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downsouth_gw

Husband is exhausted & wants to retire (I think)

downsouth
20 years ago

My DH has worked for the same company since 1968, 35 long years ago. He is 57 years old and is a produce mgr for a nationally known supermarket. He works every Saturday and Sunday, and he likes to work Sundays because it's about 1/2 of his entire paycheck, as he gets overtime. He only takes one day off during the week, on Thursdays. He feels like he has to work so much because his company cuts hours and he doesn't have enough help to get the job done. Being a manager, he is overwhelmed with responsibilities.

Last night he told me he didn't think he could make it until August. My company gave me a chance to work at home and I work part time. DH suffers from depression and on top of this, he is the most dedicated employer a company would ever want. He feels guilty if he leaves and everything isn't done. Today he is working 12 hours and tomorrow it's inventory time, so he'll be working 12 hrs again (when everybody else is off for Memorial Day). I have to beg him to take his vacation, and he gets 5 weeks.

We are getting ready to put our house up for sale and take all the equity we have and pay cash for our next home which will be smaller. He needs dental implants which is going to cost $15,000, which is money we don't have. Hopefully, when we sell the house we will get enough money to pay cash for his implants as well.

I told him what he should do is give up the stressful manager position and just become a regular worker. As a regular worker, there won't be all this stress and he can leave at the end of the day and not worry about making schedules, inventory, price changes, etc. All of this burden would be off his shoulders. He could also reduce his hours to 32 hours a week which would be enough hrs to keep him as a full time employer, and we would still have insurance benefits. If he only works 32 hrs a week, he would bring home around $350 a week, but that would be enough with my job for us to make it until he can retire permanently, at age 62, which is only 5 yrs away. He still says he doesn't know how much longer he can hang in there. Right now he is working 48 hrs a week. He doesn't do much of anything around the house because he is so tired. Sometimes I get real aggravated because of this, but I try not to mention it because he is on anti-depressants and he is such a hard worker.

I told him another thing he could consider was going ahead and retiring after we sell the house, and working somewhere else maybe 3 days a week. If he does this, I don't know what we would do for health insurance.

Our biggest major problem if he does retire early is what would we do about health insurance? Even if he works part time somewhere else, there still would be no insurance benefits. He will get a pension from his work if he takes early retirement, but the longer he works, the more the pension will be. If he retires right now, it would probably be about $800 a month.

Does anyone have any suggestions in our case? Sorry this is so long.

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