Month: December 2019

That’s right, when my wife and I start drawing Social Security it will be worth $92,430 a year.  That’s almost the same amount as my one day a week consulting gig earns me now in 1099 income.  Think about that, Social Security alone, with no other sources of income, no dividends, no interest, no pension and no withdrawal from my investments will be equivalent to $92,430! I’m guessing you think I’m using some clever trick to inflate that number, but trust me, I’m going to be transparent in showing you how $92,430 is an absolutely accurate determination of what Social Security will “pay” me when I start drawing it. 

Like any blogger I love opening with a counterintuitive challenge to conventional wisdom, because it begs the reader to hang around a little longer just to see how in the world I came to such a ridiculous premise as this.  There are not many topics on which there is universal agreement in the personal finance, FIRE and financial independence communities.  But if there is something on which nearly everyone agrees it might be that Social Security isn’t anyone’s answer to a rich retirement.  I hate universal agreement by the way, it almost always means people are drinking the same Kool-Aid, or as another blogger put it recently, it is hive mind thinking.  Let me take this opportunity to disturb the hive.   

Convention wisdom places Social Security somewhere on the spectrum that ranges from “won’t even exist in the future” to “benefits are too small to matter”.  This is probably due to the fact that the consequences of getting retirement planning wrong are so severe, and outside of this community a staggering number of people are not saving enough for retirement.  Finding yourself in your senior years with insufficient funds to live a life you enjoy may not leave you with many options.  Your work skills may no longer be marketable, your health might be declining making employment problematic or the jobs available may be unrewarding or even intolerable. The prospect of such a bleak outcome has led many pundits to write Social Security off as a false hope because placing too much faith in it undermines the incentive to save now for retirement.  There are also legitimate concerns that the program is underfunded and will have to find ways to reduce benefits to stay solvent.  I’ll steer clear of that debate, I’m talking about the current Social Security program which has ample funds to make no changes until at least  2035.

So I do admit there are good reasons to not pin all or even most of your hopes on your social security benefits.  However, I would like to propose the idea that Social Security is not an insignificant source of income in retirement.  And to do that I will use the only family I have total data access to, and that’s me and my absolutely awesome wife.   After careful analysis it appears to me Social Security will provide nearly 100% of my retirement income needs and I’m living a six figure expense lifestyle.  

“How?” you might ask.  Because you’ve seen over and over again that the average retired worker only draws $1,471 per month.  That’s equivalent to $17,652 per year.  That’s less than the cheapest of the frugalista’s spend?  Mr. Money Mustache didn’t even try to live on that little.  The very idea that the real number for you might be closer to $92,430 sounds preposterous.  But think about it, the average retired household has two wage earners so it should get twice what one retired worker gets, that brings the income up to over $35K which is still on the skinny side but starts to sound like a significant amount.  Still, it is a long way from equalling $92,430.

Here is how I came to that number for my future family income from Social Security.  In my case I have a 40 plus year working history counting my post retirement side gigs and for 35 of those years I made wages higher than the Social Security maximum.  But before you categorize me as a one percenter,  realize that the maximum was much lower when I started working in the Triassic Era.  My starting pay back then was only $18,000 but that was over the $17,700 maximum amount to which Social Security taxes were charged.  If you convert my starting wage from back then to today’s dollars it would be about $70K.  So that was very good money way back then but it wasn’t huge money.  And oddly because Social Security taxes only applied to the first $17,700 of income, I put just as much money into Social Security that year as Warren Buffet did.  And as time went on and the Social Security maximum taxable amount changed (it is $132,900 now!) I continued to earn above the maximum for my highest 35 years of income.  35 years is important because Social Security only considers your top 35 years of income when it comes to determining your benefits.   And because Warren Buffet and I both put the maximum amount into Social Security for all those years my benefits (and his) are going to be much higher than that $1,471 a month that the press likes to quote to scare people.  

