Retirement...

I can’t believe the time has come to look into retirement. My husband has put in 30 years on a job he never cared for, but it paid all the bills. Now, while he is still young, we are looking into early retirement. My younger daughter will be out of school next year and hopefully supporting herself. Now we can put the focus back on ourselves.

We are going to see a pension specialist this afternoon to get advice on what steps to take and when. We have always been mindful of the day this would come and have prepared pretty well for it. You can’t think about retirement a couple of years before you get there. We didn’t want to have to worry about anything when the time came so we took advantage of different retirement investments over the years.

My plan is to move out of this house and find something easier for us to manage. I will probably go back to taking some French classes at a local college for fun. My husband plans on finding a much less stressful job in his field just to stay active. He is also completing a Master’s Degree in history, which is a love of his, and maybe he can find a job that will allow him to pursue it. He has so much information in his head about history, a subject that I have very little interest in. But, I know more history than he knows French, so we are even!

I would like to live in a nice quiet area, but I can’t move too far from here because my girls are now pretty much set on staying here and there are a lot of advantages to living in NYC. They have their friends here and frankly my only brother is here too and I would feel bad to leave him. So I have my work cut out for me with finding just the right place, packing and moving everything and I would love to be out of here next summer. First I have to see when this retirement would be most advantageous.

I’m glad we are both still young enough to enjoy and make the most of our retirement years. Maybe we can travel again. I was thinking of cashing in that IRA and getting a nice new car too. There’s a lot to think about, but for now we are taking the first step and getting informed.

Next year at this time I may officially be a “senior citizen” but, thanks to this diet, I’ll be a damn good looking one!