Musings about retirement

I plan to semi-retire at the end of 2013 due to some health issues. There are a couple of points; one that is on my mind from reading AARP is do I have enough money? The answer is I think so, I have a financial advisor working on an analysis and I have done some of this myself in my trading notebook.

To determine if I have enough money to retire, I started a budget looking for the sources of income. We have some fixed annunities, dividend portfolios, interest payments on a house we owner financed and so forth. The budget was a major step in letting me really start to think this was possible and perhaps even wise.

The next question is what do I want to do with the time that I currently spend working. And it is an important question. When I used to work at NSWC I would watch people retire at 55 ( the US Government had a system called CSRS that allowed that). Then it was not uncommon to learn that they died within a year. I guess they just did not have anything to do with their life, so I would like to avoid that. By the way, speaking of CSRS, I will not receive retirement benefits until age 62, it is called deferred retirement, but that is fine.

I would like to keep teaching, I enjoy it and just completed an update of my flagship course MGT 512 SANS Security Leadership Essentials. Kathy and I have talked and we think teaching six to seven weeks a year would be a nice balance. I have another course as well, MGT 514 Security Strategic Planning, Policy and Leadership, so it would be nice to mix and match those a bit.

Kathy currently works as an hourly employee. That sounds pretty attractive, but the other alternative would be teach as a 1099 independent contractor. Need to puzzle this a bit there are positives to both. Not that it is my decision, it is SANS decision, but I should learn to articulate the merits of either choice.

If I become an hourly employee, I could simply do projects for SANS.ORG and SANS.EDU. I have been working on the college rubrics lately and am enjoying the work. After the rubrics are done, it would be great to have a chance to update the college's leadership essay. I think SANS policy project is an important asset to the community and would love a chance to spruce it up. A big advantage of being hourly would be health care.

However, there appear to be advantages to being a 1099. I would need to create a corporation and have SANS pay for teaching through the corporation and the corporation could pay the health care. This way I would get full author fees and at least so far MGT 512 has run a lot, but that is partly due to 8570 which seems to be winding down. Another question would be where to locate the corporation, probably Delaware, they look to be fairly straightforward, not Hawaii, but maybe Washington, our residence. There is some evidence Washington is a good choice for a corporation, but other evidence that it is not.