The other huge factor is when you choose to take your Social Security benefits. Most people in this space already know this, but for every year you delay taking your benefit your monthly payment will go up 8%.  I could have drawn Social Security at age 62 but because I’ll defer until age 70 my benefit will increase from $2,271 (at 62)  to $4,010 per month (at 70).  Since my consulting hobby is bringing in all the money we need to live a rich life I feel good about waiting until 70 to bump up the size of that check!  And since my wife was a stay at home mom and doesn’t have a large benefit from her shorter earning record she can elect to receive half of my full retirement age benefit instead of hers, and that will add another $1,538 to the pot.  That will bring the total to $66,576 a year just from our two Social Security checks. 

Now you are probably wondering how I got from $66,576 to the $92,430 I claimed in the title of this post?  Let me show you, there are no tricks in how it works.  First gross income means nothing, it is what you have left after taxes that matters.  My 1099 consulting income has FICA and income taxes withdrawn so a lot of it disappears before I ever get to spend it.  That will change significantly once I’m on Social Security because only 85% of Social Security is Federally taxed and none of it is taxed by Arkansas.  Also no FICA taxes (Social Security, Medicare taxes) so if you adjust the $66,576 up to the equivalent taxable amount of a 1099 wage then it is the same as $78,564.  But wait, there’s more!  Right now as a private contractor, too young for Medicare, I’m paying $17,745.72 in private health insurance premiums and about another $3,000 in actual out of pocket medical costs that don’t reach our $6,500 per person deductible.    By the time we start taking Social Security benefits we will also be covered by Medicare and that plan only costs $7,891 annually.  The supplemental medical insurance will also reduce our prescription costs by $100 per month.  In addition the new deductible under Medicare will be $185.  The impact of all those things raises our Social Security income into equivalent 1099 (contractor) wages of $92,430.  

To be very clear I’ll only get checks for $66,576, but I’ll have exactly the same lifestyle as I have now earning $92,430 as a contractor. And I’m living extremely well on that amount, traveling world wide and all across America, paying country club, health club memberships plus five streaming service subscriptions and many hobbies that require fairly expensive equipment (a boat, an off road vehicle, etc.). For the last four years I’ve left our substantial investment portfolio and the income it generates untouched and lived on almost exactly that amount and lived quite well. 

So in spite of the myth that Social Security is not worth considering in retirement it certainly looks like I can live a multimillionaire lifestyle on just my monthly benefits.  I feel confident in saying that because using the 4% rule to estimate the value of a portfolio that could produce a taxable income of $92,430 would require $2.3 Million in investments.  Most people would consider that a fat FIRE portfolio and yet that’s what Social Security alone will produce for us.

 Now in the interest of full disclosure I can live a multimillionaire lifestyle without my Social Security benefits because, well, I’m a multimillionaire. However, the fact is I could have spent all of that portfolio by now and once I started receiving Social Security I could continue to spend as much as I desire without any other source of income.  My point is that if you contributed a lot in Social Security taxes you might get back more than you’ve have ever dreamed of in buying power in retirement.  

You might well ask why my wife and I don’t spend more, using the 4% rule we could spend multiples of what we currently do.  Even if we took a conservative approach we could double our spending easily.  But the fact is we spend all we want now, with no self imposed limits.  The house is paid for, we have no debts, our children are grown and support themselves.  We spend our time doing outdoor sports, consulting and volunteer work. We feel like our lives are pretty much wrapped in luxury when it comes to being able to spend our time doing what we value.  We do not desire more stuff than we have.  The fact is we will live quite comfortably, once we start drawing Social Security, on that alone even if I decide to stop consulting.

All that is to say, if you enjoy your job and plan to work for 35 years and if you earn at or near the maximum Social Security income ($132,900) then you are probably going to receive Social Security benefits much higher than you would expect, based on all the negative media coverage.  And if, in addition, you are a high earner living in a low cost of living area with a frugal mindset then you may find that big nest egg you’ve got for retirement will be an insurance policy  you’ll never need.  Instead of spending it for your own expenses you will get to give it away some day to your family, people in need and causes you believe in.  

