Non-financial reasons for retiring early or planning on it?
Hello Everyone. As I read through these posts on this subreddit, I see that most of the questions relate to some specific retirement policy or financial benefit. But something that I rarely, if ever, see discussed here is whether there was something about your work environment or your organization's values that no longer aligned with your own values or needs and that driving the desire to want to retire early. Was there something that a boss, colleague, some incident, something that conflicted with your personal or professional values, or some policy from on high somewhere up the chain that made you decide, "I have enough and enough is enough!" ?
I'd really like to hear from different levels of government though I realize this is very heavily skewed towards federal employees. Obviously, you don't want to share overly sensitive information, but I'd like to hear what caused you to say the scales had tilted towards early retirement and not towards sticking it out?
And, how did you come to your decision? If you're not retired yet, what do you think that will be.
Okay, pet peeve time and a simple request- no offense meant: This question is for getting into the weeds about FERS, or TSP, or OPM, or even state pensions or any other alphabet soup. This is not what this question is about and there are plenty of other threads I've seen that get into the weeds on that.
Otherwise, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Edit: Thanks everyone for the responses so far! I appreciate and have read all of them, trying to respond to each one, but appreciate them all whether you have a direct response from me or not. I will check back periodically to try and respond to future comments.
I've adjusted the question to also include if there was one specific incident or boundary violation with your professional or personal values that pushed you over the line to expedite your retirement?