After some serious adjustments in my thinking I kind of find myself frequently asking what day it is. Without the job to define my life, each day seems to fold into the next. Holidays are just another day to us retired folks, especially those of us without any children or grandchildren for visits…. I am generally one of those who struggle to get through this time of year but not so much this year.  Maybe the warm weather is helping… maybe it was the 5 million lights at Branson recently.. Fa La La Continue reading Never Get A Day Off…

My month-long hiatus from blogging a while back was more than just blogging. I pretty much ceased all my normal daily activity in favor of just doing what I felt like doing. Some days it was vegging out and some it was all day in the barn working on my micro-RV project of the last three years. And of course given that it was Spring, which is my favorite time of year, it was about sitting on my “mountain” and enjoying the view. One of the primary things I gave up during this period was keeping lists of my activity. … Continue reading No More Lists…

This post finishes up my multi-part “insights” series about where and how I go from here.  My overall goal is to do what is necessary to live a happy, wild, and free retirement. Some of my commitments are personal in nature so I won’t be sharing them here. But I will give you the others. It was a very enlightening time for me. I finally managed to “listen to myself” and gain some new sometimes surprising insights: I vow to be more tolerant of other’s beliefs but that does not mean I will let others run roughshod over me. I believe that we are all praying to the same God. It … Continue reading Epilog — Personal Resolutions…

I talked a little about “craziness” in the last post but I want to expand that concept this time to include eccentricity. A definition of this word is: a strange and unconventional behavior. In some ways that fits my current life. I seem to be a person who always looks at the unconventional way of doing things. I just don’t generally go with the flow so to speak. Is eccentricity something I should value more in my retirement life? Here is a little about what Ernie Zelinski says about this topic.  “Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a … Continue reading Insight 5 — Eccentricity

Congressional leaders are playing a dangerous game with their constituents’ money, their livelihoods and their retirement savings. On Wednesday, all Congress did was flip over the hourglass on a game of chicken that cost our economy $24 billion and left America’s future up in the air — and, by doing so, may cause some of our hard-earned retirement savings to disappear into it. via Your Retirement: A Victim of the Debt Ceiling Deal – ABC News. Continue reading A Dangerous Game…

  I had to discover a passion for retirement because I had worked all my life at something that I was not passionate about. I understood that in order to discover a passion I had to understand who I am. Figuring out who I am was not complicated, but it required time and effort. It took a lot of mental work, the hardest kind of work. It took a lot of experimenting and trial and error, the scariest kind of work. But almost anyone can do it. You don’t have to be a monk, priest, philosopher or psychologist. You don’t … Continue reading Discover Your Passion: Know Who You Are

Source:  Don’t take a lifestyle cut in retirement — Fidelity Investments. I know the source article says basically the opposite of what the title is. That is because I think the article is, at its foundation, wrong.  It wouldn’t hurt almost any of us to take a lifestyle cut now or even in retirement. I know that my wife and I are now living on a little over half of what we spent but prior to my retirement. We moved from the “high cost” State of New Jersey back to my roots in Indiana.  We quit buying much of the … Continue reading Take a lifestyle cut in retirement — Please…..

Source: Many have little savings as retirement looms – USATODAY.com. Ravages of the stock market. The people Redmond encounters most who are lacking sufficient retirement savings weren’t necessarily delinquent or negligent. Many had money saved but were wiped out by the sour stock market in the past decade and poor investment strategies, Redmond says. That’s what happened, in part, to Robert and Connie Cabana of Tampa, who are both in their 60s. Robert built up a sizable 401(k) working as a financial executive at Verizon. Connie was a business assistant for a local irrigation supply company. Connie was laid off four … Continue reading Many have little savings as retirement looms

Let me start of by saying that I am by no means an investment professional but that doesn’t keep me from having an opinion. And I will also admit that looking backwards is a lot easier than looking forwards, especially in money matters. That being said there is something to saving for retirement the old fashioned way and that is to save the money while you are in your income earning years. Fortunately I retired just before the dot.com bubble burst. I had already moved much of my savings into more, some might say very, conservative areas that were somewhat unaffected by … Continue reading Do Retirement Savings the Old Fashioned Way…

The title to this post seems to be more frequent the last few years. When the kids are grown and out of the house (sometimes those are two totally separate events 🙂 ) then Mom and Dad make the announcement that they will no longer be living together. This often comes as a shock to the kids but maybe it shouldn’t. When Mom and Dad got married twenty-five or more years ago they were at one state of their lives. They had fallen in love and that alone is an overwhelming experience. But as the years progressed Dad took an … Continue reading Mom and Dad Are Getting a Divorce?????

I have discovered another nice blog about retirement. It is http://retiredsyd.typepad.com The blog is called Retired Syd and is by a young lady (at least by my standards) who choose to retire in her 40s. She was an accountant in her working years. I didn’t realize accounting paid so much that you can retire with less than twenty years in the business! Maybe that fact would help one endure the boredom of all the number crunching (ha). Anyway, Syd is now on my regular view list. She definitely has a way with words. More power to her. I retired more … Continue reading Living Day to Day…

Retirement is not a onetime thing; it is a long term process. In earlier years when I was preparing for retirement I deemed it pretty much that event where I left the workforce and collected my virtual gold watch. But after that ceremonial event is when the real thing takes place. I must admit I struggled with just what to do for the first year or so of my retirement. I finally decided that I really didn’t want to fully retire so I ended up opening a woodworking cabinet shop. That lasted, to one success or another, for about six … Continue reading Don’t worry that you may make the wrong decisions.

One of the problems I have faced with retirement is the question “Where are the milestones?” I have up until retirement gauged most of my life by its milestones. They go something like this: Starting School My first communion Becoming a teenager Getting my driver’s license Graduating high school Deciding on college Being able to drink “legally” Graduating college Getting my first full time job Getting married Getting my first promotion Retirement Ok, so now I am at the last milestone on the list. What comes next? What is there to look forward to now? I have viewed my whole … Continue reading Where are the Milestones??