A word of caution, this post is not meant to encourage anyone to rely just on Social Security.  In my retirement planning I ignored it completely and we saved at a rate that insured we would have a rich retirement without Social Security because it was the conservative way to go.  Plus over time the maximum income limits have increased at a rate that exceeded inflation so the program has a better payout for Boomers than it does for younger generations.  When I started work it wasn’t highly unusual for college graduates to earn at or above the maximum income of $17,700 but now it is a rarer situation for college graduates to start at over $132,900. So your results will not match mine unless you are a high earner and unless Uncle Sam finds a way to keep the program going without cutting your future benefits.

Another disclaimer is that the $92,430 value I use for the value of my Social Security annual benefit is in 2026 dollars.  To be precise it should be discounted to 2020 dollars which would make it equal to $86,046 in today’s money using the last five years inflation rate.  But that doesn’t change much, $86,046 is still very close to what my expenses are now, pre-tax.  Plus $92,430 made a better post title!

So what do you think, will Social Security still be here for you?

Do you think there is any chance you can get by on Social Security alone?  

Does it surprise you that Social Security alone can provide a fat FIRE lifestyle for some people?

Or do you see a gaping hole in my logic plus some dumb math mistakes, wouldn’t be the first time!

As usual, if you do not see a comments window then just click on the title of the post.  

I had a dream job, one I enjoyed for most of the thirty plus years I worked a 9 to 5.  I was the weird guy who started getting excited about going in to work the next day on Sunday evenings.  But eventually that changed and I pulled the plug on my career earlier than I thought I would, four years ago. My job was unusual in that I was both a corporate officer and a plant manager of a large chemical complex.  Usually those are two different people, but at our company it was just me doing two jobs.  And as the plant manager I was literally on call seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day, all year long.

 Seriously, my Fortune 500 CEO expected me to be able to respond in person to anything that happened, and in facility with a billion dollars worth of high tech equipment something was always happening.  That meant I would get a call on Christmas morning and have to leave my family and go to the plant, or we’d ready to leave for a family vacation and the phone would ring and I would have to work through some crisis while my family vacationed without me.  That probably sounds awful to you but it did not happen every day and the adrenaline junky in me kind of enjoyed managing emergencies, I did mention I was a weird guy didn’t I? 

After I retired to nothing more than part time consulting and volunteer work I instantly had a lot of free time.  That might be a scary thing to many former business people who were constantly on call, because they never had time to build much of a life apart from their careers.  Fortunately that was not me, I had developed many hobbies while I was working and my wife was my best friend and companion for most of my favorite outdoor adventures.  And with more time on my hands I found that we could take some of them to another level.  My wife and I were able to travel overseas with friends, knowing I wouldn’t be called to respond to some dire situation at the plant.  We went to  tennis camp together where we immersed ourselves in lessons and matches.  I was able to go off on baseball and football weekends with my guy friends and not worry about being back for work on Monday.  And we could take multi-week road trips with no real planned itinerary and no firm return date.  And this year we decided to take our hiking to another level.

 If you’ve followed my blog for very long you know my wife and I are avid hikers.  Some might even call us extreme for doing things like going rim to rim on the Grand Canyon in one day and bushwhacking to every listed waterfall in Arkansas, a ten year saga that included some truly dangerous terrain.  But for all the hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of hikes we’ve done from Italy to New Mexico to Colorado to Virginia, and of course Arkansas, we had never once backpacked.  And by back packing I’m talking about carrying a tent, sleeping bags, water filter, food, etc. on our backs and spending the night in the middle of nowhere with no conveniences except what we carried in. We had strictly been day hikers and that left us feeling a little inferior to the rugged backpacking tribe. 

