Some Random Musings on this topic.

My mom retired in 1984 after teaching for 32 years. This year will be her 32nd year on a teachers pension, one of those nice defined benefit ones that is indexed no less. The teachers pension is in addition to her government funded pensions. She has taken our more in pension that she earned as a teacher. I realize that not everyone is in this situation…very few if any in modern workplaces.

I love the idea of mini-retirements, but the employment landscape is not ready for it nor is most of society structured to allow for it. I have been underemployed since my last employer went broke in 2011, (Ageism and geographic location are a big role in this.) My wife’s job is not relocatable. I have had some good gigs, and some poor ones, and some time off in between. Luckily my wife's job working for the government has had increases that pretty much offset my decreases. We met older and had kids older, now in my 50’s I’d like to take a sabbatical but I have a 9 year old son. As one of the other comments stated, do we take our kid out of school or home school, I’m really not that great of a teacher, and he has fantastic teachers where he goes to school. What about my wife, her continued employment at the government = a pension program much like my mom’s that will go along way to sustaining our retirement, my pension program is nothing but government funded.

Last comment, things change suddenly, my wife and I have always had plans; she has been battling an autoimmune issue for two years. Though we are not sure of the cause, earlier this year she was to go on a biologic agent to suppress her immune system and the blood work flagged a liver problem. She has liver damage, not likely reversible, but our long term horizon may be a lot shorter that we thought, so we may yet have to adjust our prospective and start to tick off some of the bucket list things long before we planned. As travel is part of the plans, we will have to travel while she is still healthy enough to do so, and that may well involve taking our son out of school from time to time.

No point in accumulating a big bucket of money if you can’t enjoy it. But it does go against everything we have been taught.