I'm glad I'm retired. I would have been in great shape financially if I had stayed married to my first wife. Of course, that's the only area of my life that I would be in great shape in. I wouldn't be riding motorcycles and I wouldn't have the wonderful wife I've got now. But, since the only asset we had was my pension fund and since we had more debt than we could handle while we supporting two separate residences, we had a problem. Turned out that the only way I could access the money in the pension fund was if it was part of "Qualifying Domestic Order." I wasn't very excited about giving a big wad of money to my ex-wife (after all, she was leaving me!), but my attorney told me that judges didn't like it when the parties of a divorce had very great differences in their life-styles or resources, so if I didn't give her some of my pension, I'd be writing alimony checks for the rest of my life.
I ended up giving her 62% of my pension contribution and she gave me back 40% of our total indebtedness. But the upside for me was that I kept making contributions to the fund for the next 15 years. Then I retired at age 70, which was what I'd planned on doing all along. I'm OK financially, and my part-time work with Hospice pays for most of my motorcycle travel.
Retirement is a good thing, but I couldn't have taken it much sooner than I did.