There is a lot more that goes into an overnight backpacking trip than I realized.  You have to pick a route, you have to take a second car or arrange a shuttle since you will end up many miles from where you started.  You have to have a lot of gear that most people do not own, and it has to be very light weight or you are going to have a bad day on the trail. In our case we had no light gear at all so we were starting from scratch.  For our day hikes we had small day packs just big enough to carry essentials for a few hours on the trail. But to do a muti-day hike the logistics and the gear get pretty complex.

In our case this is what we decided we needed to carry: a ground cloth, two person tent, a rain fly for the tent, two sleeping bags, two sleeping pads, headlights, flashlights, waterproof matches, dehydrated food, energy bars, breakfast bars, cheese and crackers, beef jerky, salmon in foil pouches, candy for energy, a propane stove, stand and cooking pot, four bottled waters, a water filter with a squeeze bag, a foldable water cup, a multi tool, a lighter, four hiking poles, hiking clothes, two rain suits, hiking boots and socks, inflatable pillow and a couple of large backpacks to haul all of that.  Because we did not own many of those items we bought a few of the less expensive things, borrowed one pack from a friend and rented everything else.  I don’t do affiliate links or ads on my blog but we had great success renting from an outfit called trailtogo.com so I’ll give them that free plug. They shipped everything for free, both ways, and their equipment was state of the art, meaning it was all extremely light weight, yet durable.  

Because the trail we chose is over a hundred miles from where we live we rented the downstairs rooms of someone’s house on VRBO for one night so we could have a short drive to start out the hike. Being a rural state there are vast areas of Arkansas where there are no hotels of any kind, and this was one of those places.  We also dropped one of our cars at the far end of the trail the night before we started.  One downside to renting equipment was we had to do that several days before the trip so that we could be sure it got to our house before we needed it. That was complicated in that we were planning to hike the day after Thanksgiving because we’d be in the general area seeing family.  So that pushed the day we had to commit on the rental to about eight days prior to the hike.  And that meant we had no reliable estimate of what kind of weather we were signing up for.  And since we had spent the money in advance on renting the gear we pretty much had to do it no matter how cold or wet or stormy it might be on the actual days of the hike.  

And wouldn’t you know, the weather did indeed turn out to be challenging.  As we watched the long range forecast the chances of rain just kept on increasing until it hit and held at 90% rain and thunderstorms, awesome!  The first day of the hike it was cool and threatened to rain, but for the most part it just misted until late afternoon. We never even donned our full rain gear, just the jackets a couple of times.  I was amazed at how light the packs felt on our backs.  If you picked one up it felt very heavy but when you got it on your shoulders and attached the straps across your hips and chest it did not feel like it weighed much at all.   At least that is how it felt when we started the hike.  We pushed pretty hard and had seven miles behind us by lunch time.  We dropped our packs and ate our smoked salmon and some cheese and crackers sitting on some convenient big rocks.  After lunch we reached the  halfway point where there was a log shelter.  We debated stopping there since we felt it was going to rain all night but decided that we had time to do a few more miles and kept going.  

At that point I really started to feel the weight of the pack.  The next few miles were straight up the mountain and I started looking for a place to pitch the tent.  Of course the trail did not cooperate, that section was steeply sloped above and below the trail.  The only flat spots were on the trail and while we considered camping there, we knew that animals use the trail, as well as people, and if we blocked the trail with our tent a bear or deer might run over us in the middle of the night.   About the time my legs were calling a strike we found a flat spot just off the trail, hallelujah!  We had made it 13 miles up and down some steep elevations and I could feel every one of them in my legs.  So now we were ready for the true outdoors experience of setting up our little home in the woods with nothing except what we had in our packs. 

We stopped at about 3:15 in the afternoon which sounds early but it gets dark around 5PM in the mountains and it was already feeling like the predicted rain was upon us.  We set up the tent without issue, we had practiced that in our living room.  Talk about a miracle of modern technology, this little tent weighed less than two pounds yet you could fit two people into it and stay dry in a driving rainstorm, or at least we hoped we could.  Next I fired up the propane stove to boil water to add to the dehydrated Beef Stroganoff.  It wasn’t exactly like mom used to make but considering all you did was boil water and then stir it into a bag of dried noodles, it turned out pretty good.  We shared that for a meal and then tried to build a campfire.

