Is 45 Too Young To Retire?

The current financial plan Vicki and I are following has us potentially ready for retirement - in terms of having enough money for it - sometime next year (2008), which would mean I could afford to stop working at 45. Most of the time, this is a very appealing prospect to me! It addresses many of the biggest annoyances I have right now:

1) I hate getting up early in the morning because I don't sleep well enough to get 7 or more hours of sleep that way.

2) I don't have enough free time to do the things I want to do outside of work.

3) I think about work way too much when I'm not there.

4) When I can't bike to work (like now), I really hate the commute downtown and back every day.

5) Some - though not many - of the people I work with cause me occasional grief.

Hence, I'm looking forward to the prospect of leaving all that behind, within a reasonably short time from now.

But, on the other hand, I also worry about the downside of retiring early. The only exercise I get now - biking to work 8 months of the year - won't be easy to maintain if I don't have a job to go to every day. Obviously I could address this by just biking for fun, or getting a fitness membership, but as I wrote about here, the best thing about biking to work is that it's so natural: I do it because I need to get there! Forcing that sort of thing never seems to work for me.

Also, will I still have any drive, any ambition, if I'm retired at such a young age? I like to think I will, but I also have nothing to base that on. I've been working continuously for over twenty years, meaning that it's been a long time since I had to just get up out of bed and figure out what to do with myself, other than on short vacation stints when the relief of not having to go to work overrides everything else.

And yes, I realize that I'm describing a 'problem' that most people would love to have! That irony's not lost on me. But this is the place where I go to be honest, and so there it is.