How to Experience Retirement BEFORE You Retire!

Is Motor Home Travel for You?

I want you to enjoy life as you go along. My mother taught me that waiting to have fun is very risky.  Stuff happens along the way and it is not always good. Life needs to be lived day by day. I'm just saying.

I think that people nearing retirement may be planning for an eventuality they cannot even wrap their mind around. If you are going to make a reasonable plan for retirement, then you need to understand what a life of no work is truly like. You can do this by following my advice and just enjoy little bits of retirement as you go along.

How can you get a feel for a life without work?
If you live a life that includes periods of real down time, you are going to get a feel for what retirement is all about. Why should you do that? Well...you are not going to quit work and go on vacation to Hawaii for the rest of your life. A trip to a tropical resort is NOT retirement. It is fun but not what a retirement lifestyle is all about. I think it is better to find out what is feels like before you retire. Surprises are not always good. Here are some ways to experience the lifestyle while you are still working.

1. Planning on traveling in a motor home? You can find out how RV travel may be by simply going camping in either an RV resort or a camp ground. Stay put and settle in for a while. Don't feel like you have to be on the go all of the time. In fact, I would suggest doing it on the cheap and making your own fun. If you can do that, you are doing just what you would do if you were retired and living in a motor home for an extended period of time. 
2. Plan to stay at home after retirement? This may sound nuts but spend your vacation at home.  A two or three week vacation spent at home will give you a real feel for what retirement is all about. Shop, clean, putz and read. Even when you become a snowbird, you will be just living like you are at home. 
3. Wonder what a normal retirement day will feel like? When you are at home for the vacation, shop on Monday morning. Golf in Wednesdays. There is a whole world of things that happen in the world during the week when you are working. Get out there and see what it looks like.
4. Do you want to be a snowbird in a 55+ community? Never turn down an invitation to go someplace with a group...golfing or just berry picking. Spending time with other people and learning to enjoy it will help you see what a retiree's snowbird lifestyle is all about. We live very closely but you really cannot understand how it works until you actually do it. 
5. Are you afraid of all that free time? Set aside a period of time for nothing but what you want to do. No work related stuff can invade this time. See how it feel to fill the days with just life in leisure. This is not like the stay at home putzing thing.  This is honest go goodness leisure without anything to do. See how you do with that experience.

Doesn't this all seem way to simple?  Well, it is not brain surgery...it is just living as you go along.

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The Wait is Over....Time is not on our side anymore!

The train is leaving the station...are you on it
or just dreaming about going? Don't let
life slip away.

I don't suppose you remember when my husband tipped over in the kitchen. He had managed to drink as little water as a man can possibly drink and finally went totally dry. He always simply said he didn't like water and refused to let it pass his lips.  The tipping over resulted in a 911 call, a trip to the hospital, a big bag of water being pumped into him and a night spend visiting the bathroom. He was astonished that people actually went that much. He learned a very hard lesson. But then so did I. That was the first time it dawned on me that the wait was over. We needed to make our dreams come true if we possibly could...the sooner the better.

The next morning I woke up, drank my coffee and announced that I was buying new golf clubs so I could enjoy them. I asked my husband if he wanted to do the same. That was when I broke the news to him that we were going to die one day and I did not want the day to come and go without us enjoying some of the things we had been "waiting" to do or buy!


When we arrived in the desert this winter we made arrangements to add a small porch in the front of our park model. I had been asking to have it done since we moved into the park model several years ago. My husband was not very enthusiastic but all I could think was I did not want to have the porch completed and then die within the next few months. I wanted to do it now and enjoy it while we could. He relented and has built something that we will use for as long as we can live in our little winter house.

Now I am using "the waiting is over" phrase more and more. I will ask Are we going to do this or not. If we aren't going to get things done, I want to know so I can quit dreaming and planning. We have come to an age when we cannot wait to buy what we can afford or do what we can afford to do. Time is not on our side...not anymore. Tic toc!

Have you ever had this happen? Is the wait over for you?  If it is, why?

I was just wondering!

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Bragging Rights: Success in Retirement

What happens when you remove career from this puzzle?

What do you see as being successful in a life without a job? When the perks and rewards that come with a career go away how will you find satisfaction without someone telling you how good you are? You may not realize it but I would bet that you will need to find a way to satisfy that part of your nature. So how will you do that?