Building a fire sounds easy enough, right?  Well try building a fire when it has rained two out of the last three days and every single branch and limb in the woods is just soaking wet.  My wife is a good fire builder and she found some large dead pine limbs that she broke open and found semi-dry wood inside.  We worked and worked to get the fire going because by this time it was pretty cold and we were pretty wet.   And wouldn’t you know it, just as she got the fire blazing the rain decided we did not need a fire at all and the skies opened up on us.  We beat a hasty retreat into the tent, it was pitch dark by then, and it was only 5PM.

 We did tent yoga, or at least that’s how it felt, getting two people into two mummy style skin tight sleeping bags inside a tent that just barely allowed two bodies to wedge into.  The fact that we could not move once we were in our little cocoons wasn’t really a problem because we couldn’t have moved anyway in that casket of a tent.   That’s when it occurred to me that if you go to bed at 5PM and it doesn’t get light enough to hike until 6:30AM the next morning that you are going to be laying flat on your back on the ground for thirteen and a half hours.  I’m not sure I’ve ever been in bed that long in my life.  The next great thought I had was that I was surely going to have to take a bio break at some point in that long night and how much fun that was going to be in the woods, in the pouring rain, in the pitch dark.  

Bears, I almost forgot about the bears.  Up until now we had seen almost no wildlife on the hike.  One deer, a few squirrels and only a very few birds.  I was mildly surprised because were walking on a trail covered with wet leaves so we were very quiet.  But we were deep in black bear country and even though we had not seen them, we knew they were there.  And unlike northern bears, southern black bears break their hibernation and come out to find something to eat whenever there was warm weather.  As it happened, the day before our hike had hit seventy degrees.  So we had taken the precaution to set our packs with the food in them fifty yards away from our tent so that the bears could enjoy a nice meal before they killed us and ate us for dessert.  

Every little sound we heard during that extremely long night sounded very beary to us.  Fortunately the rain, wind and thunder drowned out most of the forest noises.  The thunderstorm, I almost forgot about that too.  Oddly, we did have a cell signal in our tent, presumably because we were camped near the highest elevation of the entire hike.  That let me check the weather radar which showed lots and lots of rain, and not only rain,  we were also in a severe thunderstorm warning zone.  But that was OK because we had almost thirty ounces of gossamer nylon between us and the tennis ball sized hail they were predicting.  Yikes!  

In a stroke of good fortune the storm just barely missed us and the tent stood up to the wind and rain fairly well, though my wife said she got wet on her side of the tent, which she said was much smaller than my side.  Apparently in my sleep I became very territorial and exiled her to a narrow strip that included the wet sidewall, hence her getting wet.  I maintain that I am not responsible for what my body does when I am sleeping, something we’ve agreed to disagree about for the first 41 years we’ve been married. An ancillary benefit of the foul weather was it apparently dissuaded the bears from going out for a midnight snack because our packs were untouched when we finally got up and struck camp.  

We learned two very important things about backpacking that next morning.  One is that even if you lay flat on your back for thirteen hours your legs will have not forgotten the abuse you exposed them to the day before.  The first steps I took when I hoisted my pack on my back that morning felt just as unpleasant as the last ones I had taken the day before.  The second useful factoid is that wet tents, sleeping bags and assorted gear weigh twice as much as when dry.  And everything we had on our persons and on our backs was soaked.  Fortunately we were over halfway and only had nine miles left to go.  Admittedly, nine miles on weary legs is still a long way to walk and today we were hiking in constant rain.  It did not help much that I had misfigured the remaining distance to only be seven miles instead of nine.   After what seemed like hours we finally finished the first two miles of the day.  That is when I realized we still had seven more miles to hike.   It is pretty depressing to miscalculate your progress like that, especially when you’ve got all the geolocation and trail apps I have on my phone.  Eventually we did finally reach our car at the end of the hike.  Our first stop was the Jessieville dairy diner where we had a cheeseburger and milkshakes.  And it was so good!

