Slightly Early Retirement

If I had to rate my financial performance across my considerable span of years lived, I would, so modestly, give myself an A. Realizing of course that it’s not that different from high school where I was one of the smartest kids, and was able to pull A grades without studying. So giving myself a Financial A is not a humble brag, it is much more a reflection of the unmerited gifts I was given by my circumstances. Great college educated parents who were frugal and understood how to invest wisely and who desired to pass that on to their children, that’s an amazing superpower. That and timely advice on picking a career that leveraged my IQ and interests but also paid extremely well, was responsible for most of my excellent financial grade point. My personal effort was a minor contributor, in my opinion.

Most people do not get catapulted toward success like I did, life is very unfair in that respect. Most of you reading this did not start out your adult life with iron clad rules drilled into you and exampled to you by financially successful parents like my brother and I did. Rules like, never run a balance on a credit card. Never borrow money to buy a car. Never spend more than you made in a given month. Automate your investments into retirement plans at the maximum allowed. After you’ve filled every retirement plan to the limit then put a significant amount into a taxable Brokerage account. Invest in stock funds and to a lesser extent some fixed income assets. Buy an affordable house and pay it off early. Rules that were lived out in front of my impressionable young eyes.

I suppose the reason there are so many of us in this financial independence blogosphere is because most people did not start out on a sustainable economic path like me. They were mired in the weeds and mud and had to fight their way out of the swamp of bad money habits to find the trail to success. That makes for a lot of potential readers and a lot of writers with much more compelling stories than mine.

I’ve found that there are several established schools of thought that have distinct tribes of followers. First, there are the Dave Ramsey thinkers. Love him or hate him it’s inarguable that Dave and his organization have pulled many people out of the swamp and set them on a rigid path to financial success. I can remember when my company’s HQ was in Jackson, Mississippi I would drive there often from Arkansas. Somewhere around Monroe, Louisiana, late at night, I would pick up Dave on FM radio. Yes, that was before you could stream podcasts or Spotify into your car radio, ancient days. Dave was in your face, a Rush Limbaugh of personal finance. And when you are trying to stay alert on a long drive he was a perfect companion because of his brash confident delivery. It’s very popular to criticize Ramsey now because personal finance is personal and the Ramsey plan is anything but. It’s rigid with baby steps that have to be in a specific order.

But there is a method in that madness. Something one of the T Party right wing leaders explained to me when I challenged her rigidity on a “no tax” pledge stuck with me and I think it applies to Ramsey’s program. She said her people were single minded and complex when it came to political issues. To lead them she had to have simple and inflexible message. I’m not getting political, but her point struck home. It was that if you are trying to lead people you have to go to where they are and talk to them in terms they can connect with. And if you are trying to get them to follow you then you have to draw a line on the road they can follow. You can’t just toss out some ambiguous directions toward the destination, or you will lose them.

That is exactly what Dave does, his followers are not simplistic people, they are as capable as you or me, but they have a money problem that is very simple. They spend more than they make and they use debt to cover the difference. It’s unsustainable and so Dave built the baby steps as a painted line to a sustainable trail out of misery. You save up $1,000, you attack your debts small to large in a way that brings early success to sustain a long battle. And on from there. Another way to look at it is that his tribe has a spending addiction that led to their woes. Generally speaking, though I am not an expert, I do not think most treatment plans for alcoholics revolve around teaching them to drink moderately. And Ramsey’s plan to treat credit card addiction is to eliminate the cards. I think that is appropriate for someone who is addicted. But not for someone like me or my wife who have had credit cards for over 40 years and have yet to fail to pay off the total balance in a single month. That’s true for most of you as well, but you have to admit there are plenty of people who can’t stop spending when they have a card in their hand.

A second school of thought is to focus on extreme frugalism. And there is logic to that, if you minimize your spending you will surely be better off financially. This overlaps heavily with the minimalist crowd. Folks like Joshua Becker. And like Dave Ramsey I find value in how he sees things, but it isn’t how I live. Again there as so many people who keep score on how well they are doing in life by how much stuff they have, and that’s sad. They need that message, looking for happiness in things is a fool’s errand, it didn’t work for Solomon and it won’t work for you or me. And perhaps the only way for some people to break the consumerism habit is to eschew it entirely, to go cold turkey on buying stuff and to clean out their horde from their homes and sell it or give it away. There are thousands of stories of people who have greatly increased their joy in life by doing just that. Yet it isn’t my lifestyle, I have plenty of hobbies that have caused me to buy stuff, tennis racquets, a fishing boat and lots of tackle, pickle ball stuff, hiking stuff, skiing stuff, running stuff. I don’t want to drop a single one of those hobbies because they all bring me joy. At the same time I rarely buy anything except replacement gear for things I wear out or break. I have no problem with seeking joy in buying stuff. I detest shopping, it is a necessary evil sometimes. But I never enjoy it, unless I find a bargain for something I need to replace.

A third take, one popularized by Ramit Sethi, a blogger, author and podcaster is to live a rich life. It is to strike a balance between living large now and also investing for a rich future. I’d call it the moderation in all things approach but Ramit would not like that because he is not about moderation at all. You can sum up one of his main tenets like this, spend lavishly on the things you truly value the most and be ruthlessly frugal on the things that are not important. This is one I come the closest to identifying with but I can’t embrace it entirely. Mainly because Ramit preaches that there is almost no practical upper limit on what you should spend on those big happiness items, like a wedding or honeymoon or your dream vacation. And the fact is my wildest dreams will always be out of reach of my comfort zone, even if I can afford them. So will almost everybody’s. Johnny Depp is the poster child for wild dreams.

My version of Sethi’s philosophy is spend to the sweet spot on what thrills you and be reasonably frugal on the rest. I love performance cars but I’m not buying a Ferrari or a Plaid Tesla because that’s too big a piece of my total assets to spend on a depreciating asset. So I bought a three year old lightly used Infiniti that does 0 to 60 in 5.5 seconds. That’s the sweet spot for me. A nearly new, fast car that cost a total of $25,000. That is about one tenth as much as an Italian supercar. Ramit would have bought the Lambo and would say I was settling, because, in truth, I could afford a Lamborghini. I’m just not spending that much on a car. To me that would take all the fun out of having it and I’d be terrified to drive it or park it anywhere.

