Life Update: I'm Finally Joining Shawn in Retirement! 🎉

It's Happening!

After more than 30 years in Human Resources, I’m officially hanging up my HR hat in January.

When Shawn and I got married, we had two major financial goals:

1. Invest in Ourselves: Retire when our youngest went to college.
To us, this meant two things:

• Being able to live well while covering all our current and future living and medical expenses & never becoming a financial burden to our children.

• Being able to travel comfortably and as often as we want while we are healthy and physically able.

2. Invest in Our Kids: Cover four years of college for each of them.
We wanted to give them the gift of stepping into adulthood with a Bachelor’s degree in hand without the headwind of student loan debt to go with it.

Every major financial decision we made circled back to those two goals. If it didn’t help Future Us or Future Kids, it got cut. (Proof: I still drive a car that requires an actual key in the ignition.)

Looking back, we know how fortunate we were to even be able to set goals like these. Having two strong, steady incomes gave us choices we understand not everyone has. We’ve always tried to be mindful of that privilege, and we continue to be.

Of course none of this would have been possible without Shawn as our family’s CFO. He not only kept us on track for our goals, he also taught our kids financial management. Budgeting and investing lessons are free in this household… and mandatory.

So here we are. Our youngest started college last year, and Shawn retired. He’s been patiently waiting for me to join him ever since, and it’s finally time.

I’ve worked my entire adult life, in an executive level role for the last 20 years of that, so I’m fully aware that this next phase will require some serious change management. But for once, I’m the project, and honestly? I can’t wait. Thankfully, Shawn has had a full year of “post-work life” under his belt, so he’ll be my retirement sherpa - guiding, nudging, and occasionally dragging me into the land of owning your own schedule.

What I know will be hardest to leave behind are the people - the colleagues I cheered on, the ones I watched grow into phenomenal leaders, and especially those who crossed over into friend territory. Those relationships are the souvenirs I’ll treasure long after I turn in my badge.

As for our joint retirement plans? They’re big! The slow-travel spreadsheet has officially come out of hibernation, and we’re already plotting 2026 and 2027. So far we’ve locked in a Panama Canal cruise in the spring and a couple months in Portugal over the summer. After that, we’re eyeing Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Nordic countries. But nothing is set in stone; as JP Morgan said: Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.

Cheers to new horizons!