I have worked my entire life, starting with a paper route at age 10.

I could not imagine what retirement would be like – what would I do? I don’t have a lot of hobbies.

On Jan 28, 2025 I was unexpectedly laid off from my job at Nuna (my first lay off) and that started my experiment with retirement. After a month of not looking for a job, I decided that maybe I was retired.

Financial

I had saved plenty of money, so I was in good shape financially to retire. Morgan Stanley managed our finances, so every month they would send us a check to cover expenses for the month. The weird parts were:

• Knowing that I was done earning money – that now I was spending the money that I had saved earlier. This turned out to not be entirely true, as I had one more payoff when Niantic was sold to Scopely.
• Paying for my own health insurance was eye-opening. It cost about $40,000 per year (or about $3,500 each month).
• It had been a while since I had stuck to a budget. I did not HAVE to stick to a strict budget, but I wanted plenty of money left for my kids to inherit.

How I spent my time

Cleaning the garage

This sounds like a joke, but it ended up becoming more of a ritual. Every few days I’d go to clean the garage, but it never got any cleaner. My ritual was to put something away, only to realize that I didn’t have an ideal place to put it. I would then build a place for it (in the process making the garage messier). It was a fun ritual, and I always managed to do it using scrap materials that I had on hand (spending money would have been cheating).

For example, I was putting away my random orbital sander when I realized that I always used it so it really belonged with my workbench, Hence, I built this:

Another time I was wondering where to put my accessories for my bench grinder, so I built this:

And as my garage was always filled with sawdust, I built a switch near my miter saw so I could easily enable dust collection (I spent a little money on this one, but not much).

Photo editing

Last year I bought a very nice camera for our African safari, so I decided that I wanted to become a better photographer. I also realized that a large part of photography is editing the photos after the fact, so I wanted to sharpen my photoshop skills. It also helped that I had 800 pictures from Africa that I could practice on.

My biggest issue here is that I’m colorblind and should NOT be trusted to mess with colors. My BIL suggested that I buy Luminar Neo, which enables various color presets that I can apply. It is still messing with color, but with training wheels.

I also watched some videos to help my technique. I have improved, but I still have lots of room for improvement.

Walking the dog

My wife still teaches piano, so our roles were reversed – I had a lot more spare time than she did. As a result, I got to walk Sherlock every day.

Travel

It was hard to travel too much because my wife still worked, but I did manage three trips:

• A weekend retreat in Utah.
• A two week trip to Tucson to visit a friend.
• My mother-in-law died, so my immediate family and their partners spent a week in St Louis for the funeral. The circumstances were sad, but the week together was pure heaven.

Doom scrolled

Let’s be honest – this is probably how I spent most of my time.

How it went

I learned to enjoy my retirement experiment – I was more relaxed and I slept better. I feared that I’d be bored, but I was not.

Around the time that I went back to work, my daughter bought a house 9 minutes away from us. It was built in 1962 and needed a lot of love. I could have spent all my time there doing repairs, but those projects can wait until I retire for real.