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I like Wednesday now; it’s my favorite day of the week. When I was organizing everything before selling my business and retiring, I was so uptight and stressed about sorting out a cash flow stream for our everyday spending. I decided to pay ourselves weekly, reasoning it would make things easier to track what we spent this way. If you think about it, it’s a silly thing to do. It’s not like it was a surprise to me what we spent; I’d been funding that for countless years.
I ran a small business with a multimillion-dollar turnover. My focus was on optimizing cash flow, generating income, and maximizing profit to keep the enterprise healthy and flourishing. Paying staff and suppliers was an easy thing for me to do. Surprisingly, I had a harder time paying myself. Taking the business’s life-giving cash to fund my lifestyle always deeply bothered me. Definitely a weird tension for a business owner!
But now I don’t have this issue. It’s just a joy to see the money drop into our account every week. I actually log into my online banking on a Wednesday morning, coffee in hand, just for the satisfaction of seeing the deposit. I’m easily pleased! Prior to pulling the trigger, I had spreadsheets about retirement income streams coming out of my ears. I would obsess over them nearly every day and get an itch if I hadn’t looked in a while. Totally and utterly over the top.
Nowadays, I really don’t even think about them. I’ve set my sail, chartered my course, and it’s on autopilot. It’s a revelation to seemingly receive cash on a weekly basis without having perceived to hustle and work for it. It’s a wonderful feeling that I know will fade when it becomes mundane everyday, but at the moment, I’m enjoying it immensely and wanted to remind you old-time retirees what a super thing it is to seemingly get money for nothing. Now all I need is the chicks for free!
Not receiving SS yet, so our favorite day, “payday”, is the last business day of each month when our pensions magically appear in our checking account. The absolute best “payday” each year is the last day of July as that is when the COLA hits our pensions!
By the way, I’m also thinking of “Money” by Pink Floyd: “I’m alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack.”
Mark Knopfler could not have said it better.
Don’t forget Sting
Measure twice, cut once!
Sounds like you approached things the right way. Though I suspect the planning didn’t create anxiety rather the opposite, that you planned to salve the anxiety of approaching a new stage.
Autopilot works but I’m curious how you’d adjust it if there was a shock to the economy that challenged some of your assumptions. (Because those are things I think about heading towards retirement)