Our Early Retirement Trip

September 16, 2010 by Jeremiah | 0 comments

We knew five or six teachers when we first got married. They lived either in our apartment house or near it. We were all a friendly bunch and belonged to a ski club together and did fondue parties and wine tastings.

We were both blue collar workers – me an electronics technician, and my bride was a secretary. Together we made more than they did by themselves and probably made more than two of them. But they had something we did not have.

Time off. They started back to school in late August and in less than two months had a couple of days off in October for Parent Teacher conferences. There was also a three day weekend for Columbus Day. Then a month later they got a week off at Thanksgiving. Then another month later they got two weeks off for Christmas.

They get every major holiday – Labor Day, Columbus Day, Pearl Harbor Day – O.K. maybe not December 7th; Pearl Harbor Day. But you know what I mean. They get days off that I didn’t even know they were days off.

I remember one of the women was from the East Coast and complaining that they did not get VJ Day off. I had to go to the library to look up what VJ Day was. This was back before the internet and Google and people actually went to the library to look stuff up. VJ Day was Victory Over Japan Day. It used to be a holiday.

They got a week off for Spring Break and then less than two months later, they were off for the summer. All summer. And they got paid for it. I know they made less each month for getting paid in the summer and they had a choice between more money each month or getting less and getting a check 12 months all year long.

But having all summer off always got to me. So, we always said that when we retired, we were going to take the entire summer off, just like they did every summer, leave town and run away. Our youngest daughter was doing an internship downtown and wanted to come home, stay at the house and work downtown. So it worked out O.K. Someone would be there to take care of the pets, see that the grass got watered and mowed. That sort of stuff.

We had a great time. But one of the conditions was that there would be no “work”. No blog posts. No e-mail. No working on my stock market course or the stock market course web site.

We would only use the laptop to check the weather, pay bills online, transfer money from savings to checking, that sort of “work”.

Well – we are back. We had a wonderful time. I missed not posting to the Taking Early Retirement blog and answering e-mail. I’m three months behind getting my stock market course to market and finishing up the web site to make sales. But it was a great relief not to have to do any of it.

Now that I am back to “work” look for more regular posts from me to this blog.

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For Taking Early Retirement (TER), I hope you are enjoying a great retirement or are close to that day!