re-tire-ment. n. the act of retreating or withdrawing from business or public life.

Ah, retirement: Now that is a word which may carry almost as much emotional impact as love and death. Men and women dream about it, hunger for it and upon achieving it, are often befuddled as to how to handle it. It conjures up savory images of lounging around an azure pool, getting gloriously tanned on sun-drenched golf courses, sleeping late, eating well, traveling far, and best of all, thumbing your nose at old adversaries still yoked to the corporate wheel.

Even more enticing is the dream of early retirement. The notion has been spurred on in recent times by tales of high-tech 30-year-old wizards hanging it up to wallow in their fortunes à la Scrooge McDuck.

But you rarely hear that kind of story when it comes to folks in advertising and graphic design. For the vast majority, retirement is only a diaphanous distant goal something like the holy grail—achievable only after decades of slaying dragons. And the prospect of early retirement! Well, that’s about as likely as the U.S. becoming a world power in cricket.

With clients jumping ship with a randomness that can only be admired by disciples of chaos physics, advertising and design professionals are customarily more concerned with meeting next month’s mortgage payment than with making retirement plans.

But I am living proof that you can retire early from our crazy world and live to talk about it eighteen years later. Yes, it was November 1986, when I pulled the plug as CEO of Portland’s award-winning agency, Borders, Perrin & Norrander. At the age of 50 years, two months and one day, I bid farewell to a very good organization billing well-over 20 million in 1986 dollars.

How did it all come about? Well, to start with, I had a role model from advertising history. The guy I wanted to pattern myself after was Raymond Rubicam, who in 1923 co-founded Young & Rubicam (“Clients none, cash meager, hopes high” he proclaimed). I admired him for a number of reasons: He believed fervently in the value of an extraordinary creative product. He was one of the first to head an agency that paid its creative people more than the account execs. “Resist the usual,” he proclaimed, “Advertising has a responsibility to behave properly...you can sell products without bamboozling the American Public.” But even more inspirational to me was the fact that in 1944, at age 52, he’d had enough. He waved farewell to the agency and in the words of Mirror Makers author Stephen Fox, “Retired to a life of good works, real estate development and golf in Arizona.” If he could accomplish that, why not me as well?

There were other powerful influences on my decision. My dad died at 60 and never took a vacation longer than a week. John Brown, a cohort in my early days at Cole & Weber, once gave me a knowing look and declared, “This business can kill you.” I had only one wife, a terrific one, and my plans were OK with her. Our two sons turned out great and were out of the nest. We were debt-free except for a small mortgage. My business partners, good men and true, shook their heads, but smiled and paved the way for a seamless exit.

Fine, you say, but let’s be practical. Once on the street, how does a person put food on the table? I am by no means a financial magician, but here’s my story: I had my 401(k), some CDs and, most importantly, a ten-year buyout package from my agency. (Is it any wonder that I urge you to seek an equity position in your organization? That ownership can ultimately mean more than a big salary?) My financial plan was simple: Ages 50 to 59 1/2—use the 401(k), savings and the monthly buyout check. At 59 1/2 I could begin to draw on my IRAs without penalty, then I began to tap a couple of annuities I had purchased when I was still employed. At age 62, I opted for the early payout of Social Security, and my wife, a retired school district secretary, began to draw from her Public Employees Retirement Fund. Two years later she added her Social Security check to our pie. Midway through all this we had the blind luck to profit nicely from the sale of a mountain cabin we bought back in 1977. As you can quickly tell, my overall philosophy is conservative to the core. I always remember reading a Money magazine article pointing out that even with a dinky 4% average annual return, if you saved a sum of $560,000—about the current price of a two-car garage in San Francisco—you could retire at age 55, and collect $30,000 a year until age 90.

Of course for those who want to keep strings attached to their past calling, numerous opportunities exist for income from consulting and freelancing. My creative partner, Bill Borders, who, like Rubicam, waited until age 52 before retiring, chose this path and loves it, working from his handsome log home on the shores of Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille. But for me, consulting was too much been there, done that. Even with living on a leaner budget I felt better concentrating on the personally interesting things which previously were out of reach because I couldn’t find the time.