Find a Hobby that You Love
I am a blogger and part of my measure of achievement comes with what happens when I write. You may be a golfer or a volunteer or even an avid lover of books. Whatever you do, I imagine that it validates you in some way. And validation is what we all need.

Live on Your Past Laurels
My family likes to joke that every adventure is all about the bragging rights. It is very true that humans do like to feel good about something that sets them above the crowd...it is natural to feel good about success. In some ways talking about success is the minds way of getting that feeling achievement brings one more time. It is very like showing those vacation photos to an unwary friend...the viewer may not be excited but the person that took the photos gets to relive that vacation joy one more time. Bragging may work the same way.

Even though bragging may make the bragger feel good, being the person listening is not so much fun.  In fact, it could be that the person that is bragging is simply topping what you just talked about. This is where the old job that brought the worker a millions air miles gets to be a unimportant. Really no one cares anymore. If they want to have friendships, retiree have to move on and find a new way of validating their existence.

Find Intrinsic or Extrinsic Rewards
It is hard to give up the idea that going to work does not pay for your bread and butter. Getting paid every month without a job seemed very strange when my husband I headed down this path. We would never again get a raise because we worked hard or be given a plaque for a job well done. While it is all good, we both missed those types of positive strokes...at least to begin with. Then we settled into a life that required us to find satisfaction from within. We became self-starters and worked or played for the shear joy of being tired or getting better at our hobbies. We learned to have fun and worry less...why was that so hard?

I have begun to think that retirement happiness requires a great deal of imagination. Maybe that is why it is hard to feel successful in spite of what may look like a perfect life. Everyone needs to find something that brings a reward in their life but payoffs in the third part of our life may need to come from an inner drive and not a pay check.  For us the trick was to set goals and then invent our own rewards and plaques. It was a process that required us to learn to pat ourselves on the back. Other people take up a hobby or avocation with the hope that they will gain recognition or monetary gain. Their success comes from feeling wanted and needed. They need extrinsic rewards to be able to see themselves as successful.

Conclusion
As for those bragging rights it all depends on how you use them. Do you voice them out loud or do you keep them close to your vest? It is each individual's choice. I am working to come to a place where it is a enough to know in my heart and be satisfied. Hopefully, I can keep myself under control and not become tiresome or a braggart.  Hopefully!

What do you see as being successful in this stage of your life?

Note: Comments are encouraged and very welcome. Be sure to leave a url for you blog site in the comment box with your comment.  I would like to read what you are writing and so would other people.  Let's make it as easy as we can for them.

Have a wonderful day.

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On using the "f" word: What Works in Blogging

Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While my blogger friends were talking the other day, the subject of readers, comments and success came up. We all love to have readers and encourage meaningful comments and suggestions. In fact, response from readers is a measure of our success.

For example, today I received a book suggestion from Early Retirement Journey for a book relevant to the post about Mississippi finally getting their name on the list of states that ratified the 13th Amendment.

Comment: My first thought on hearing this was "You can't make this stuff up." 

I would also recommend an absolutely excellent non-fiction book written by an educated, former slave titled "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs. Harriet is amazingly articulate, and this book, released first in Europe in 1851, didn't make it's way to mainstream America until 1973. Harriet's story, beautiful and articulately written, makes it crystal clear that slavery corrupted every single individual involved, up to and including the North, particularly after passage of the Fugitive Slave law. 

Nicely enough, it's in the public domain, and therefore available as a free e-reader download if you are interested. 

This is the kind of exchange bloggers love. Meaningful, articulate and interesting!

Building Blog Traffic
Linda Myers of Bag Lady in Waiting was with us on that day the bloggers gathered and she told us that she wanted comments from people that were fellow writers or had something to add to the conversation. We all agreed  that a return comment is the polite thing to do but sometimes is very hard. Our blogging life depends on courtesies like this but when a commenter doen't read the blog and leaves a comment about their own life that does not apply to the blog post, we are put off.  Sad but true!

Sadder yet is the fact that success in our world is dependent on getting traffic. Building a relationship with fellow bloggers is one way we can do that. Some very successful bloggers have built a great following that has emmerged as a brand name.  They have succeeded by just being attentive daily to those people that read their blog and leave comments. Good or bad, they keep returning the comment favors. I admire their work.

