groceries and household expenses. We had been living together for a few years but until I quit my job, I used my paycheck to handle things like my car payments, my credit card bills, etc. By the time we got married everything was paid off and we worked out a financial system that works for us. And we have taken care of business so that I will be ok financially if something were to happen to my husband (disabled veteran).
I was excited about not having to deal with the stress of a 40+ hour per week job, and worried about how I was going to fill my days when we weren't traveling. Staying in touch with some friends became a challenge because I was the only one of my old gang that wasn't working and our schedules just didn't jive anymore. But as I got involved in other things, more friends came along. It did take a while to adjust to the idea of not having to go to work every day.
Somehow, 16 years later, filling my days is no longer a problem -- finding time to do eveything I want to do in the course of a day is the problem these days!!
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Ann