investing

Retirement Ramblings

Retirement is a highlight in one’s life. You work many years, and the goal is to retire in comfort and enjoy your remaining years. Retirement is one of the American dreams that can come true. It takes some planning and saving to reach the goal. Also, it takes a little luck for all the cards to fall in place so that Retirement can happen.

Since I retired eighteen years ago, I will share what I did to help me live comfortable in retirement. First, I made sure all my credit cards were paid off. The only balances I had in credit cards were monthly expenses and they were paid off totally every month. I inquired what my social security monthly amount would be, and the small pension amounts we would receive after retirement. Reviewed the condition of the vehicles seeing how many years they would last before replacement. Then, made a tentative budget seeing if our retirement income would cover the necessary expenses every month. Entertainment items such as trips and vacations would come out of savings. The decision was made to retire and hope our finances would last longer than us.

Everything was doing ok until the financial crash of 2008. At that time our portfolio showed unrealized losses to be over one half of our portfolio. The decision had to be made to sell the stocks and change the unrealized losses to realized losses. Since I didn’t need the money, I elected keep the stock until the value of the investment returned to the purchase price and then sell. We didn’t make any money, but we didn’t lose any either. It took about seven years to finally regain all our original investments. These were scary times, and the decision were made to pull out the stock market completely and just invest in secure investments. I was just becoming too old to live with that stress and insecurity. We have been ok financially since.

As you become older health issues tend to hamper retirement plans. The vacations and trips appear to be shelved because of health issues. We have had over eighteen years of comfortable retirement and feel very fortunate to have these years. Hopefully we will have many more.

Daily writing prompt
How do you want to retire?
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Retirement Years

 

The big day came in September of 2006. That big day was retirement. I had good thought and bad thoughts. For example, the absence of the stress of a responsible job will be good. I won’t have to get up or be at work at a specified time. I can plan and do things that I never took time to do when I was working. I could go on and on about the benefits of reaching and being able to enjoy retirement. 

On the other hand, I had reservations about retirement. Will my financial planning be adequate? Will I fall into the rut of being bored and not have enough interest in my idle times? I also thought about that I am now on the downside of my life and the inevitable will happen sooner than later. Also, will my health remain to be good? 

In reality, I am enjoying retirement very well. over seventeen years since I retired and people ask me, “what do you do?’ I respond, “I am recuperating from the last forty-five years. Sure, I still have stress in my life and things don’t go as expected. I have had two medical issues in retirement. The first happened in 2018. I had an eleven-millimeter kidney stone in my right kidney and had to be removed by going up from the basement. I peed chocolate milk for twelve hours after the procedure. The next issue was a large pulmonary saddle embolism (blood clot) between my lungs. I thought I was going to breath my last breath during the removal. But I survived and it has been over a year now since that event with no long-term effects. (LINK TO MY BLOOD CLOT)

However, every day is Saturday and what I don’t get done today I can do tomorrow. My outlook remains to be good, and I pray that I retain this outlook as retirement and the later years of my life evolve.