I might add here, that I am not so successful that returning the comment favor has ever become a burden in anyway.  I love my readers really and always respond to their comments in my blog and will visit their blog before long or even add them to my blogroll in the sidebar. I love that my success rate fits my needs. I also encourage people to leave a blog address in their comments or even the link to their business as long as they add something to the conversation. Some of the most interesting bloggers I know are in business.

Words that Build Traffic
That brings me to the "f" word post I put up on Monday. See, I am a former teacher and in my world the full "f" word was not actually spoken...ever. In fact, "f word" has become symbolic even with the general public. The fact that I put "f word" in the name of my blog post and it brought in so much traffic I was astounded is very revealing.  We all know that a giant up spike in my traffic on that day had to do with readers curiosity and even prurient interest. Or it could be that people are looking for reasons that the "f" word would be important in some way. It is really is very interesting.

If you didn't read the post, the three words I was speaking about were friend, flower and fences. I confess that when I wrote the title, I knew that it was pushing the envelop. It is fun once in a while to throw out a hook and see who bites.  I did that very thing a while ago when I wrote a blog inviting spam. That hook did not draw many in at all. Oh well!

FYI
So there you have it...a little glimpse of life inside the mind of a blogging woman of a certain age.  Any bloggers have additional thought on what works for them? I would love to hear them.

Be well.

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• And I thought I was behind the times: Mississippi Ratified the 13th Amendment

And I thought I was behind the times: Mississippi Ratified the 13th Amendment

I quote a website called Above the Law:

Amazon link:
Team of Rivals: 
The Political Genius of 
Abraham Lincoln

Today the big story (at least in liberal circles) is that Mississippi finally officially ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, after two Ole Miss employees saw the movie Lincoln and decided to look into why their state hadn’t officially ratified the amendment. You can’t make that up: Mississippi needed a Spielberg movie to remind them to ratify the amendment banning slavery....

If you were one of the people that went to a theater and watched Spielberg's Lincoln, you know that the movie was about as good as it gets. I loved that it made enough of an impact to clean up an unresolved legal oversight. You go Mississippi...you may get it right yet!   

Go see the movie and maybe even read the book that the movie was based on...it is called Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and is written by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I, for one, am going to read it very soon.

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Three important "f" words!

Three important words: friends, flowers, fences.

Friends (fellow bloggers)

Flowers

Fences

I think I know why these words are important but I am more interested in what you have to say!
Have a wonderful day.

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My life is good...but then you know that. Todays schedule went like this:

12:00 noon: Lunch with blogging friends.

1:30-bedtime: open for engagements!

Smile!

bloggers:
Linda Myers of Bag Lady in Waiting
Bob Lowry or Satisfying Retirement

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What is the MIRROR telling you?

English: Woman at mirror, circa 1930s Item 78068, City Light Glass Lantern Slides (Record Series 1204-03), Seattle Municipal Archives. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am not going to talk about wrinkles or face cream or even exercise here. But I am going to talk about the mirror and what we can learn from a good facing down with the person you see reflected there.

I am a fairly positive person usually. I have to admit that occasionally I feel the urge to pick life up by the scruff of the neck and give it a talking to. But that doesn't happen very often. I am grateful for that.

We are doing some construction around the park model and I have a lot of opinions that drive everyone else nuts. It is hard for me...poor me. I was stewing over things that were out of my control. I didn't realize how much I was fretting about it until I walked by the mirror.

See, when I am unsettled, worried or unhappy, the corners of my mouth turn down and I cannot get them to come up no matter how hard I try. My mirror does not lie and what I saw was a very unhappy woman.

There are other kinds of mirrors that are not made of glass yet reveal a lot about how I am feeling. My grandchildren can work mirror magic on me occasionally. If I frown, they frown. If I am content, they are quiet. If I am bunchy (need to go outside), they will ask for a walk. My little talking mirrors are wonderful creatures to have around.

Life may be a reflection of how I feel or at least that is always what I have thought. Because I believe that I have great power to make my life what I want, when things start to go wonky, I usually take a good hard look at myself. The question I ask is could I have brought this on myself? In many cases the answer is yes! 

So, as I age, I wonder if the negative people around me are that way because that is the way they are or because they are mirroring the way I am thinking. As a result, I am being careful these day to be mindful of my thoughts and how they are spilling out onto the lives of others.

What is your mirror telling you? Take a hard look and think about it.

As for me, I am fine now...my attitude toward life has improved and my mirror is happier too. Life is good...again!

It is just a thought!

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