In spite of the weather it was an enjoyable experience together.  And it did give us an idea of what backpacking is like at its worst, which was at least tolerable.   Our consensus is that we’ll probably stick to day hiking unless we find somewhere to go that requires overnight camping on the trail.  But we know how to do it now so it is at least an option for the future and it is something we can check off our list.  It is something I would have had trouble doing in my 9 to 5 days but our new retired life is all about experimenting. We aren’t surprised that some of the experiments may not turn out perfectly.  That’s actually part of the fun.  I think we get a lot more stories to tell out of a wet and exhausting hike than we might from a sunny walk in the woods where everything was perfect.  Now what next?  

What about you, do you have some future plans that your job or finances make difficult right now?  

Do you love backpacking or are you more of a day hiker, like us? 

As usual, if you don’t see a comment box then clicking on the title of the post should get you there.

Being bored out of your mind! Does that thought scare you? Many of you are pursuing an early retirement.  Others don’t plan to retire early but are focused on having enough of a nest egg saved up to allow an enjoyable conventional retirement in your sixties.  Either way, you do foresee a time when you will not spend 40 plus hours a week at a job.  A day when you’ll have more time to live life on your own terms.  

And that can be a problem, living life with more time and less constraints.  It seems counterintuitive doesn’t it?  You’ll have more freedom to do what you want but even now when you think about it I’m willing to bet there is at least a grain of doubt in the back of your mind.  Because, how is that going to go?  We’ve all been bored, and we do not like that feeling.  And if we get bored in the midst of a busy working life how can we escape mega-boredom in a life that has an extra 40 hours, or more, added to it?

I have some thoughts because retirement is not a hypothetical concept to me.  I retired, slightly early, four years ago which coincidentally is about the same time as my two brothers-in-law.  As far as I can tell we have all three managed the amount of boredom in our lives successfully and are very much enjoying the way we spend our time. 

We are all brothers-in-law because we married three sisters and we get together from time to time and talk about our retired lives.  Starting with the oldest sister’s spouse, he is the strangest case.  I remember when I told him I was contemplating retirement his one word of advice was, “Don’t!”  That was at a time in his life where he was struggling with boredom after a high powered career.  I rose pretty high in the ranks at a Fortune 500 corporation but I was a minnow compared the big fish he was.  He ran the biggest part of one of the largest corporations in the world, one every one of you knows by name.  Where I had some 700 employees on my team he had as many as 40,000 reporting through him.  

He lived on corporate jets, the transcontinental type and not the short hoppers I  occasionally flew on.  His compensation was up in the seven figure zone instead of my  six figures.  He was doing trade deals with foreign governments while I was just trying to meet production targets.  So in other words he was legitimately a big deal.  I’ve said before you don’t see star NFL quarterbacks retiring when they are still at the top of their game but a change in ownership of his company retired him when he was still an All-Pro executive.  And he hated it, at first.  He wasn’t used to having free time, he literally worked all of his waking hours and it was his only real hobby.  And he was not atypical, that is how almost every C-suite executive I’ve ever met lives.  You almost cannot reach that level with anything less than a single minded devotion to your career.  It is one reason I never tried to get that high in business, because I did not want work to be my life.  

So here he was, not happy because he was not the shot caller any more.  But being a problem solver he created some hobbies, which in his case meant buying himself a job.  He found a run down facility that produced the same kind of widgets his former employer did in a niche they did not care about and set about modernizing it.  And you could see him reanimate into the high energy and happy guy he had always been.  He was no longer a big fish in the big pond but he found being the big fish in a small pond delivered the same endorphin rush with much less stress.  It wouldn’t work for me, but it was a valid answer to the boredom problem for him.  