So where am I? Well like Dave Ramsey I advise buying cars with cash, though I wouldn’t ever judge someone who took a low interest rate loan. Especially if they invest that car money at a higher rate of return. I also recommend buying an affordable house and paying it off early. However, I will continue to use my credit cards and pay them off faithfully every month because it is convenient, I get free float on the money and I get cash back. As far as Joshua Becker and minimalism, I never buy anything that I don’t find real value in. I have all my pre-retirement clothes and other than sports wear that I wear out, I don’t clothes shop, I have plenty. I’m far from a minimalist but I’m not particularly materialistic either. The only stuff I have is stuff I use consistently. And as far as Ramit and living a rich life, I do spend on the things I value but I do it as frugally as I can without taking the fun out of it. We take road trips all the time but I stay in Hampton Inns and Hilton Garden Inns because I collect the points and they are consistently clean and affordable. On things I could care less about, like my jeans, I get those at Walmart. But my tech toys like the device I’m typing this post on? it’s the most expensive one in the world, because I’m worth it!

In retrospect, I do life like my parents taught me which combines almost equal amounts of all three schools of thought of the camps Ramsey, Becker and Sethi. Probably none of them would totally approve of my lifestyle, but it has worked for my family.

What about you? Do you find yourself firmly in one school of thought or do you have a mix and match take on financial philosophy and practices?

Is it a rational choice to have a balanced combination of outlooks that incorporate rigid policies, anti-materialism and splurging occasionally? Or is that a cop out, a lack of personal discipline?

How would you describe your take on optimizing personal finance?

As always, if that pesky comments window is hiding then click on the title of this post at the top of the page. That should make it show up.

It was quite the week. The last seven days we put over 2,000 miles on the car, traveled through seven states, hiked many miles of mountain trails, rented a VRBO with a pool that we shared with some of our grown kids, rented a side by side ATV and did some serious off roading, had dual surgeries in a brand new robotic operating room on its opening day and returned home last night with all my parts in their proper location for the first time in months.

As this was the fourth surgical procedure for me in less than a year I’m very happy to still be among the living and looking forward to getting back on the tennis and pickleball courts in a few weeks. This week I’ll do very little besides some light walking but after four weeks I’ll be able to ease back into the active lifestyle I prefer. It’s crazy hot right now, which is perfectly normal for the southern swampy area we live in. If I had to pick a time to be under house arrest I couldn’t have scheduled it better.

I guess because I’m an engineer I’m always planning for the worst outcomes. I’m generally an optimistic guy and expect the best but we are taught to plan for all contingencies. In fact we are legally required to subject the things we design to a very elaborate system of worst case scenario planning. That carries over to everyday life as well because it is so ingrained into us by our training. Since there is always the chance that surgery might not go well I tried to pack as much fun into the days before as possible.

Since I knew I’d be unable to hike after the operation for weeks we planned as much of that as we could. We also ate out at nice restaurants and enjoyed all our favorite foods. We drove over a thousand miles to see my super high tech surgeon in Denver rather than fly there because the surgery was on July 5th and the airports were predicted to be a major disaster over the holiday weekend. From all the news accounts that was a brilliant decision! Plus it allowed us to split up the trip and detour to some beautiful country in Buena Vista and Salida Colorado.

It was not nearly as hot out West as it is here at home so the off roading and hiking were a lot of fun. And, oddly, we saw few other people when we were out on the trails. I guess Colorado is so vast and the areas we picked to explore were not the most popular ones, so even in peak tourist season we had things to ourselves. My wife and I abhor crowds so this was just the way we prefer it.

All in all it was a great seven days. There is nothing fun about surgery or recovery but I had been tolerating a lot of pain and it will be so nice having that gone from my life. It was to the point that tennis and pickleball had stopped being much fun, but that’s over now thankfully. Seeing our kids was awesome, seeing the adults they’ve become is mind bending. When you can remember changing their diapers, dropping them off for their first day of school, telling them bed time stories, seeing them now as adults wrestling with the same challenges we faced at their age. It’s just pretty cool.

So right now if I had to pick a word to describe how I feel it would have to be thankful. Thankful I’m here and healthy. Thankful my spouse of over forty years of marriage had my back all week and will continue to put up with my whining. Thankful for the doctors, nurses and other medical professionals that did their thing to perfection. And thankful for my friends, family and readers who were hoping things went well, which they did.

What about you, did you have an eventful week?

Did anyone try to fly over the holiday weekend, and if so was it the nightmare that the news made it out to be?

As usual if you can’t find the comment box then click on the title at the top of the post, now why does that work I wonder?

If you’re an occasional reader of my blog you may remember I had some fairly dicey surgery about a year ago. Fortunately I found a world class surgeon who was able to make some internal repairs that my local doctors said were impossible, and a life threatening situation was completely, and hopefully permanently, corrected. At least until a couple of weeks ago when a similar defect occurred in a different part of my body. So it’s back on the road to Denver next week to have some more patchwork effected. It appears I inherited more than money from my parents, but also a genetic deficiency that renders my internal structural support system rather puny and wimpy. My other muscles, arms, legs, etc. are completely normal, fortunately, so I can still crush a tennis ball and zig zag across the court better than most fossils. But the internal systems that keep organs in their proper place are flimsy at best.

This time it is a very routine procedure and although my DNA may make a few future repairs or re-repairs necessary it seems the rocket scientist surgeons I found in Colorado can just keep patching me up like a body shop can fix the dents on a 1965 Mustang. I am actually a 1955 model but I can’t think of any iconic cars from then. The only bad part is that I have to take two months of down time after surgery. I’m 66 and two months represents a meaningful chunk of the number of days remaining in my allotment. And as an active aging athlete, two months with no pickleball, no tennis, no extreme hiking and no extreme fishing sounds completely awful. It also occurs to me that my whining to you sounds a lot like my whining to my wife. My wife who is ridiculously and annoyingly healthy and really doesn’t want to hear it.

So what to do? I’m open to suggestions. I barely remember what the last time was like except I had a ton of food restrictions that won’t be a part of this recovery. That’s a blessing, I still can’t stand the smell of cottage cheese which was the only solid food I got to eat for weeks. Ugh, and soup, I almost stopped eating that as well. I will still be able to blog, but at the severe risk that more whining would ensue. I can read, I’m sure I’ll do a lot of that. I assume I’ll be allowed to walk quite a bit, so there is that. And all of my volunteer work will still be going on as usual so I should have enough to do to stay sane. I remember last year I got my fly rod out and caught a lot of pan fish from the bank of a friend’s lake because they are tiny and didn’t require much effort to catch. But he has moved and sold that to someone I don’t know, so my private fishing hole is unavailable.

