I'm sure this sounds very strange, but I retired at the age of 39... without much money in the bank. I quit my job and went to Japan to teach English. If you ever interview me for a job, the narrative goes, "I wanted to improve my people skills, especially my presentation skills because I was doing more coaching than programming. But I also wanted to learn Japanese". This is not untrue, but to be honest I knew at the time that making such a radical change might mean that it was impossible to return to my programming career. So I retired.

I worked for 5 years teaching English and enjoyed every second of it. I got married in Japan and my wife wanted to learn English, so we moved to the UK. At that point, I got a programming job again. However, in my mind, I'm still retired.

You have to do something with your life. I suppose some people dream of the ability to lie on a beach every day and get drunk, or whatever. I've never been that way. I want interesting challenges. My "job" furnishes me with those.

I don't really treat my "career" seriously any more. I like programming. I program. People give me money. I'm happy. I don't show up for my 9-6 (or 8am-12pm as I used to do when I was young) and push bits for money. I just write code for fun because I'm retired. My "employers" give me money because they like my code.

I think the only thing that gets me down is interacting with people in difficult situations. If your personalities don't mesh, or if the person is going through one of those times as a programmer where they are as annoying as hell (and everyone has times like that)... But that's life, isn't it. Even when you are retired, it's not like all the ass-hats of the world will suddenly disappear.

So if you feel like it, I highly recommend retiring as well. What do you want to do in your retirement? I want to write code.