Gutting It Out: What’s Worked For Me … So Far

True Story Time

I was soliciting ideas for blog articles the other day in the Financial Independence (FI) pensioners’ Facebook Group I started called Golden Albatross/Golden Handcuffs. I floated the idea “Coping Strategies For the Last Few Years (i.e. Gutting It Out)” and received the following response from one of my group members:

“I have 6 years. Help me gut it out, and keep my eyes on the prize.”

Six-years eh? That’s probably not an all-to-uncommon time-frame for a person to lose motivation for their job, no matter the reason. I find that pension earners tend to get that “trapped” feeling near the end of their career. That isn’t the same feeling as my self-described Golden Albatross situation. I define the Golden Albatross as the tension a person feels between staying or leaving a pensionable career. In this case, the trapped feeling to which I refer comes after a person decides to stay at a job in order to earn a pension, but before that person can retire with a pension’s full benefits. That’s where I find that “gutting it out” truly comes into play, and it’s the topic I want to concentrate on in today’s post. Continue reading

Test Your Retirement Plan: FI Numbers Don’t Lie, But … (Part 2)

Test your retirement plan

Sister, I killed Colonel Grumpus in the Drawing Room with a lead pipe.

Grumpus The Confessor

I have a confession to make.  I put off writing this post for a while.  When I first started my blog, I had always intended to demonstrate how to test your retirement plan.  I wanted to do this by using a high powered retirement calculator.  Doing so would complement what I consider the biggest strength of my website: the series of practical “How To” retirement plan articles in the Planning section.  However, I needed to tackle some other topics first.  I wanted to walk financially novice readers up to a point where they could understand the subject matter of this article.  Yet, I essentially hit that point weeks ago, and still, I delayed.

Part of that delay was due to the complexity of what I intended to describe.  It’s hard to write effectively about the steps needed to test your retirement plan.  A technically savvy blogger would simply post a video of how to do this, but that is beyond my capability at the moment.  As a point of reference, I was happy enough when I figured out how to embed a spreadsheet into this post.  Maybe someday I will circle back and create a video once I obtain the skills, and find the time. Continue reading