There was a little business around the corner from me on what was mostly a hidden residential street. It was, as I understand it, the perfect little business. The name of the place was called Unwined, and as you would guess it specialized in selling local wines. They had a little patio and live music every weekend. Not a ton of parking but enough for the few locals who knew about the place and liked it.
Why I say it was the perfect little business was because it was one of those rare businesses that was built on a residential property. The property had a two bedroom house that looked like something out of a sears catalog. More importantly the property included a retail location that must have been some kind of gas station or local dry goods retailer in the early to mid 1900’s. The owners of the property understood how quaint it was and they turned it into a wine shop. As they had full time jobs, it was only open a few days a week and closed for their vacations, etc..
Unfortunately, right before I moved into the area the owners sold the property and moved. The new owners tried to sell the retail building by itself for almost as much as the house, and that didn’t work. They ultimately used the place as storage. Sadly the building is defunct now, overgrown and dirty. It’s also a huge life lesson for me on how I should consider what’s next in my own life.
My birthday is coming up as I write this. I’ll be fifty two which means I’m technically eight years from retirement. I work for the state. To retire with healthcare included I need to have twenty years of service credit and I need to be at least sixty years old. Technically both of those things happen in eight years, well seven by the time you read this as I write my articles a year in advance.
I say technically for a few reasons. First, if I get sick and need extended time off from work, I’ll lose all my banked sick leave that counts as time accrued. Currently in my sick leave bank I’ve got six months. By my calculations, by the time I hit sixty years old I’ll have nineteen years of service and a year of sick leave. Together that equals the magic twenty years of service credit. If I get sick and need to use the leave, then I’ll have to work until sixty one years old so as to have my twenty years of service credit. Twenty years, as I said, is the magic number. It’s when you’ve earned healthcare for the rest of your life. In truth you get full health care until you take Medicare, and then you get the supplemental healthcare paid for but the point is you don’t have to worry about a thousand dollar a month health insurance bill.
The second reason why I say I can technically retire is that I’ll still only be sixty years old and the earliest I can get anything out of social security is at sixty two. There are options to bridge that gap, but I’d rather not leverage my future income to cover a shortfall in the first two years. There is a third and fourth reason as well. The third reason relates to my personality. I’m simply not one to sit on my ass and do nothing, so even if I “retired” there is no question that I’ll still work a bunch. The fourth reason is much more practical. I have a wife and the way her career worked out, she can’t retire until about ten years after me. That means my life will be a little less than pleasant if I decided to just sit around and play video games all day while she went off to bring home the bacon.
So all this is why I say I can technically retire if I hit sixty years old with twenty years of service. I will get a small pension but as I said, more importantly, I have earned paid healthcare. That’s a big big deal in that it allows me even more flexibility than I have now in what I choose to do. Adding to the flexibility matrix, my youngest will be graduating from highschool that year. If she goes off to college, we can downsize or relocate. Knowing all this is coming, and having the type of personality that likes to plan way way ahead, that’s why whenever I pass the old Unwined my mind immediately moves eight years ahead.
It’s not just seeing that old and neglected wine shop, there was another experience I’ve had that keeps rolling around in my head when I think of my options eight years from now. Several years ago my wife and I were on a cruise. One of the stops was the island of Cozumel. I’m pretty sure stopping at Cozumel is required by international maritime law as it seems every cruise stops there. The pier we were moored at was about two miles or so from downtown. As we’ve been to Cozumel a million times I convinced my wife that we should try something different and it would be a good idea just to walk to downtown. About halfway she started complaining that she didn’t come to the island just to walk up a highway all day. At that point we were right next to a local watering hole. It was a bar in the most basic sense. It was what seemed like a skeleton of a building and a simplified bar at the center of a bunch of rough tables. Beers and bags of chips were the only things on the menu. No A/C but the place was located next to the water and had a nice constant breeze flowing through it. It was about as simple an operation as you can get and the kind of place you would only find in Mexico. We stopped for a rest and we had a couple of beers. We then walked out onto the rocky shore next to the bar while the tide was down. After our beers we continued on our way and eventually made it to downtown. Yet that quick stop was absolutely the most memorable thing of that day. I still think about that place even today. What struck me was the simplicity of it. It wasn’t crowded, but there were definitely a few customers in there besides us. It had a very basic offering but the location was amazing and definitely a place you’d want to spend your day even if you were working. Also it was so lean, someone could come in and steal everything in the place and you could be back in operation the next day by going to get a cooler, a bag of chips and a twelve pack. In many ways it echoed Unwined.
