Well, actually I only made $1917.50 and I made it yesterday but it just is not as catchy when I say it like that. All around it was a very odd day. I got up that morning feeling like I needed to do a little bit of work on my normal consulting side gigs but I was still kind of sleepy after breakfast so I decided to take a nap. I usually sleep like a dead man but that previous night not so well. One of the best things about life after leaving the 9 to 5 behind is my schedule is very flexible and I can be shamelessly lazy on short notice, so I hit the couch about the time my former coworkers were hitting their desks and got a little nap in.
It was already a strange day because my current volunteer work had intersected my former corporate job for the first time since I had retired. My old company was holding an annual charity fund-raiser and the community college I volunteer at was participating. The college offered tickets to my wife and I to the dinner celebration that night where I knew I would get to catch up with all my former coworkers, some of whom I had not seen in three years. It sounded like fun! Then it got weird, because I got a phone call after getting my nap in and was surprised to hear it was one of my former management team members. They were in a bind, could not get the plant started up and the only expert they had on the problem areas was on vacation clear across the country. It happened to be a niche area that I actually am kind of an expert in so I said, sure, I can come over and see if I can help.
The thing is, up until that phone call I had zero contact with my former plant since I left. I left on great terms with retirement parties and dinners and hugs and jokes but when I left I left. In a small town the last thing a new facility General Manager needs is the former boss looking over her shoulder. And my side gigs, while technical, weren’t really focused on solving chemical plant problems. I had done a little work at one of their other plants down in Texas but I never thought they would want me to be active in my old plant because it might look like I was trying to come back to a full-time position which is not in my plans, ever again. But the guy on the phone was my friend and he had a serious problem that I could probably fix so I said yes. I got out my old work clothes and took that familiar 8-minute commute back to my old plant.
As I had expected everyone I bumped into when I walked into the offices was surprised and intrigued, immediately quizzing me about “Was I coming back?” But soon I was immersed in the plant data and in interviewing operators and engineers about the problems they were facing. Minutes turned into hours and before I knew it we had spent the whole day troubleshooting and the problems were solved and the plant was back to normal. I charge $250 an hour for that kind of work but they felt like it was a bargain considering that the plant was making $100,000 a day more when I walked out than it was when I walked in.
I don’t market myself for this kind of work because it usually occurs on nights and weekends and involves sitting up all night at a bank of computer screens scratching your head over why things are not working right in addition to travel to a lot of remote plant sites. Frankly not needing to ever earn another paycheck makes that kind of work unattractive. I know it probably sounds crazy to avoid work that pays $250 an hour in this frugal and hard saving community but the simple fact is that if you have all you need then money ceases to have much incremental value. I suppose I could earn it solely to give it away but that is not really very motivating to me right now. I am not a kid any more and I am running out of time way faster than I will ever run out of money. I think I’ll get enough calls from my old employer going forward to do one or two jobs like this a year and that’s plenty to keep my skills sharp. And my other, steady, consulting will continue to generate the six figures that keeps my withdrawal rate at zero.
I got off “work” in time to go home and change for the party. It was fun for my wife and me to see a lot of old friends we haven’t seen much of since I retired. I was heavily quizzed about what retirement was like since many of my former coworkers are within two or three years of pulling the plug themselves. Great I told them! Some were puzzled by why I was still working at all and it is hard to explain. To many in this blogging community escaping the jobs they detest is their whole point of focus. I’m not sure I can answer that question yet, I am still a rookie at this retirement thing. Who knows? I might stop working altogether once I get it figured out.
But for now, it is fun to occasionally fly to the rescue like Iron Man, solve the problems, and fly off into the sunset. And it is fun to get overpaid. And it is fun to be the “expert” that everyone in the room turns to even if you know deep down inside that you are not that special. It still feels special. And in a nice way it closes the gap on some questions I had about what my relationship was with a company I had spent over 30 years at. I know how people blame current problems on the former boss who is not there anymore, they can become a convenient scapegoat since they have no voice to defend themselves. Calling me back when they need help puts the stamp of approval back on me as having value in that company’s culture. And that feels pretty good. It does disappoint me a little that I felt I needed that, it is a slippery slope to base your own self esteem on the opinion of others.
All in all a pretty fun day and I just had to write about it to you, my anonymous friends. I have had a plethora of fun days in the last three years and I highly recommend early retirement or if you can’t swing that, at least shoot for slightly early retirement like I did. Preferably with a few side gigs.
What about you, would you ever go back to your former employer after you retire if a former coworker called you desperately needing your help?
