Since we're sharing...
Odd thing is that free school and early retirement were at the top of my priority list when I was 17. And I got on the track... appointment to the Naval Academy with a possible retirement at 42 on a captain's half pay. I think in 1973 that would have been something like $40K, don't know what that is in 2019 dollars.
But I did not like life in the navy, and the shock of leaving the mountains of Idaho for 24 years of greyness, rules, and not being able to make things (I probably would have made a better Seabee than a nuclear engineer), stimulated a previously dormant critical thinking brainwave and I soon caught the bug of idealism.
Though I accumulated enough credits at university to graduate, I never took a degree, as my side-life of working to pay for school (never had any debt - different thread) became dominant and I was off in a career as a building contractor and woodworker. Always liked innovating and doing interesting things that seldom evolved into "makin' da money" - that nasty bug of idealism working its way with me.
I became a true enough environmental activist in the 80's, filing timber sale appeals on Forest Service decisions and suing the State of Idaho for mismanagement of state endowment lands. Got certified in a variety of water quality management programs, served on innumerable economic development and restorative land management project boards (none of them paying gigs), and started a 501-c-5 nonprofit in '98 to figure out how to restore forests and save rural economies at the same time. All the while taking construction jobs to pay the bills.
Today, at the ripe old age of 64, I have very little money in the bank, but have an almost embarrassingly humongous pile of assets in the form of property and equipment that I am still trying to see used in the furtherance of saving the planet - if only humanity in general would take some responsibility and pitch in to help.
So the idea of retirement is really not on the drawing board. My colleague in the biochar stuff is 80 years old and still putting in full days at the shop, inventing, designing, welding, and grinding - and dreaming about when the good ideas will finally be applied to the problems that we have created to plague ourselves with. We are both aware that he may not be in the game much longer - hell, I think the same for myself. But if he goes first and our joint mission blossoms, then his daughter will be well-fixed and can retire, or whatever she wants to do.
As for me, I am a bit worried that if I go before there are competent people involved to carry on the mission, that all of our work will be lost and my pore wife will have to clean up after me (there'll be a big auction, I reckon, and the salvage vultures will pick apart everything that we have built). Convert the dream back to its molecular structure for ten cents on the dollar.
Life is kinda weird, ain't it?
I just googled it - I'd a been making about $63K a year since 1997, for doing whatever the hell I wanted to do. If there was such a thing as going back and sticking out the Navy career, knowing the current alternative, would I have made that choice?
No...