There are some limitations to my retirement plans. For example I love teaching but I can’t retire, take my pension, and then double dip by going right back into full time teaching. I can adjunct teach, and I probably will, but I can’t go over a certain income level with the state of NC. The way the NC retirement plans works, if I earn a bunch of money working for the state after retirement then they don’t consider me retired and they take away the pension. I don’t like it, but I have to admit, the policy makes sense. Ideally I could adjunct with one of the private institutions, and I really need to start making those connections now if I want to do that. But that’s an easy transition. It’s basically going from full time work to remote part time work. Since adjunct teaching is only one part, then what else is next?
If your in business, and you have a ton of professional connections, then you can go into consulting. Now when I say consulting I really mean doing professional level odd jobs. It’s often just a short to medium term regular job, but your hired as a business not as an individual. You are also typically paid more, but don’t have any associated benefits. In education that would be writing a ‘textbook’ for a publisher. Textbook is in quotes because it’s all online learning materials these days. I could be a traveling educator for a business who sells a pricey technical product which includes training as part of the sale. There are various levels of time commitments with the different types of contract jobs.
There are always straight commission jobs, like real estate, selling insurance or being a financial product broker. But that’s not a good retirement gig as with these types of jobs there is always some form of investment for licensure, a big time commitment and a real probability of limited or zero luck required to be successful. In theory you have the kind of flexibility you’d want, i.e. work when and where you want. In reality, it takes years to build up a ‘book of business’ as they say. It’s 80 hours a week for the first several years if your doing it right. So you’d have to have some sort of passion related to the work or you’ll just be a statistic in an industry with massive churn.
I could do the low paid ‘get out of the house’ retail job. I go work in a taproom or big box retailer somewhere. That could work, especially if it’s something I have a passion for, but most likely won’t as I’d like to avoid some of the crap related to big businesses. Even small businesses like the local tap rooms require a temporal commitment that’s determined by someone who’s not me.
I think about all these options and I keep going back to Unwined and the Cozumel streetside watering hole. Both places had limited risk, simplicity, a fun and relaxed working environment and an ideal location for living in your retirement. Also the beauty of the business is that it can be owned by my wife, or she can technically collect the salary from the business. I’d just be a minimum wage worker bee thus not causing any issues with Social Security or the state pension.
If I were to stay here in North Carolina I could ape the Unwined model. There are other residential properties on side roads with little retail businesses, or buildings which could become little retail businesses. In one instance I’ve seen a chicken house turned into a wedding venue. At nearly $2,000 rental for the day, that little farm was making back its refurbishing investment in a matter of months. I could easily see something that’s both a retail establishment and a venue all rolled into one. The secret ingredient for success is the property. You have to own it outright. If you pay rent, it’s the property equivalent of a boss putting you on the schedule in the big box retailer job. You are having to work to meet the needs of someone else. That won’t work long term. I know that debt or debt commitments like rent kill most startups. I’ll be new to whatever I decide to do and I’m sure I’ll make lots of costly mistakes. I’ll need to be in a place where I can afford to make them.
Honestly, I could see myself enjoying the adventure of opening up something in Mexico or some other Caribbean location that’s friendly to ExPats. It’d be much more complicated, but I like that kind of adventure, especially if I could manage the risk. The biggest problem there is the logistics of my wife working until I’m close to seventy years old. By that point I’d think my retirement adventure will be winding down. Then again, maybe that’s when I hand it off to her and I go fishing.
Right now I don’t know the direction I’m going to go in. I do know I need to do something. I also know that even though I’m just half way through my current work adventure, the next one needs to be in my sights. Thankfully with my personality, I’m on it. I like thinking about big future plans. It always helps me Unwined.
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