Brother-in-law number two married the middle sister and worked as an inspector in a field that paid middle class wages.  He enjoyed his job because he was very good at it but never aspired to get into upper management, or even middle management.  He loved to be the technical expert and to spend a good part of his day outside talking to people and inspecting things.  He also enjoyed golf, fishing and hunting and his workdays were generally only eight hour ones except for the occasional crisis time.  He looked forward to retirement and never seemed to miss a beat when it arrived.  He is an excellent carpenter and devoted himself to making things for his family and friends and helping keep his church in good repair after he left his 9 to 5.  He also has some grandkids he adores and they occupy much of his time.  He is a happy guy and always fun to be around.  He has less money than the other two of us but he has more than enough and boredom is not a problem in his life.

And then there is me.  I had a great career doing a job that involved both technology and management.  I resembled brother-in-law number one in that for most of my career, work was my favorite hobby too.   However there were some major differences between us.  Unlike him I never worked more than 45 hours a week unless there was some kind of emergency.  And because I did not have extreme work hours I had a richer life apart from my job.  I had more time to have a great marriage and  good relationship with my three kids.  In addition I had many hobbies that included distance running, tennis, fishing, hunting, skiing, travel, volunteering and hiking.  I also reached a point in my career pretty quickly where I could see that I did not want to promote up further into the corporate ranks.  My bosses did not seem nearly as happy as I was and I felt like it was because they were under a relentless pressure to achieve.  I’m all for achieving but they were being given unrealistic and unattainable goals and were being blamed for circumstances that were far out of their control. And when that trickled downhill to me I stopped having fun and retired.  

But because work wasn’t my only hobby and because I had spent years planning, the transition to retirement was kind of a nonevent in my life.  I knew I loved some aspects of work so I stepped seamlessly into some consulting fields that I enjoyed and that had very little of the negative aspects of traditional work.  I also kept my volunteer positions.  The consulting and volunteer work kept most of my old networks alive so I stayed socially engaged.  And because I only spend 8 to 16 hours a week consulting, sometimes even less, I have more time for all my hobbies including new ones like pickle ball and blogging.  And I’m happier now than when I was a 9 to 5 guy, just as happy as when my old career was at its very best.  Boredom just hasn’t become a thing in my life. 

Looking at the three bro-in-laws, we’ve adopted three different strategies to enjoying retirement.  One recreated his old world on a much smaller scale but one that allows him to enjoy being his creative best.  Work is still his only hobby, but he has found a way to work less and still be the man in charge.  And it is one that he can continue until he dies.  He wouldn’t have it any other way.

 Number two just quit working for money, he already had enough  hobbies and family opportunities lined up that he filled the newfound hours easily.  He did not have a plan for retirement but was flexible enough to fill the time with things he enjoys without facing boredom at all.  Because he was never one dimensional he has adapted without any issues.  

And then there is me, the one who married the baby sister.  Like the engineer I am, I defined the problems I might face years ahead of my retirement and already had consulting jobs lined up that would engage me in case I found myself facing boredom.  I also spent a lifetime developing many hobbies I could pursue, most of which I could do with my family. So far retirement has been even better than I hoped.  

I encourage each of you to take a look at yourself and start preparing now for the day you quit full time work.  If you have to work to be happy then figure out how to create the ideal job for you that you can control into old age.  If you have plenty of things you love to do but just don’t have the time now because of that pesky job of yours then you may not need any plan. Or if you feel like you will always need a balance between a little bit of paid work, some volunteering and pursuing your many hobbies then plan for that life now.  Make time to explore and develop lifetime hobbies, figure out how to monetize something you love doing and find some ways to give back to others.  

What about you?  What will it take to keep you happy in retirement and to keep boredom at bay? 

Do you know family or friends that have retired from full time work and are killing their retirements?  How are they doing it? 

Do you know someone for whom retirement has become a curse instead of a win?  Someone who wishes they had never retired?