I kind of doubt the docs will let me bounce around trails in our off road buggy, that can’t be good for healing. I can’t take the boat out, there is a lot of heavy work involved in getting the trailer hooked to the car and getting the boat into the water and getting it back out. So far, I’m better at figuring out what I can’t do versus what I can. I can do my baseball trip with my buds probably, I had canceled that due to a conflict with the state tennis championships, which I won’t be recovered enough to play.

Enough of that. Any suggestions on what to do when you are restricted to light duty?

Have you gone through a period of physical limitations due to a health issue?

As usual, click on the title of the post if the mysterious comment box has become invisible and it should be revealed.

I have always maintained that the success I’ve had in my career, my retirement, my marriage and family has been largely the result of good fortune and not due to any hard work on my part. Because I’m not really good at hard work. In other words, I’m lazy. Yet I’ve done fairly well at my career, starting as a summer intern and ending up running a billion dollar company. I’ve stayed married to my best friend for over 44 years. And I have no money worries in my slightly early retirement. I’m loving life and feel I have a purpose and a lot of great relationships. But when I reflect on how all of this came about I do see I did one thing differently than a some of my friends did.

And that secret to success is so very simple, I took ice cold showers every morning of my life…No, sorry, I hate cold showers. Morning rituals were not my thing. My thing was planning out life’s big decisions logically. I’m pretty spontaneous on most things, my wife and I usually will head cross country on week long road trips with maybe one or two days advance notice. No kids, no pets, no planning required for fun stuff usually. I’m not talking about that kind of planning. I’m talking about logically planning out the three or four key decisions you will make in your life. Things many people do impulsively.

One of the earliest pivotal decisions I made was to pick a career that I thought would motivate me. Because as I opened with, I’m not good at hard work but I am good at fun work. Even as a young teen I knew the good and bad parts of me. The bad was the laziness but the good was a very adept intellect. I was smart, very smart. And I loved problem solving. Remember those word problems in algebra? The ones you hated? Those were cake to me. And so were all things science and math. So as strange as it might seem I was thinking about a career before I even got to high school and ended up deciding chemical engineering would leverage my innate ability to handle extreme math and science and also would pay me very well. It and electrical engineering were the consensus two hardest four year majors that existed at the time so it just made sense that engineers would always be in demand.

But how many people even have a career plan in mind when they start college? My first engineering fundamentals class had 14 people in it who declared chemical engineering as their major. Exactly two of us graduated in that field. The others all ended up doing something else. Some figured out it didn’t match their skill sets, or it didn’t interest them. But they could have known after taking high school chemistry and physics if it was their thing or not. But they did not plan well enough and wasted time in college taking courses they weren’t going to use when they switched their majors. Some did not have the right kind of brain to handle the coursework, if you didn’t score 1450 on the SAT or 32 on the ACT you need a different major, because you probably weren’t going to be able to pass the courses. Again, it does not take much research to know that.

My next big decision was getting married. I had dated just for entertainment until I met my future wife. I was trying to date her roommate in college, which never happened, and became fast friends with her. She shared the same values on faith, money, kids, recreation and optimum places to live and over time we fell in love. We have been married 44 years so far and still are both happy with the decision. But we were friends and dated for two years before getting engaged. We didn’t enter into marriage lightly, we both thought about what we needed to do to put glue into the relationship that would hold us together. She took up tennis, I taught her to ski, we both loved hiking and fishing already. Today those are still all favorite things. Yet we both had friends who married people they couldn’t even date without fighting. It made no sense to us that people who approached life so differently were going to make a lasting couple. And they didn’t. Marriage is about love and romance, that’s true, but it better have a solid logical foundation as well. It’s one area you better have a plan.

The next decision chronologically was to select a job. Because I had chosen a major which was in high demand I had my pick of jobs. I interviewed over a dozen companies and took trips to nine locations to hear their sales pitch of why I should work for them. These were all expense paid trips to be wined and dined and put up in exclusive hotels. Eight of the nine companies made me firm job offers. And rather than me selling myself to them they were practically begging me to work for them. It was pretty heady stuff for a kid who had never been on an airplane until then. All were offering great pay, $80K in today’s dollars, plus or minus a few thousand, depending on the company. I had a choice to make again, but I had already been planning it out in advance.

The summer before, I had taken an internship at a oil and chemical complex in my home state. Unlike most of my fellow students who did the same at other companies I was given serious projects to complete and left with only as much supervision as I asked for. The others were giving training projects that were like additional coursework, and not much fun. I was actually being a real engineer and building things. Also this local company was smaller but had a bright future. They were investing heavily and would be hiring quite a few more engineers after me, but I was the only one in my class they were interested in. Being the first one hired would give me a competitive edge. I took that job, did senior level work from day one and ended up running the place by the time I was 41 because I got my foot in the door first. A lot of people would have picked one of the other jobs at a bigger company, but why face insane competition when you don’t have to? I had a plan.

The final and most recent key decision I had to make was about when and how to retire. I worked until I was sixty not because of financial reasons but because I enjoyed what I did and wasn’t sure if retirement would be as much fun as my job. But still, I had been planning for it my entire career. Little things like maxing out our retirement plans, plus investing in taxable brokerage accounts, paying off our house early and not borrowing money to buy depreciating assets like cars all put us in the position where money was not an issue when it came to retirement. Being well paid was also a big part of being financially independent.

I also knew I needed some purposeful activities after I stopped full time work, including some paid consulting. But that is hard to do if you are the boss at a billion dollar company. There aren’t many consulting jobs for that skill set, at least in my rural area. So decades earlier I had decided that no matter how high up in the company I got I was going to keep a couple of niche areas in my job description because they were adaptable to consulting. These were things that others in my position would have delegated to others but I kept them as part of my duties just so I could do some consulting if I wanted to. It worked perfectly.

I get to do as much expert witness work as I want now and find it keeps me in touch with a very interesting group of people from my former career as well as politicians and business leaders. And it pays well even though I do not need the money. It still feels good to open up a big check now and then. Some of my friends who were running other local large companies approached me when they retired about how to set up a consultancy and sadly I could not help them because they had not preserved the technical skills in an area that had market value. They knew how to run a big company but that is a full time job and it’s difficult to find someone willing to pay you to do that one or two days a week. In most cases those guys went back to lesser paying full time jobs because they needed the money or did not have enough purpose in their lives to feel good in retirement without a job. One went back to work full after their spouse issued them an ultimatum.

In my case, I love being retired, my wife and I will head out to the tennis courts as soon as I finish typing this. I have a half dozed volunteer and paid gigs active right now, plus this blog and too many hobbies to keep up with. But only because I planned retirement for decades. The finance, the volunteering, the consulting and the hobbies were all ready to go well in advance.

