Beyond saying that it was not a government contract and involved writing a distributed message processing system in Java, I don’t really have anything interesting to say about the job itself. It was better than many jobs that I have had (except for the commute).

I was surprised by how easily I switched back into the work routine. It made me notice some of the things that are “hard” about being retired. Not that I am complaining about being retired – it is truly a luxury.

One thing that makes working easier than being retired is having a weekly schedule where someone else decides how I fill my time. It takes more energy to sit down and write this blog entry than it did to go into work every morning and do the tasks assigned by my boss. Part of the difference is that I don’t have to make a decision about whether to go into work each day, and another part is that I didn’t have to resist the desire to browse the internet or otherwise waste time.

It is also much easier to explain my “job” to people when I am employed. Having a job is easy to understand, and when I say that I am a software engineer it lets people make a bunch of (generally correct) assumptions about me. When I try to explain early retirement and game development, it takes a lot more time to reach the same level of understanding about what I am doing. It is also kind of interesting that it generally takes a lot longer for people to wonder if I am happy with a job, than with not working.

Finally, and most importantly, work provides me with a sense of self worth and accomplishment that is much harder to achieve when I am not working. Even if the job isn’t producing something that I would consider worthwhile, the fact that I am getting paid is enough of an accomplishment for the day to feel like a success. The bar is much higher when I am working on my own projects; just putting in time isn’t enough. I need to make real progress on something that I think is worth doing.

I have a feeling this sounds like I am complaining about being retired (the ultimate first world problem), so I want to say again that I love being retired and only took this job to buy some luxuries that I couldn’t afford on my retirement budget. But I was surprised by some of the advantages of working and wanted to share that experience.

However, the multi-touch table we just got is still a fairly new technology, and there may be some interest in our experiences with the hardware itself and our attempt to convert board games to play on it.

I have started this blog by creating a bunch of back-dated entries. These entries come from things that I have written on my web site, Facebook, and Google+. There are also some new entries that I created just for this blog.

I expect most of the entries to be about my programming projects and the multitouch table. But I will also create entries for trips that we take and other things that interest me.

The title of this blog comes from the business cards that William and I created when we left Solidyn. Lacking a “title” to fill in, William became the Lounge-About and taking a cue from “The Office,” I chose Assistant to the Lounge-About.

As is always the case, the software was more complex than I thought it would be. The main complications were due to the fact that my partner and I aren’t married. So the application had to try to optimize who paid the bills to manage the size of each of our accounts and how much taxes we each had to pay. The other big complication was trying to manage our traditional and Roth IRAs to minimize taxes each year.

There are some big things yet to do:

1. Come up with a model for stock dividends. Right now, dividends are simply included in the return of the S&P. However, that is not really accurate, as the yield of dividends lags behind changes in stock prices. Also, taxes are due on dividends the year they are paid instead of the year the stock is sold. Those two differences may end up balancing each other out in the overall results.
2. Investment strategy comparison. Would dividing our money between bonds, i-bonds, and stocks be better overall than having everything in stocks? Does the reduction in volatility pay off? Or is it better to just accept the volatility and maximize returns?
3. More optimization post 60. The order of IRA withdraws should change after 60. Need to model medicare.

The model is giving us an 85% chance of success right now. I don’t really think that the things that are left to do will change this number significantly. It is surprising how much money we have to have to get a 95% chance of success and how much variation there is in the possible outcomes.

It is possible that treating the S&P 500 as a random distribution is wrong. While the historic data looks random, there probably are some underlying “fundamentals” that keep the stock prices within a range. I am not sure how to add that to the model besides trying to put an overall cap on the market returns.

A long time ago, I tried to create a retirement analyzer/simulator. It would allow a user to enter everything about their finances, including their plans for the future. It then simulated the future by generating thousands of possible scenarios and displaying your odds of still having money when you die. It built these futures probabalistically based on historic performance of different investment types, the user’s life expectancy, etc. The project was too ambitious and I never completed it.

Now, as I consider retirement, I’d like to have this tool. And I realized that I could complete the project if I would limit the scope to just my own situation. It wouldn’t be useful for other people, but it would give me a better idea if I can really retire.

The old project was created with C++ and wxWidgets. I would like to build the new version in C# because it would be easier to create the user interfaces. But C++ would be faster for simulating thousands of futures month by month. It would also let me re-use some of the code from the original project. So I am going to compromise and build it with C++/CLI. I can use the GUI builder and the .NET libraries and also have the speed of native C++ for the time critical parts of the code.