How To Retire 6 Months Every Year

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Date: March 18, 1970
To: Personnel Dept.
Subject: Retirement

Four weeks from this date, on April 15, 1970, I shall be retiring, and this constitutes my four weeks notice in conformance with company standards for professionally classed employees.

I realize that retirement is an odd term to use at my age, but it is the only one that can validly be applied. The circumstances of my life are such that I need only work half the year for my physical support, and rather than spend or hoard the excess for 25 years, which is the usual custom, I would rather take my retirement in easy stages while I am still young enough to make good use of it.

It is really sad that the only work choice open to people is that of the 40-hour/50-week year, or none at all. There are so many reasonable combinations which might be put together that each of us could live his life in a human, rewarding fashion if the alternatives were actually available. Instead, in an economy that brags about its affluence and leisure, we are working at the same mad pace that was required in far more austere periods of our history. This is something which exists because each and all of us permit it to exist, as though we do not run our own lives or our own business functions. A business is no more than a collection of individuals, and when they decide to control their own destiny, they shall.

Fortunately, there are still personal alternatives available, and this is mine - periodic retirement.

Most Sincerely,
Irv Thomas

Barely eight months before the above resignation was written, I had arrived in Seattle with less than $400 in my pocket and the suit on my back. I did not know a soul in town, and had no idea where or when I was going to find a job. I had just left a shattered marriage behind me in California . . . along with all my worldly possessions and a job paying $12,500 per year. That my wife and I had been living to the hilt of our income was evidenced by the small amount of cash I had brought with me. And yet, here I am, loftily telling my boss where he can stuff it because I don't need any more of his filthy loot!

Fantastic? In a way, yes . . . but not nearly so fantastic as the way all of us have been thoroughly conned into the idea that we really have to work all year to stay alive and pay our bills. It just isn't true, and I'm going to prove it and show you the way out.

Though it may be very hard for confirmed rat-racers to believe, neither economics nor social pressure is keeping you from living the kind of life you'd like for a large part of the year; of having the time to develop the creative or academic activity to which you would really prefer to be devoting your life. The price is a willingness to accept less income, and that's what this article is all about.

Three thousand per year is not a poverty level existence for a single person, even in the inner city. You who need five, eight or ten thousand a year are victims of a cluster of addictions that can be broken. There are easy and hard ways of breaking habits. There are even pleasant ways.