What about you, have you planned the big life decisions with a logical underpinning or are you more a spontaneous free spirit.

Is it really possible for a teen to figure out their lifetime career based on their self knowledge and talents?

How do you avoid growing apart from your partner? Even if you are perfectly compatible at the start we all change over time.

As usual if the comment box doesn’t show up then try clicking on the title at the top of this post.

I hate to even take up the space to define this, I suspect you know the drill as well as I do. Numerous studies (Trinity, Bengen, etc.) determined that if you take the invested assets in a diversified portfolio you can withdraw 4% of the total value your first year of retirement. Each year after that you can withdraw the same amount plus any extra needed to offset inflation. It makes it easy to determine what you need to have invested to pull the trigger on retirement. You need 1/(4%) or 25 times your annual expenses.
Now there have been all kinds of recent reviews of this concept by Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab and even Bengen himself as to whether 4% is a little too high or a little too low or even way too high. It all depends on your assumptions about the future. What will inflation look like, it’s pretty high right now. What about the performance of stocks, that’s pretty dismal this year so far. And how about that old standby bonds, not looking too great if you ask me. I have that classic diversified portfolio, nearly exactly like the one in the original studies and it’s been quite battered.

Since you are reading this I’m going to make the intuitive leap that you want to know what my opinion is regarding the 4% rule. And I will tell you, but first I need to give you some back story. I’m a chemical engineer and was always on the technical side of my profession. A lot of engineers get into management or sales and don’t do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to computer modeling of complex processes, but I did exactly that. I was using artificial intelligence software to model chemical plant reactions back when nobody had heard of it. This is like thirty-five years ago, long before iPhones and self driving cars.

My task was to model a complex reactor system that produced a high octane gasoline component that was used for aviation gasoline and high performance car engines. A chemical additive had been created that the manufacturer claimed would improve the yield and quality of our gasoline significantly. If we purchased this chemical for a few thousand dollars a week we’d see a million dollar improvement over the course of a year. But there was a problem. While a million dollars sounds like a big improvement it was actually only a fraction of an octane number and maybe 0.1% of an increase in production. And our product octane varied by a full number every day and production varied by several percent due to constant unpredictable variations in feed stocks amount and quality. In short the very improvements claimed by the additive manufacturer were hidden by the “noise” of the natural variations in our reactors performance.

So what to do? I needed to be able to come up with a model so accurate that it could tell me what the octane and production should be based on feed quality and amount. Then I could look at the actual performance versus the model and any differences would be due to the additive. I tried a whole lot of conventional computer modeling methods, none came close to working. Then I came across something brand new and exotic. It was called artificial intelligence modeling software. I could feed it enormous amounts of past data and it would “learn” what impact things like reactor temperature, feed quality, amount of production and a hundred other data points had on the variables I was trying to predict. And it was great at predicting the past. I could feed it the data from any past date and I’d get results that matched up with what really happened. So problem solved, right? I wish.

There was a huge problem, in that we live in a dynamic changing world. Our facility was constantly being expanded to meet market demand and so each year we ran more feedstock with different components in it than at any time in the past. And my model that was so talented at predicting anything that was within its past experience, lost its mind when it encountered a future that was outside the range of what it had learned from in the past. I suppose it was like a self driving car finding a charging elephant in its path, it’s going to be quite confused and it might not do the right thing, if there even is a right thing.

So what does that have to do with the 4% rule. Everything, in my opinion. The 4% rule applied today is going to base its assumptions on what the next thirty years look like, based on the past. And the past it knows about started in 1925 and ended in 1995 in the original studies. The next thirty years for you and me will be comprised of 2022 through 2052. It’s kind of obvious isn’t it? Does anyone really think that the 2052 economy can be accurately represented by the economy of 1925? We do not have a clue where the next thirty years will take us, but assuming it will be just like some thirty year past set of years is quite a stretch, in my opinion. If we knew, if we could see into the future, we might find the 4% rule should really be the 14% rule, or maybe the 0.4% rule. I’ll let you know in thirty years, if I’m still around.

I hate to attack a sacred cow, because I have used this rule to comfort myself since my withdrawal rate is very low. I tell myself that being well under 4% is surely safe. But then I think back on how poorly my history based artificial intelligence models did when applied to the future and it gives me pause. I realize I do not have any reliable basis for feeling like 4% will mean much of anything heading toward 2052.

So what to do? Are we helplessly adrift with no reliable guides to the future? Should we just make do with 4% because it’s all we have?

Do you have faith in a 4% initial withdrawal rate? If you do, why?

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My wife and I were married 44 years ago today. She is just as amazing and patient today as she was when we were dating in college. Neither of us had any money when we graduated. I was debt free, except for my car loan on a very used oil drinking Toyota Celica. She had twelve hundred dollars of student loan debt, that was still less than $4,000 in today’s dollars, so not much at all.

I graduated a semester before her, and she wouldn’t get married until she got her degree because one of her sisters had done that and never finished college. She had promised her parents she would wait until she had the degree which meant we would be apart the last few months of our engagement. This was back when unmarried people living together was very rare, and we were even more straight laced than most. I took a job clear across our state from her and for a semester we were engaged while five hours away from each other by car. When she would come to see me she stayed with the plant nurse who had “adopted” us and who made sure we behaved. When I went to see her at college her two roommates performed the same function. We are all still good friends these many decades later.

After that last semester she graduated, we married and moved into an apartment and then a trailer for the first year and a half. I was making great money at the time, $18,000 a year. Sounds ridiculous now but in today’s dollars that is equivalent to an $80,000 starting salary. She picked up a job at the county extension office and then later became a junior high school teacher. Our starting combined income was over $100K in today’s dollars which would be outstanding, even today. And this was in a small Arkansas town where rent was maybe $150-$200 for a decent apartment. We decided after renting for awhile to buy a used mobile home/trailer until we saved up a down payment and then we’d sell it and get back all our “rent”. I received a small inheritance from my grandmother and we found a small house just outside of the city limits mostly in the woods. We bought it with a 5% down payment and an 8.75% thirty year mortgage. We qualified for a government subsidized loan, a normal mortgage had a ten percent interest rate back in those days of high inflation! How high was inflation? CD’s were paying double digit interest rates. What we are seeing right now would have been considered moderate at the most.

