"Have you given it any thoughts?" she asked.
"I think about it almost every day," I replied. On our recent trip to Mexico, DW and I met two lovely couples: one, from Montreal; the other, from the east end of Ottawa. Both couples had recently retired, and they weren't much older than ourselves.
"When would you like to retire?" was a question that our financial advisor and our new-found friends had all asked us.
"If possible," I said, "I'd like to leave my job in the next three to five years. The earlier, the better."
Our advisor crunched some numbers and then showed us a graph on her computer screen. "Conservatively, three years would be a little tight," she said. "Four years would be doable but five years would be best."
Five years.
Mind you, I don't plan to sit still, in retirement, nor will DW and I be spending all of our saved-up cash on constant travel. We would continue to take one big trip each year but I would also divert a lot of my time to writing fiction. I would also like to be more active with my photography, perhaps working as a portrait photographer and selling some of my artsy photos.
Enough work to keep me from being bored and to earn a bit of cash on the side.
The end of the tunnel has not yet been reached but at least we can make out some light ahead. DW says she would work a year or two after I retire, so our days might be similar to how they are now, where we both work from home, in separate rooms: only, I'll be doing work that I want to do, taking breaks or heading out to shoot photos whenever I want.
I'm so glad our advisor didn't laugh in our faces when we set our retirement goal. Instead, she sent us links to what our upcoming steps should be and what to research ahead of the next big milestone in our lives.
We were looking for the light and she pointed it out to us. Day by day, that light will grow brighter.
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