Brilliant message from
drron. I retired from my 36 year career job at just shy of 57 in July 2006. It was a job that I really loved but I was pushed to transfer to CBR from PER. The project I had been working on had come to a natural conclusion and on top of all that, as a research scientist, I was getting pretty fed up with the grant-applying treadmill. So - no brainer! See ya!
I retired on a Friday but had an epiphany over the weekend
. A very good mate of mine has a small business that he was in the fairly early stages of developing so I joined him under the condition that I have 6 weeks annual leave to do my annual xDONEx (now coming up in September to about my 13th consecutive.) But the key thing was that I could relieve him of some of the things that I enjoy like mentoring young recruits and some things where my skills are highly complementary to his. I wasn't chasing the bucks; it was the satisfaction that was most important.
After a while, and a bit of 'filtering' of recruits, we started to get some young folk who 'got' the type of work we do (it's in agriculture, so it's pretty demanding and requires a certain type of highly flexible person) and they started to step up. That meant it became time for JohnM to start stepping down (I think it's important to know when to gracefully depart.)
So, after about 4 years I went to four days a week, the after about another 3 years I went to two days a week and now I just work casually. In the meantime I picked up a bit of private consulting work that kept me moderately, but very flexibly busy - with the all-important ABN for making tax-deductible personal super contributions
.
I have LTG well and truly packed away but I haven't been <WP for about 12 years. LTG is my old-age back-up!
So a DONEx every year is my way of earning status, points and optimising travel.
Oh, and did I mention the divorce about 15 years ago?
Woo-hoo!