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About myself I'm 61 1/2 and will be 62 in June and will retire in July. I'm a federal employee working in the DMV (D.C., Maryland, & Virginia). I was born in D.C., did 13 years in the Army and finished my military career in the Army Reserve. I'm probably going to maintain my roots in the DMV when I'm retired but you never know. places like N.C and S.C. have intrigued me for some time so warmer climate is in the forecast (no pun intended!) I love to play golf so being near a few courses is a must (sorry FL your not on my list) I want to do a lot of travelling. Stay a few months in Europe and just do a road trip. Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain. My neighbors are great, diversified and we take care of each other. I'm a little bit torn to leave here though because both our families are in this area. We have one child together who stays with us while he attends college and we have four other children between us. (they can be an absolute P-A-I-N!) with about 7 1/2 months to go I so look forward to sharing my experiences here. The Retirement section on CD has been very informative and entertaining.
I was born in Georgia and raised in Florida. I have a graduate degree and enjoy my profession. I have been married twice. Have one biological child in their early 30's who is a college graduate but moved home two years ago and quit their job three months ago and is not looking very hard for a job. (And it's driving me crazy). I have two step children who have left Florida (good for them). My husband is about to retire from the local university after 40 some odd years of professional employment. I am employed with the Feds for the last 11 years and plan to continue working for another 10. We are looking to move away from Florida in the next two years. I am exhausted from storms and damages to my home. (18 trees removed so far at the cost of nearly ten grand!) Being a fed I am considering a move to a higher locality pay area for my high three. We visited the San Francisco Bay and Monterey area recently and loved it. Trading hurricanes for fires? Crazy expensive to live there, will require a big downsizing but it will only be for 3 to 5 years before we move again to what will likely be my final duty station and in close proximity to where I will join my husband in retirement. We have discussed retiring north - Michigan, Minnesota, upstate New York. I have never lived further north than the piedmont of North Carolina but my husband grew up near Chicago so he knows cold. Not sure what I will think of long winters and feet of snow. My family or origin is nearly gone (brother with terminal cancer and mom with end stage vascular disease) so I have no family ties to Florida or the south. Have started looking at these forums to better educate myself about nice places to retire. We love to travel, enjoy nature, camping, state and national parks. Want to be near public transit, a good airport, and good medical infrastructure.
I live in San Francisco, turn 70 next month, and I've been retired for nearly 10 years from a technical job at a TV station. I was part of the studio crew, handling cameras, audio, video playback and graphics. I've been married for 32 years. My husband also worked there as a master control operator. He's 78 and has been retired for 13 years. (Yes, we met at work.) It is the second marriage for us both; no kids.
In my previous life, I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley. Then it was still known as the prune capital of the world and not Silicon Valley. I remember walking through orchards on my way to school. When I was 18 I met a boy at college who was from New York City, fell in love and moved to the East coast to be with him. That didn't work out, but my six years in NYC was a real adventure. I worked for a small film production company at one point, and Paul Simon had the office above ours. We could hear him play the piano sometimes. One of my bosses knew Joan Crawford, and that is how I came to speak to her on the phone once when she was trying to reach him. I remember what a lovely, well-modulated voice she had and how gracious she was to a mere secretary.
My life now is not nearly as exciting. After 30+ years of working nights and weekends at the TV station, I love being a homebody and don't go out that much. My husband has health problems and doesn't like to go out much, either. We're both rather introverted. For this reason we don't travel. Our big splurge is that we go out to dinner twice a week and breakfast once a week, always at the same places. We also read voraciously and spend a lot of money on books. I am an opera fan and also love classical, oldies, jazz and big band/swing from the 1940s.
Another legacy of working nights is that my husband and I are both confirmed night owls. We rarely get to sleep before 3am and usually get up between 11am and 12 noon. I assumed that after retirement we would go back to living on normal people's time, but it just never happened.
We're the same age.
In 1948 I was born in Redwood City and grew up in San Carlos, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Santa Clara. I remember when sides of the El Camino had prune orchards between the small cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara with the area all around the San Jose airport pear orchards we played in.
In the early 1960's I picked string beans around the San Jose airport for 2 cents a pound.
