Should i keep working

This is all to say that working in retirement is one of the few levers you can pull to add another layer of security to your retirement plan. If you have the ability and willingness, adding another income stream seems like a no-brainer -- particularly at this moment in time. Trading time for money means something different to everyone.

Getting away from work forever is a common goal, and for good reason. But maintaining even some form of paid employment can go a long way after you've retired from your full-time career.

As the list above makes clear, the benefits range from the financial to the psychological, so it's worth thinking about how you might structure your life when the golden years arrive. Discounted offers are only available to new members. Stock Advisor will renew at the then current list price. Investing Best Accounts.

Stock Market Basics. That worked great for me. I have mixed feelings about work. I do feel I have devoted my life to service though. Work provides meaning and structure that just feels right.

Thanks Wealthy Doc. I think we all have mixed feelings about work. Balance is the key. Thought provoking, balanced, helpful. I failed retirement twice. Now that it is reality, I miss the fascinating problem solving, my smart, funny, dedicated colleagues, and the feeling of satisfaction going home knowing I helped someone today. By comparison, full retirement is an empty feeling. Strongly agree with THP to engineer your perfect shortened hours or part time job, take sabbaticals to travel, hike in the mountains and spend more time and activities with your kids before they have flown.

Tony the rad. Good post on a common problem. I am close to FIRE in late 30s basically there and see this exact dilemma arising for me in about 10 years. That is not an individual physician responsibility, at least not one that is already full time clinical care.

Including my wife, kids, previous nuclear family, etc in concentric enlarging circles until I reach the media. While not an atheist like her, I do believe in objectivism created by Ayn Rand and the virtue of selfishness. Incidentally, I have found mediation to help. Also, I hope your back is feeling better. I got hit by a car while crossing the street about 3 weeks ago to see a patient the other day. Got some shoulder issues and was thinking of you and the posts you wrote about your back pain.

Meditation is a great way to get to know yourself and be comfortable with your thoughts. Many dilemmas can be simplified by just being more aware. You have a great talent for deconstructing a question and dilemma such as this one.

Posing alternate questions and flipping the script shows how the way in which the question is framed can change the way we approach it. Nicely done. Thought provoking post. None of us should feel morally obligated to continue working. Once financial independence is reached it becomes an individual decision.

Started slowing down in my later 40s to the decision to retire completely in 3 months. Retirement needs to be individualized. The beauty is, he has choices. He can choose to continue working as much as he does now, not at all, or anywhere in between. There is no one right answer for any of us, but it is a great point to get to, to have the choice. I look forward to getting there.

Great post, THP! I think your advice is spot on. Freedom is so important, and moral obligations can seem huge as physicians…but we are not the only ones that carry them. So do our employers. I was stuck in the mode of being a human doing and not a human being. At some point about 4 years ago, we closed our practice and hired into a big corporate group who took over our previous contract and became salaried physicians.

It was the beginning of the end. We built the place from scratch and felt obligated till we found a solution. Once found, thus ended the moral dilemma. Hire somebody else to be the manager. If anything it increases and everything is interdependent.

The patients continued to be cared for regardless. The place has 2 new gassers. Life goes on. Now retired I am ecstatic. I do what I want, as much as I want, whenever I want. My sister has a corporate job. I reached FI when I was 36 years old. I just wanted to be home with my children. Although I am good at delegation, I realized that fitness and relationships are not things I could pay someone else to do for me. So I was a young female family doctor who stopped practicing at 36 years old.

I had never heard of anything so insane. I knew exactly what I would regret and that would have been missing out on my children while they were growing up. Now that my youngest is heading to university, I am happy to work more in Medicine. I am an RN who worked until age 62 but only because I loved my work. He is a retired surgeon who mostly loved his work but the stress of being on call for a large hospital system with a Level I trauma center wore him down and he retired long before me.

Two years later I struggle with exactly the same guilt as the writer. I agree with the other comments that the writer might want to try part time work as a first step. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.

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Email Address. And because nobody knows what the future has in store, assuming you'll continue working for as long as you'd like can be an incredibly risky move. If you have reason to believe you'll develop health problems or lose your job, it might be best to plan on retiring earlier than you expect just to be safe. But if you're able to continue working, that might be a smart move to build up your savings and enjoy a more comfortable retirement. Discounted offers are only available to new members.

Stock Advisor will renew at the then current list price. Investing Best Accounts. Stock Market Basics. Stock Market. Industries to Invest In. Getting Started. The Chase Sapphire Preferred is my top pick for your first rewards card. Ideally, you I choose to leave when the likelihood of regret is in perfect balance between working too long and walking too soon.

After all, you never know when that extra money might come in handy. Health care costs keep rising. It happened to me 12 days ago! Hopefully, I can make our monetary fortune last no how many bones we break or surgeries we require the boys have each had a couple of those. I loved certain aspects of my career. It seemed that my life revolved around supporting all of that crap while others were getting all the new and better projects.

There were also new things I wanted to learn and do. FI allowed me to retire early from that long career and pursue opportunities more aligned with what I loved doing and new things I wanted to learn and move into to. I will admit that although not my motivation, my retirement gigs did act as a nice way to transition away from a career mindset toward early retirement and a passion driven mindset.

Breaking decades of work based mental conditioning can mess with our brain. All of my post retirement work in FI were far better experiences than my long career. Working on your own terms and knowing you can walk away whenever you want definitely plays into that. Yeah, it can be frustrating for sure. I know that I could design my dream job at my current work place, if only I had the leverage to do so.

Financial independence makes sense for all people to work toward. Deciding thereafter how to spend your time and energy is a separate question altogether. The freedom is what we should all be chasing. What we do it after that is going to look different for each of us. The feeling of uselessness can invite depression very quickly.