I have hinted at it in previous posts, but today I am making it official. This was supposed to be the week I stepped away, threw off the bowlines, and retired. But…

One More Year.

The Dark Side that the FIRE community fights every day. A relentless condition, and somewhere over the last two months, I caught it. The infection has taken hold. I am sick with it, but I am told the symptoms usually clear up in about twelve months.

Have I decided 100% that I am doing one more year? 99% yes. I have finally fallen off the fence, and I landed squarely on the One More Year side. Unless some magic cure reveals itself in the next couple of months, I am staying in command at the office.

How did this happen? It was a convergence of several forces.

First, it gets Padme across her finish line. In eight months, she can call it quits to transition into retirement or whatever fun next chapter she wants. Based on potential severance, we are likely close enough today, but I won’t lie—I will sleep much better when she actually breaks the tape at the end of the race. She has been dealing with burnout and anxiety; me retiring right now would put unnecessary pressure on her, and she doesn’t need that.

Second, I need to put real work into what my retirement life actually looks like. I need to push harder to build a social life and find my “tribe” before I abandon the routine.

Third, I realized I can pretty well run things on my terms at work right now. I can work from home 3 to 4 days a week, which is great target practice for being at home 7 days a week. A recent vacation showed me that retirement is defined by what you do with your off-time, not just where your desk is. I need to start using my downtime better.

Emotionally, I don’t think I’m in the right headspace to let go just yet—to release the fear, quiet the obsession with cash flow, and simply take whatever comes. I know I’ll remain hyper-focused on the numbers until our nest egg is comfortably and permanently deployed. I need to find a way to let this go. I am not even close to there today.

Then there is the spending. Money is almost always at the root of One More Year. There are three or four major things we want to tackle while it’s easy—which means while the paycheck is still landing. The new kitchen build starts soon.

I’m also planning a heavy tactical travel schedule: Camp Mustache for Labour Day, a Camp FI between October and January, EconoMe in March, and a Vader/JEDI trip next June. That’s a lot more travel and spending than a standard year—a bit of a last hurrah to punctuate my final year and survey new horizons. On top of that, I want to set aside money for our next vehicle over the next year, plus finish funding four years of university expenses for the young JEDIs. It is critical to us that our kids graduate without debt. Our parents did that for us, and it sets you up in life if they get can be debt free when finishing school.

All of this spending and earning keeps us charging toward the ultimate nest egg goal line. If I pulled the plug tomorrow and spent at this rate, we would drop the ball right on the one-yard line. (And yes, as I noted in my last post, that goal line is somewhat arbitrary.) Is it a cop-out? Maybe. Is it moving the yardsticks again? A little bit.

The Market Trials and the Rule of 55

I won’t lie: if my investment strategy were executing more smoothly, pulling the plug would be much easier. I’ve started migrating a chunk of our nest egg into its permanent home in the market. I’m taking what I consider a conservative approach, but as I limp in with dollar-cost averaging, almost everything I touch seems to hit a crater. I appear to be blessed with the exact inverse of the Midas touch—I wonder if there’s an official name for that?

My portfolio is down 4 or 5 percent during a stretch where the broader market climbed 10 percent. If I were up 4 or 5 percent instead, my mindset might be completely different. It’s a classic, painful reminder to just index it all and forget it, which my brain has a hard time doing.

The final, and likely largest, reason I am staying comes down to absolute conviction.

As I’ve written before, I have always been 100% locked on not working past age 55. I’ve told my entire circle that everything stops at 55—with a slight asterisk for maybe sooner. 55 was the hard “all-stop,” no erasees, no take backs allowed. It wasn’t until recently that I realized I never held those same visceral feelings about age 54. I spent this entire past year trying to talk myself into leaving a year early, all while my internal computer had age 55 hardcoded into the system.

So, the retirement gods are testing my resolve. First, job instability for Padme, and now these less-than-stellar investment trials and tribulations. For now, the path of least resistance is to stay working a little longer. It turns out I just need a bit more training on how to retire.

And honestly? I am (mostly) with where I’m at. Accepting the decision has actually lowered my stress. Stress that was almost entirely self-generated to begin with.

If there is one absolute rule in this universe, it’s this: Retirement is meant to remove stress, not add to it.