Both my parents were born in California in the 1920's and a great, great grandfather jumped a Russian whaling ship in San Francisco harbor in 1846 two years before the gold rush so the family tree goes back a ways.
Graduated high school in 1967 and less than a year later got drafted then sent off to Vietnam for a year where I was a combat medic with the First Infantry Division just north of Saigon.
Got out of the army in late 1969 and had a heck of a time deciding what to do with my life. Tried a few jobs only to not like any of them so I decided to use my GI Bill to attend flight school where I became a commercial pilot and flight instructor. I loved flying, flight instructor, air taxi pilot of ferry pilot where I delivered new airplanes for Piper out of their Vero Beach facility. Would fly commercial to Orlando on Friday where Piper would pick us up, ferry us to Vero where we would spend a night in a cheap hotel then pick up an airplane the next morning and only then would be learn were we were heading off to. I've flown to every state of Vermont, flew over Vermont but never yet stepped foot there, the Bahamas, Mexico and Canada. I wanted to go airlines but Vietnam was winding down and pilots were literally a dime a dozen.
I met the love of my life and knew we could not survive on a pilots salary of the time so I started looking for something else. It was fine while single, what else did I need when single and going on a date I had access to quarter million dollar airplanes where I would impress my dates. Better than a Ferrari and a Beechcraft Baron would go three times as fast. Didn't have a whole lot of money to do anything once we arrived but get there we would!
Remember once flight crossing the lip of the Grand Canyon with the sun coming up in back of me... all by myself with a fantastic view and I am glad I did it.
One of my flight students owned a fire sprinkler company and he thought I would make a good designer. He invited me to the business, showed me around, offered me twice the money I was making to start and wanting to get married I couldn't say no. Went to work and got married less than a year later.
43 years later I am still doing fire sprinkler design work it's sort of a niche field few know about. I am in fire sprinklers which is typically 5% of your project costs but I can be 50% of your problems sort of thing.
A lifetime later I feel I lucked out and made all the right moves... don't regret a single major thing in my life and I told my wife I would do it all again exactly as we did it the first time.
Worst time in my life was 1972 when I found myself stranded in downtown Sacramento with a VW bug holding everything I owned. The bug was out of gas and I literally did not have two pennies to rub together... broke, no job and no gas with the closest person I knew 100 miles away. It was the worst four or five days in my life and I vowed I would never do that again. I dunno, might have been three days but it seemed to go on for months.
At 23 few of us know what we really want to be.
At 70 I am still working just because I want to. I like it and to me what I do is fun... it's sort of like a complex puzzle and I am pretty good at it. I tell people I am retired because I don't have to work and I am doing exactly what I want to do. I tell my wife "maybe three more years" and she just rolls her eyes.
I'm not a native Californian - but I remember Mountain View and Los Altos in 1968.... when apricot trees were everywhere. My sister and BIL had just moved there post-graduation from UW Madison.
In just over four months I will be eighty-one, I was laid off at age 54 as part of lay-off from a university I had worked at for twenty years, and three days before my last day I had an accident and have never worked again. So, my involuntary retirement started about twenty-four years ago.
I was born and raised in a most wonderful small town in western NYS. My parents came from different, and hostile, religious & ethnic backgrounds. They knew each other six weeks and ran away and got married in secret, a deformed female child was born and died in 14 months four years before I was born. My mother was very disappointed and reacted badly when I, a male child was born, but I was unaware of this for many years. We were a very financially pinched lower level working class family, but only once did I get a clue - from our angry landlord's wife. I was really a happy little kid growing up with neighborhood kids, playing in the fields and woods and fishing in the creek, and playing "war" in the big graveyard behind our houses (the 1940's).
About age ten my little world fell apart. We moved to the other side of town. There were only a few kids on the street and I seemed unaccepted and the parents of the group leader were derisive toward me - when my mother inquired with other neighbors it turned out that this family were hostile to Catholics. End of playmates. I realized that my father and mother were unhappily married, and furthermore each was unhappy with the child they had - though for different reasons. I spent the next twenty years in the counter-productive project of developing an ever-increasing hatred for them. I was a bit brow-beaten and shy, but my mother's sister became the major support in my life, I had very large paper route and then worked before school and after and summers in a drug store and the small school system was superb in every respect. So, what I didn't get at home, I found you could get from all sorts of other open, giving folks. I can still recall many of them.