The house was a four bedroom two bathroom 1,440 square foot single story on one acre. Our house payments with taxes and insurance included were $300. Later when we doubled the size of the house to get some space for three kids we refinanced to a ten year loan at the unbelievably low interest rate of 6%. I think our payment jumped to maybe $600? In any event we paid that off in maybe four or five years and never had a single debt after that. Other than that first wreck of a car I bought we paid cash for all our vehicles and everything else we purchased. We never ran a balance on a credit card, except I think there was one time when a statement got lost in the mail, so technically I guess we did that one time. I maxed out every single retirement savings vehicle at work or offered outside of work. There were no IRA’s or 401K’s for the first ten years of our careers. She had a teacher pension program and I had this crazy good company savings plan where you could invest up to twelve percent of your pre tax pay and the company matched it 100%. You could also withdraw it after you were vested with no penalties except you had to pay the taxes. It was a big amount of free money and I’ll never forget shaking my head in wonder at one of my fellow engineers who said he “couldn’t afford” to contribute, and then went out and bought an expensive sports car.

We started having kids and my wife elected to become a stay at home parent. My next raise was equivalent to her entire paycheck so we never felt the loss of income. She was and is the consummate domestic engineer and manager and I believe she worked much harder than I did with a focus on raising our children and managing our budget. We were a great team and each contributed to the others success in life. I am certain her skillful parenting was the main reason we never had to spend any money on our kids’ college. Even though we were in the two comma club by then our three kids each obtained free rides through scholarships to the state U. Two became engineering graduates and one obtained a business degree. They all went on to pay for their own graduate degrees.

My career went well as I rose from an entry level position to running the company. I had bosses but I was the highest level corporate officer in my state and was not closely supervised. It was a lot of fun, I always felt over paid and highly appreciated. Our company changed hands twice going from being owned by a Fortune 500 publicly traded corporation to being owned by a wealthy family back to another set of publicly traded megacorp overlords. I thrived in both worlds and found things to appreciate in both. Eventually I retired, six years ago. My wife never rejoined the work force so we are both retired going on seven years now. We have a lot of active hobbies including running, tennis, pickleball, fishing, hiking, off roading, skiing and travel. Our kids are scattered so some of our travel is to meet them at vacation spots. We used to have outdoor pets but did not replace the last three when they passed on. We just prefer to be able to travel on no notice and don’t feel the rewards of pet ownership offsets the hassles.

I know all these details about our lives are probably of minor interest to you, but that’s OK. This blog has no ads, no affiliate marketing, no SEO and purely amateur content because it’s just for me to express my thoughts. I guess it’s my form of journaling. Plus I do believe my spouse and I have done a lot of things right over the course of our marriage. We stayed out of debt. Lived well below our means. Yet we still lived rich lives centered around family and friends and active recreational hobbies. This is a much different world than the one we navigated, yet some things don’t change a lot over time. If you choose the right person to partner with, make growing that relationship a priority, determine to serve them above being served by them, spend less than you make, make more income each year, develop some side hustles to take into retirement, well, all those things still make sense I think.

If you’ve read this far, wow, you are a focused individual, and maybe as patient and long-suffering as my wife!

What about you, do you think marriage for decades is still a reasonable prospect or is marriage even relevant in today’s world?

Do you think today’s world is harder to succeed in than my Boomer past life was?

Are single earner families even possible in today’s economy with housing costs and inflation so high?

As usual, if you don’t see a comment box, just click on the title of the post.

The company I spent nearly 40 years working for is having their 100th anniversary party this month. Five different entities have owned the corporation over the years, alternating between private ownership and Fortune 500 companies, and I was privileged to work for three of those during my tenure. I started as a summer intern and ended up running the company. I had bosses higher up in the corporate structure but I was the top corporate officer on site responsible for, basically, everything going on in the billion dollar facility. Although that entailed being on call every minute of every day, including holidays and vacations, somehow it was still a very enjoyable job. I rarely met anyone who loved what they did as much as me.

But having said that, the last six years of retirement have been even better. I’ve had to weather some health crises but I ended up sailing through those with best case outcomes. Maybe I should have retired earlier, but I don’t think so. I like having the financial lagniappe those last few years of Fortune 500 stock and bonus rewards added to our portfolio. Plus it was kind of a fun challenge to make the transition from a paternal family owned organization to a high growth hard charging corporate environment.

Companies rarely last 100 years. In fact the percentage of companies currently qualifying for that is only 0.009%. There are 540 such companies out of universe of over six million total corporations. Its kind of cool to have been a part of one of those unicorn companies for well over a third of its entire history. We all spend most of our time with our radar switched to the lowest range possible because the threats and opportunities of most concern are literally right around the corner in life. What happens in five years or in twenty is fairly abstract and subject to infinite permutations. However, there are occasions when life forces you to look at time differently. Certainly loss of a loved one does that, it confronts you with your own mortality even though it may be decades away. And this centennial celebration has confronted me in a similar way.

The year was 1922. The United Soviet Socialist Republic was founded. And we are now in a proxy war 100 years later with its remnants on both sides of the conflict. World War One, the war to end all wars, had only ended four years previously. It was a recent memory, leaving hundreds of thousands mentally and physically scarred. The Lincoln memorial was dedicated that year as well. And now we struggle as a society with which, if any, of our great historical figures had feet of clay. Wimbledon Center Court was constructed in London. The Irish civil war began. Gandhi was imprisoned by the British government. The first successful use of insulin occurred in Canada. King Tut’s tomb was discovered in Egypt. Mussolini came to power in Italy. Judy Garland was born. My late father turned three years old. And the facility where I spent most of my life working was constructed and started up.

In the next 100 years a lot more has happened, including every day of your life and every day of mine. None of us were around when my company was born, we all showed up somewhere between then and now. I got here before most of you but we are all present and accounted for today. Its fairly safe to say few of us will be around when the next 100 year anniversary of my company arrives. Maybe medical research will preserve the youngest of you, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t even bet on my company being in the next 0.009% of centennial survivors, those are staggering odds. So this will be the only 100th anniversary party I’ll be attending.

And I’m kind of excited. I left the company on good terms and still do some consulting for them. I’ll get to see a lot of former employees, some who have been retired for as much as thirty years. It will be fun to see many of my former coworkers and catch up with what’s going on in their lives. It will be a little sad as well, as I’ve lost a number of old friends I used to work with who have died since I retired. Maybe someone who used to work for me will take the opportunity to vent about some perceived wrongdoing on my part, but I doubt it. I was a fair and perhaps overly tolerant boss and did not have any enemies at work that I’m aware of.

