I’ll be honest. I did a really terrible job of planning for retirement. Partly because of life choices, circumstances, and happenstance; and partly because I just wasn’t very educated about what I needed to do to retire comfortably. So, there I was in 2017 at the age of 60, beginning to think about retirement (yeah, I know…late to the game). Having decided on teaching as my second career at the age of 38, 2018 was the year that I would finally have enough years teaching combined with age to qualify for Texas Teacher Retirement (TRS). Question was, was I really ready?
I loved my job (still do) and didn’t know if I was really ready to retire, but I was also wanting to do some other things with my life that teaching was keeping me from. So, I decided to start talking to my principal about the possibility. The next year, I thought I was ready. I revisited the conversation with my husband, principal, and teacher friends. Could this really be it?
I began looking at the financial aspect of retiring. I had no 401K or 403B. I had used my severance from the company I had worked for for ten years to pay for college to earn my teaching degree. Yay, no student loans, but no retirement package either. Crazy thing in Texas is that though I had paid into Social Security for almost 20 years, TRS trumps Social Security so that I can not draw my full Social Security and my Teacher Retirement. I can, however, receive partial Social Security. So, collectively I will be getting just slightly over $4K a month. Luckily, we are totally debt free except for a small mortgage we have on our home, and we own a rental property (that we have now remodeled and is completely paid for). We dabbled in house flipping. Not a business but flipped five or six properties over the course of nine years or so. That brought in some extra savings, allowed us to buy our lake home and totally remodel it with very little mortgage, and take some nice trips without dipping into our household budget. So, though we couldn’t go crazy, it’s not like we couldn’t do well. Plus worst case scenario, I could always substitute teach for about $100 a day to earn a little extra when I wanted it. Yes, I could do this!
But as often happens with me, things hit a little snag. Our daughter got engaged. Being the only girl and 14 years younger than her nearest sibling, we knew we would give her the wedding of her dreams and I didn’t want to go in debt to do it. So, I decided to teach until January 2020 (her wedding date was in March) in order to be able to cover wedding expenses and possibly save a little money toward retirement while I was at it. However, once again…a little snag. The beginning of that school year teachers in our school district got a big raise (for me close to $6000 a year; thanks COVID), and as the year progressed, we started putting pen to paper to see what that kind of raise would do for my teacher retirement. It basically meant that if I continued to teach for two more years, my retirement check would increase by almost $300 a month. That’s kind of a no brainer, especially for someone who did such a lousy job of retirement planning. Plus, it’s not like I hated my job or anything. Well, here I am four years later, and I’m finally pulling the trigger.
As I am typing this post, I have six days left in the school year and have taken off three of those days. One of the things I know is that I am going to need something to do to give me purpose. Thus, the reason for this blog. I am a novice and though not tech savvy, I am not totally tech ignorant so I will be giving it my best shot. Please bear with me to see where the adventures take us. If you want to know more about my life journey, check out my “About” tab.