If you’d like to leave a comment just click on the title of the post.
good for you, steveark! you swooped in like aquaman and talked to the fish and got ‘er going. i do chemical plant work and in addition to just r+d work i’ve operated a bunch of those processes. so many of these old plants are quirky like trying to keep a very complex $500 car running. experience can’t be beaten. we had a young dweeb hotshot engineer manager come to our control room years ago knowing nothing about the process and ask why we didn’t just put everything in “auto” and press “start.” the answer is we’ll gladly do that if you agree to clean up the disaster/mess/fire that would result.
i would help a couple of former employers in a heartbeat where it was personal and positive. i wouldn’t help these guys if they called me back, though.
Thanks Freddy, I didn’t realize that was your background too, it is a small world! As senior people retire there is a real lack of institutional memory particularly on some of the older and/or more obscure processes. I’ve found the newer generation facility managers often are not technical at all, sometimes with marketing or human resources backgrounds, and their lack of first principles understanding of what is going on inside the equipment leads to dangerous decisions. Or young smart guys with no experience like your dweeb shoot from the hip without considering the risks involved. I prefer my normal regulatory consulting where dollars are the only thing at risk and not anyone’s safety but on the occasions I have done this kind of work it was because I felt that things would be much safer for my former coworkers if I agreed to help.
It has to be a great feeling that you are valued so much that a former company uses you as their go to guy to shoot down major problems.
Are there any certifications or licensing you have to maintain in order to be able and do this?
As a physician it is much harder to decide and do very occasional work if you have gotten to the point of being retired. We have to keep up with continuing medical education (25 hours a year), maintaining our license (which require in addition to cme sending yearly fees (I believe around $400/yr) as well jumping through hoops the specialty boards require like exams or practice quality improvement programs) not to mention the cost of malpractice insurance.
At a certain point it is not worth keeping all that current for an occasional opportunity.
At one point later on I will have to assess the breakeven point financially as I slowly cut back my clinical hours (right now I do 4 day work weeks as a radiologist, hoping to go down to 3 when get closer to retiring)
It was a nice feeling that they still saw me as having the technical chops to be useful! I purposely kept in touch with my chemical engineering skills unlike a lot of facility managers because I wanted to be able to consult after I retired and because while I was an OK VP and GM I was a world class process engineer, in my humble opinion. Ironically if you are as good technically as I was you always get promoted into corporate management where the skill set is totally different. I have several doc friends and they’ve all mentioned how difficult it is to cut back to one or two days a week for all the reasons you mentioned. For engineering continuing education requirements are much easier than what you face and often are satisfied by my consulting itself or my volunteer work with boards and committees at my old university engineering department. I really think the medical profession should study finding a way to make being a doc for a day or three a week easier than it is. It is a field, like engineering, where having seen a thing or two in your life has incalculable benefits for your clients. By the way, my son starts his residency in two days! Radiation Oncology is his area. Thanks X!
Love this post. I like the seminal event part. Yes I have had seminal events that changed my life. Couldn’t go back to my company it was sold twice, but I do keep in contact with my other coworkers even the CFO.
Steveark, it’s a meaningful story, telling me how you decided to stop at the company, really you could’ve gotten $250 an hour! Hahaha. All in all, I thought I could use some tips from your post, but it’s really a personal story that I enjoyed reading.
Yeah, I hesitated to write it because it was personal and I wasn’t too sure anyone would get anything out of it but me, but since i don’t monetize the blog I thought “what the heck” it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. I do think that when people retire from a long career, like Fritz, despite the big send off, there still are some lingering doubts about how you’ll be remembered. Or at least for me, although it doesn’t really matter, only what you think yourself should matter. I did some expert witness work which pays extremely well, and I adopted that pay scale for the other consulting as well even though it was on the high side of what I felt I deserved. What I’ve learned since is that there is almost no upper limit on what you can charge if the customer is desperate and doesn’t ask you in advance what your rates are!
Man that’s awesome to command an hourly wage like that! That’s the great thing about consulting, you’re not ‘stuck’!
A lot of free lancers/side giggers/contractors make the mistake of not charging enough because of the impostor syndrome, basic humility and plain old fear. I had a hard time asking for that much myself but I did enough research to know that would not be considered as too high by big chemical or oil companies.
Wow, awesome salary. I work around 8 hours to get less than your one hour salary.
It is fun to do work occasionally after retirement, also fun to meet your ex-coworkers , and share your retirement experience to motivate them.
Hey, remember I’m an old guy, when I started out at my job I was getting 1/24th that rate so you are still ahead of me! Thanks for commenting.
Wow. Sounds like a perfect scenario. You zoom in, seriously help people, and get paid handsomely in the process. All while skipping the office politics. Where do I sign up?
Of course, the skills you bring to the table are the culmination of decades of hard work. 😉
It is a bit of a trick to find a way to monetize your skills after retirement in a side gig that you enjoy. I had spent years developing some of my skill set with consulting in mind as well as developing the network that allowed me to do it. I have some other friends who had a similar career but did not network as widely or develop as many niche skills and they have not been successful in finding consulting work so far.