I’ve read that having purpose is a key to being happy. Also that having purpose entails feeling like you are a part of something bigger, something with duration, that isn’t fleeting. I felt that way during my working years. My company had been providing an income to tens of thousands of people over a century of history. How many kids had we made college possible for? How many lives had our health insurance saved? How many happy retirements had we helped build? At every retirement party I attended, and there were many, my retiring employees almost always told me how lucky they felt to have worked for our company. We had very little turnover because we paid high wages and treated people fairly. All of that feels bigger than me, makes me feel like I was part of something worthwhile. And I still feel that way. And I’m grateful that a simple thing like an anniversary party caused me to stop and realize how blessed I am to have had a good job.

What about you? Do you share any of those feelings about your career if you are retired?

Or did you not particularly enjoy the work environment you were in and are very happy to have escaped it?

Or are you in the middle of the spectrum, like most people, recognizing that work is a mixed bag of good, bad and mediocre. But its something you gotta do until you can afford not to?

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This is a risky post. Risky because I’m going to violate one of my own rules of blogging. Don’t write about something you haven’t experienced because if you haven’t lived it, you probably don’t understand it. Grandkids fit into that category for me. While my wife and I have three great grown kids, two married and one in a long term relationship, we are bereft of grandchildren.

The thing is, I like it like that, at least for now. My incredibly fit and tough wife loves the outdoors. We share all kinds of outdoor hobbies and live in a state that has few people but lots of public wilderness to explore. We hike marked trails, there are hundreds of those. We bushwhack where no trails exist to find waterfalls and canyons and rock formations that have been tagged with GPS coordinates. We also explore the lazy way on our Polaris RZR off road all terrain vehicle. Arkansas has some amazing trail systems for ATV’s as well as thousands of miles of forest service roads that are approved for off road vehicle use. We love to fish and generally do pretty well at keeping our freezer stocked with tasty filets. Sometimes we even head out West to ski. We have been visiting national parks during their shoulder (less busy) months, including Big Bend and New River Gorge so far this year. And because we can, we rarely plan any of these things more than a week out. We’ll just be sitting at the breakfast table and one of us will suggest heading out on a several thousand mile road trip designed to either see one or more of our kids or a destination like a national park or both. We will head out with no reservations and no idea really of how long we will be gone or what we will add to our travel agenda along the way. All of that is to say we like the time flexibility that being financially independent and no longer tied to an employer provides us.

And what does that have to do with grandkids? I can explain it this way, I think. Forty-three years ago when my wife and I married we did not feel the need to have children. We enjoyed being able to do things with our childless couple friends. We could go skiing or travel spontaneously as long as we could manage the time off of work. Because, other than our jobs, nothing constrained our choices about how and where we spent our time. It was a glorious time of freedom and helped build our relationship and friendship into something that would last the rest of our lives. We had a great seven year period before we decided that we did indeed want to have children. We knew that it would constrain our future choices but when we weighed the costs against the joy we felt little ones would bring it wasn’t even close, we chose children.

We never regretted the choice, in fact we made it three times. Maybe a time or two in the teen years I wondered….but no, it was one of our best decisions. Like history, life repeats itself. And now in our early retired years we enjoy the same freedom as our early married years before kids. In fact we enjoy that in a 10X way because we not only have all our time free but we’ve got enough money to do almost anything we can imagine. And its wonderful. I kind of dreaded my sixties for most of my life because I’d be so old. But so far they have been the best years of my life. We are still fit enough to do whatever we want and smart enough to make wise choices. It reminds me so much of how we felt in our early married, childless, years. And like then, before we were ready to have kids, we didn’t want them. And then we did. I think right now that’s where we are, we don’t want grandkids just yet. But when and if they come I think it will be like when we had kids. We looked back and wondered how we got by without them to love on.

What little I know about grandkids comes from what I remember as having been one, and what I’ve seen in my senior adult friends who have them. And it is a lot like what I know about children. I have friends who have happy, successful children and I have friends who lost their children to drugs or crime or bad personal choices. Parents who rejoice in their children’s lives and those who are haunted by what could have been. I think there is a range of outcomes for grandparents too. I see two main camps of grandparent behavior. One is what I consider grandparent overload. I could name a few of our friends who fall into this camp. It might be voluntary or it might be guilt fueled but some grandparents I know have ceased to have a life outside of their grandchildren. These are grandparents who become de facto day care workers for their children’s children. Unpaid at that. In fact not only unpaid but expected to foot the bill for feeding and transporting their grandkids all week. And on weekends they often become babysitters so their kids can enjoy their days off of work. Some of these are people who we befriended before they retired and before grandkids. Even though they had demanding jobs they still found time to enjoy hobbies they loved. But something happened when grandkids came along, they stopped doing most of that because they found themselves with a new job, being parents to their grandkids. In extreme examples they actually took their own grown children back into their home and helped raise the grandkids because the grown child isn’t capable of adulting enough to do it.

Just last night on the pickleball courts two little grandkids of a couple we are friends with were running around on the courts unsupervised. They and their unmarried and pregnant mother are living with our friends across the street from the courts because our friends can’t stand to see the grandkids impoverished. I have another retired friend who legally adopted his granddaughter because his daughter was not a functioning parent. While he should be in decent financial shape he is putting a kid through college in his seventies. I do not blame the victims here, they really have no choice when their kids will not or can not adequately care for the grandkids. In fact they probably deserve medals for being selfless.

There is another way of grandparenting that appeals to me much more. And that’s what I observe our most successful grandparent friends do. In most cases these friends do not have local grandkids because our rural area doesn’t produce enough quality jobs to make it easy for kids to stay here after college. However, they go to great lengths to stay involved in their grandchildren’s lives. Two of my friends for instance bought condos in the same city as their grandkids. Their kids live hours away from here so they get to choose when they are local grandparents and when they are distant ones, I think that’s a pretty wise way to go. A third bought an RV and they go to a park close to their grandkids pretty often, that’s a less expensive way to accomplish the same thing. If and when we are grandparents, assuming none of our progeny return to our area, we’ll most likely do something like these friends have done. Probably more along the lines of VRBO stays. We are already building a cabin in the middle of nowhere and I don’t think we want three residences.

So if you are old enough to conceive of the idea of having grandkids or if you already have them what’s your take on how they fit into your life?

Is life after grandkids way different than your life before?

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My wife and I enjoy National Parks.  Particularly the remote and uncrowded ones like Big Bend in Texas, which we visited last month.  We are hikers and most of the parks have extensive hiking trail systems. We love experiencing the varied terrain and flora and fauna in quiet settings and if you stick with trails that are three miles or longer you generally don’t see many other hikers.  We found another great National Park this week in West Virginia.  This is West Virginia’s first national park and the nation’s newest one. 

