I was very fortunate when it came to pulling the pin on the pension grenade. My trade union has a built in early out formula, they called it "30 30 60". 30 years in the trade, 30 retirement credits (1 credit/1000 hrs worked), and 60 yrs old was full pension rather than the 65 years old standard pension. I was very fortunate in my employment life to gather so many of those credits to where I'm sure the pension fund computer cringes each time it makes my pension wire transfer to my bank account. Not too many of my brother Engineers had the opportunity to work the number of hours that I did due to the seasonal nature of the beast of equipment operating.