Hey everyone! I have a success story to share. My primary care physician is retiring early next year! Wow, another reader escaping the rat race. That’s awesome. In 2012, I retired from my engineering career and had to find a new doctor closer to home. Amazingly, Dr. C recognized me from Retire by 40 when I walked in. FIRE was in its heyday back then. We talked a bit about early retirement, but quickly pivoted to healthcare. Dr. C has been a great primary care physician, but the healthcare system has made life more difficult for family doctors over the last few years. Primary care physicians are overloaded with patients and their compensation is lower than specialists. They are also overburdened with paperwork and red tape. As a result, medical students are reluctant to become a family doctor. They have a ton of loans to pay off so it is better to specialize. That’s too bad because I like having a primary care physician. Dr. C is familiar with my healthcare history and kept me healthy for many years. Hopefully, I can find a good PCP next year. I heard it’s harder than ever to find a new doctor. The United States is facing a significant shortfall of primary care physicians.    Anyway, I want to give Dr. C some tips for a happy and successful early retirement. Dr. C is frugal, childless, and has a working spouse. We can safely assume Dr. C is well prepared financially. I think the bigger issue will be the transition to retirement. Retiring can be jarring at any age. Stay busy My best tip for Dr. C is to stay busy after retiring early. Most people think they’ll enjoy a relaxing retirement, but that is a fallacy. Sure, it’s fun to binge-watch Netflix and play video games all day on the weekend. However, you’ll be bored out of your mind if you do it every day. Most of us will feel useless and unfulfilled if we don’t do anything productive. This is especially true for early retirees. We are still young and we want to be useful.   It’s good to relax and unwind for a few months after a stressful career. However, early retirees need to plan for the future as well. You need to pick up some passion projects when you have more unstructured time. Staying busy is essential to a happy retirement. Here is what I did over the last 12 years. SAHD, Blogging, and Side hustles When I retired in 2012, I was very busy with my son. He was just 18 months old and required a ton of supervision. Being a stay-at-home dad to a little kid was exhausting, but I enjoyed it for the most part. RB40Jr and I had a lot of fun exploring Portland. (It was much nicer back then.) I kept up with blogging, but it was on the back burner until RB40Jr started school. Once he started school, I had more time to myself