New River Gorge National Park is a jewel most people have not yet experienced and perhaps have not even heard of.  The park is composed of the land on either side of the New River, paradoxically one of the oldest rivers in the country.  This is a large fast flowing clear water mountain river filled with rapids, waterfalls and whitewater thrills for rafters and kayakers.  The park itself includes the mountainous terrain on both sides of the river for 53 miles which includes what used to be a major coal mining area in the Appalachian Mountains. 

Like Big Bend, the park is not very close to major population centers, and that has kept the visitor count lower than most parks.  But it is well worth the drive.  There are many hiking trails, but we were only able to do a handful during our one day at the park.  We normally would have stayed longer and hiked more but being on the last part of a two-thousand-mile road trip to see our grown kids in Virginia, we were ready to get back home.  We went through the park because it was convenient to work it into our drive back to Arkansas and I’m very happy that we did.  We did get in about ten miles of hiking and several scenic drives including one OHV trail that my wife’s Bronco Sport Badlands Edition handled superbly in Rock Crawl mode.  Of course, it wasn’t that tough and a Prius probably could have made it, but it was fun anyway, pretending we were intrepid off roaders. 

If you like hiking I recommend the Endless Wall Trail that takes you to Diamond Point overlook.  It has a breathtaking view of the river hundreds of feet below the rocky point.  And if it’s the weekend you’ll see some rock climbers since they use that trail to access the cliffs.   The Long Point Trail is also a must see, it takes you to a rock overlook that gives you an awesome view of what used to be the longest single arch span bridge in the world, it is an impressive structure, but of course, being an engineer, I have a thing about bridges. There is also a manmade overlook on the north side of the bridge where you can walk down steps to get a much closer view.  Its 178 stairs steps, all on the way up going back. Yes, I did count them. Yes, I’m kind of OCD.  Guided rafting, zip lining and a harnessed-in catwalk tour across the river on a teeny walkway under the bridge are all optional activities we did not participate in, because one day was all we had.  There are mountain bike trails also in the park and in the area around it.

The park was not crowded but it does fill up on weekends and later in the summer since floating the river is very popular when the water gets warmer. We always try to schedule our park visits during weekdays and not on spring break or in the summer vacation season because we do not like crowds when we are exploring out in nature.  Hunting for overflow parking spots just detracts from the experience for us, but there was none of that, we found parking easily at the trailheads and there were few cars on the scenic drives.  The park is not really set up to handle crowds as easily as most of the older national parks either.  Some trailheads and overlooks only have parking for a few cars.  I’m sure that is a problem during peak season weekends.

The first few days of our trip took us to Colombia, Virginia which is south of Charlottesville.  We rented a VRBO there on a private lake and hung out with our grown son who’s a resident MD at UVA and with our daughter and son-in-law who are both in education in the Norfolk area of the state.  We cooked, hiked at state parks in the area and fished in the provided boats on the private lake.  We also got to watch our Hogs make it to the sweet 16, my wife, me and all three kids got their four-year degrees at the University of Arkansas, so that was pretty fun to see.   It was a nice relaxed weekend for our very busy kids and fun for us to hear about what is new in their lives. They brought a grand dog along as well who was quite entertaining.  None of them have figured out how to produce grandkids so the dog is as close as we’ve gotten to having someone to spoil.

We took two leisurely days to drive to Colombia but as usual we made the trip home in one 12-hour drive.  We are always ready to get back to our normal routines of tennis, running, pickleball and, this time of year, fishing.  I also have a meeting this afternoon on my volunteer economic development project which I hated to miss, since I’m heading up the team.  I need to get out on the tennis courts too, my tennis team is already playing matches and after just getting over a wrist injury my game is pretty rusty.   

If there is one best thing about life in retirement it is the ability to control your time.  You never have to schedule a ski trip during spring break, unless you’re taking school aged kids along.  You never have to visit national parks on three-day holiday weekends when they are crowded and you can’t find a place to park.  And you can decide to extend your trip another day or another week without having to ask anyone’s permission.  And that’s pretty sweet.

What about you, have you been to New River Gorge National Park?  Is it on your list?

How has being retired changed the way you travel, or how do you think it will when you do retire?

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My wife and I love to hike and love places that you can explore on your feet.  This last week we drove and hiked a park we had never been to but that had long been on our list of things to do, Big Bend National Park.   The first thing to understand about Big Bend is that it is far away, no matter where you live.  We live in a state that is contiguous to Texas, in Arkansas,  but we still put over two thousand miles on our 4Runner driving to and through the park.  Even if you live in a one of the closest big Texas cities you are still fairly distant, El Paso is a five hour drive and Dallas is over eight hours away from the park.  In our case, being a hundred miles from the Texas border, we had a twelve hour drive to reach Big Bend.  

It occurred to me how easy a trip like this is now compared to when I was working.  Back then we would have done the entire drive in one day, because we would only have so many days of vacation scheduled and then I’d have to be back to work.  Its not like that now, we have some constraints, of course, but they are generally optional things like a tennis team match or a volunteer meeting.  My personal plans can trump most other commitments now.  We also would have had to plan in advance, but we decided to go on three days notice this time.   And that is typical, we rarely do anything that is planned out more than a week ahead in retirement.  

We couldn’t leave early on day one of the trip, I had a volunteer meeting I could not easily skip, because I’m running the show on that particular project, and my wife had a doctors appointment.  We hit the road about lunchtime and drove past Dallas and checked into a LaQuinta Inn.  That’s a step below our usual Hampton Inn or Hilton Garden Inn hotels but we were in rural Texas and our other options were Motel 6 or Super 8 and…no thanks.  It wasn’t bad, relatively clean and comfortable.  The only strange thing was the recliner in the room was a total wreck, like it fell off the back of a truck at sixty miles per hour.  But we didn’t need it so it was not a problem. We forewent the free breakfast and found the fifty year old downtown diner where the locals ate.  The food was awesome and the people treated us like family.  We spent the rest of the day driving down to Marathon Texas, just outside the northern boundary of Big Bend.  We stayed at the Gage Hotel, a historic old hotel that had been refurbished.  They had an excellent restaurant as well, we hiked over to the Gage Gardens and walked around, had dinner at the restaurant and turned in early for a full day the next morning.  

