It wasn’t at all hard for me to say yes to calling it a career.
When I retired, I had spent more than 30 years inside the commercial HVAC of that building.
It’s hard to believe that it went on that long and was over that quickly. But I knew that this was a possibility as I had seen this happen to other colleagues. Yet when you control your own destiny, life can provide plenty of great opportunities. When the HR people came to me with the early retirement offer, it wasn’t too hard to say yes. The main reason it was so easy to say yes was because I had already been planning for my retirement. This just gave me an added decade to become the real estate king I thought I could be. My wife and I have always enjoyed buying homes, upgrading HVAC equipment and other renovations that lead to a home we love. We’ve done this three times and realized that we were really pretty good at it. Neither one of us were interested in just sitting around inside the central air conditioning of our home once we retired. We wanted to do something else and we wanted that thing to be a passion. So the idea of buying smaller properties to renovate and then rent seemed like a no brainer. Yet on my very first property, I got a real lesson in HVAC equipment. I had simply planned to replace the heating and cooling equipment in that first property and move on. Well I got a little ahead of myself because upon inspection, the HVAC contractor told me the ductwork would not be suitable. That’s the first time I learned about ductless heat pumps. And man am I ever glad ductless heat pumps exist.