Your Fourth-Quarter Game

 

It may not seem so when you are looking at it in your future, but retirement doesn't mean you get off the train and sit on a bench.  Change doesn't stop and planning, adaptation and decision making are challenges you must, not might, deal with.   For example, grandchildren:  our home is now crowded with new baby furniture after all these years!  And all that landscaping that you ambitiously planted over time?  Now it's huge and not the weekend outdoors entertainment it used to be.

Many relocate, especially to a latitude without winter or to a lower cost of living area. We researched and visited, but with all the pros and cons (the latter often not clear early on), it would have worked out about the same. If we had to shovel the snow, that would outweigh things like mosquito-borne disease -- but not hurricanes.  We pay our association fee and do not worry about blizzards or Category IV storms.

Social Security and Medicare (you know, those dangerous slides into Socialism) made the modern idea of retirement possible.  Before, if you did not possess wealth, you got to work yourself to an early death or move in with the children.  If you were just on your own and lived too long, well, you were on your own and not in any kind of good way.  When our grandfather was working as a young man in the early 20th century, it was 10 - 12 hours a day six and often seven days a week.  He did survive until the 40-hour week (opposed as socialist, of course) came to be and finally enjoyed a retirement with a pension.  He was smart, but lucky too.

Life can be slower and simpler in retirement; you can finally embrace Thoreau's advice.  If you cling to status and have not eliminated debt completely, either you can afford it or it sinks you.  What would the bill be for replacing this roof?

Not dealing with commuting traffic or overpaid co-workers who do very little work or not having to schedule a few vacation days twelve months in advance?  Yes, please.

Except... that big fresh breeze of freedom often will be counterbalanced with the chill wind of increasing health problems.  It's always something.   That rule of this  life is not one of those things that change. 

Still, it's a good deal and I'll take it.