We rose early and drove to the park before daylight, nobody was manning the gate so we drove in for free.  It would have been free anyway with my wife’s senior National Parks pass.  We planned to drive more than hike on day one and our first excursion in the park was the Dagger Flats Auto trail.  It introduced us to the different plant species we would be seeing the rest of the week.  It was pretty interesting to read the signs and observe the varieties of succulents and other vegetation.  After that we went to the Fossil Discovery Exhibit.  Amazing to think that creatures as big as T-rex and the massive prehistoric crocodiles roamed what is now an arid dessert. 

We continued our driving tour on Glenn Spring Road all the way to the Rio Grande river separating the US from Mexico.  Its a very small stream this time of year, shallow and barely flowing.  We drove then hiked to the hot springs that are just on the side of the river but they were pretty full of people soaking in the hot water so we skipped doing that.  It was cold and windy and while a warm soak would have been fine getting out would have been hypothermic!

After that we navigated toward the South end of the park where we would stay the next three nights in Terlingua, Texas.  But on the way we stopped to take on our first real hike,  the lost mine trail to the peak.  If you are like me you probably think Texas is a low elevation place, particularly south Texas.  But that isn’t true.  The trail started at 5400 feet elevation and climbed to over 7,500 feet at the tip of Lost Mine peak.  It was nearly five miles and very steep, and just about right for a warm up hike before we got serious on day two.  The wind in the park was intense, I can’t really compare it to Arkansas because its just an order of magnitude stronger in Big Bend.  Literally everything has to be tied down or it will blow away.  To get to the very top of the mountain you had to walk a fairly narrow path with drop offs on either side, and in that wind keeping your balance was just a little bit frightening, but we did it.    The other thing about hiking Big Bend is that elevation.  We live at 220 feet above sea level.  There is lots of oxygen in our air, and believe me, if you live at 220 and hike at 7500 you can feel the difference.  You end up exhausted doing things you would not even notice back home where there is actually air to breathe. Things like tying your shoes!  And hiking several miles with day packs, full of lots of water, is much harder than we expected even though we’ve hiked at higher elevations before.  

Water, its pretty important when you are hiking a high desert.  We always have a back up water filter in one of our packs and in Arkansas and most other places you can find water almost everywhere you hike.  We carry water but not a lot because we can make our own if needed.  But in a dessert, like most of Big Bend, there is no water, zero water.  It rarely rains, there are very few springs and I did not see any ponds or lakes at all. 

Maybe its our aging bodies but that first five mile hike was much tougher than I expected.  We had originally planned on an 18 mile hike for day two but after considering how hard day one was we decided to cut that hike down to 10.2 miles.  We could still make our objective of getting to Emory Peak, the highest elevation in the park, but we decided to skip the extra eight miles the South Rim trail would require.  It was a good choice.  We’ve done 18 miles many times in the past, we did 24 miles rim to rim on the Grand Canyon one time in nine hours, but we were younger then.  We are now in our sixties and maybe a little smarter.  Certainly a little slower. 

We got a fairly early start on the Emory peak climb but it took a long time to get there.  The trail was moderate for about half the route but it got difficult the higher you went with a lot of rocks to go around and plenty of things to trip you up.  The last mile and a half was particularly tough and the last hundred yards were just a mad scramble up the side of the mountain.  The last thirty feet are a semi-technical climb that could easily be life threatening.  Then of course there was that crazy wind trying to throw us off the mountain.  Anyway, we made it and made the return hike back safely.  But it felt like a marathon and my legs were jelly by the time we finished.  It seriously confronted me with the fact that I’m not as good as I used to be.  Even my marathoning wife got whipped a little by the hike.  But we were thankful we could still do something that hard together. 

The last day of hiking we did several shorter trails, maybe five or six miles in all.   We went into Santa Elana canyon which was breath taking.  There was a spot where the Rio Grande was maybe eight feet across, and the other side was Mexican territory.  And the canyon is like that the whole way, with a three hundred foot tall canyon wall on one side in Mexico and an equally imposing wall on the US side.   We also hiked to Tuff Canyon, The Burro Mesa Pour Off and to Balanced Rock, another pretty dicey scramble that felt as more like canyoneering than hiking. One thing I should point out is that Big Bend is a little unique compared to places like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.  Those places get very  crowded during tourist season.  Big Bend doesn’t get crowded because it is too hard to get to.  We saw only a handful of people on our hikes.  Some places we saw no people at all.  We prefer National Parks that do not feel like Disney World or Times Square, where you see other people, but not thousands of them.  If you like seeing nature without hordes of people its the park for you!

We stayed at the Chisos Mining Company hotel in a three unit rock house up on a hill.  It was nice.   We had a good time each evening driving into Terlingua’s ghost town and eating at one of the cool restaurants that cater to tourists. The Star theatre is the most well known and it is excellent but the others were good too.   We also had great next door neighbors, a bunch of middle aged guys on dirt bikes.  They were a fun group of Texans.  The temperatures ranged from the low thirties in the mornings to the seventies in the afternoons.  Like all high desserts the temperature fell like a rock when the sun set.  The wind was relentless but we got used to it after a day or two.  It was an awesome trip with my best friend in the world, my wife.  Hiking trips with just the two of us keep us close. There is so much time to talk on the road trip and so much to observe on the hikes and scenic drives.  I feel very fortunate to have a partner who loves active pastimes.  I truly believe one reason we’ve been happily married for forty-three years is we’ve both worked to find hobbies we can share and that we could return to after our kids grew up and moved away. We had several friends who found themselves living with complete strangers when the kids left, and those marriages did not do well.  

I think the trip encompassed what I find best about retirement.  It wasn’t particularly expensive and there was nothing fancy about the lodging or most of our meals.  In fact it was a sandy, gritty, sweaty exhausting experience at times. Our legs were screaming at us on some of the hikes, but it was fun! I know a lot of people do not get why we enjoy the dirt and the scapes and the falls and the cactus punctures and the sore muscles.  I can’t really explain it either.  But when you are at the top of a mountain that took hours to climb looking out at a vista that you could never adequately explain with words, its a great feeling.  And when you get back to the cabin and have a glass of wine and reminisce about the days adventures with someone you love,  its so worth it.   

What about you, do you find strenuous outdoor adventures exciting and worth the pain or do you prefer more leisurely leisure? Sometimes in the middle of a very hard hike I question my sanity.  

As an aside, we enjoyed the scenic drives through the park and you can see all the cool sites without hiking at all.  So if you like driving better than hiking it is still a great destination.  One of the best we’ve been to for seeing everything from our vehicle.  We took a high clearance four wheel drive SUV but we saw a Prius doing just fine. 

What is your favorite national park?  I’d say Rocky Mountain National Park or Glacier National Park are probably my favorites so far.