I won a competitive scholarship to college tuition and room and board, and did well academically. Ever since jr. high I had had sexual relations with other like-minded guys, but also a long, voraciously sexual relationship with a girl; however, in college I came to terms with the fact that I was gay. The Fifties were a truly lousy time to have a gay sexual orientation. And after a conversation with a visiting Jesuit chaplain, I departed the church...so much for that heritage.
After university I moved to Manhattan, lived in a rundown Hispanic neighborhood because that is all I could afford, and stayed there for fifteen years, except for a year or so in a grubby rooming house for down-and-outers. My first experience with death was when the guy across the hall died in his little room, and after a week the place stunk horribly and then the door was forced open. I had an illegitimate son who was adopted. I had no confidence, drank like the alcoholic I was rapidly becoming and slid from one low-paying job to the next one for twenty years. In the mid-Sixities a fellow staff member threatened to tell our employer that I was gay. It was a job I loved and did well, and I was furious. I made up my mind then and there I would never pretend to be straight again, and put myself in the position of being even worse than discriminated against. So, four years before the legendary Stonewall event I stopped editing my life for heterosexual consumption....and it cost several times in the work field.
In '79 after a three-day drunk with the usual blackouts and about to lose the temp job I had, I went to AA. I never drank after that day. In a strange way my personality turned inside out and the needy and resentful guy became Mr. Easy Going....though with a risky streak of being too-easily-honest. My social life, my job and the whole world was coming up roses. Then came that bizarre health outbreak that blossomed into the AIDS epidemic. A guy I was sleeping with had it before it even got named and he went home to die of an incurable "something." A neighbor I ate out with regularly was diagnosed, and then another until my neighborhood had the second highest number of cases in Manhattan. I became a volunteer Crisis Intervention Worker and was assigned to people who were seriously ill. I did this for seven years, all of them died but one (the usual life expectancy then was 18 months max.) As did all but four of the people I knew as friends and acquaintances in my neighborhood. My work-for-pay became secondary in my life, and I spent my "free" time with guys who needed various kinds of support - it was a parade of welfare hotels, studio apts in slums, luxury apts., wonderful hospital workers and ones that released disabled people onto the street. I took care of my best friend as he died in his apt.; then another guy and I took care of a neighbor (and former workmate of mine) whose mother was dying and his father lived in a furnished room out of state - he did days, I did nights for most of a year until he died. (I had joined a research project with the expectation that surely given my sexual partners that I too would die. When the tests for infection came out finally, it was assumed by me and the researchers that of course I would be positive. I was not, not once, not twice, not ever. But my blood profile was very askew, and from research done years later it suggests that am probably in that small percentage of males who lack the "docking mechanism" for the HIV anti-virus.)
In the middle of this volunteering and caretaking by the end of every day I felt like I was being slowly cut in two with a barber's razor from head to feet. I had no psychological ballast, just raw physical and emotional energy and I knew I was going to fold. I began a desperate search for a "something"...I began with Catholic writings I was familiar with and followed wherever each new book seemed to point...and after months I came to an abrupt halt with a small book by a Sri Lankan monk that is probably the classic primer for Theravada Buddhism. As it turned out there were several Buddhist centers in the neighborhood I now lived in, and I went to one for a couple of years to my great benefit.
After my lay-off and accident in '93 I still did this work for awhile, but my condition became painful to the point that I had to use strong medications, and I was not in any state to deal with people in crisis. A surgeon told me my working days were over. I knew I couldn't continue to live in NYC in retirement, and even after lots of research I found no other place that I really wanted to go to. I decided - try outside the U.S., and was going to go to Brazil where I had a cousin. Lo, and behold he shows up in NYC, and is fighting a rare cancer....and he did not last very long. End of that plan.
I thought and thought, then told my landlord I was not renewing and gave away my stuff. I took off for Europe at midnight one January night in 2000 with a couple of suitcases. I took a "vacation" in Madeira off the coast of Africa for four months, lived in southern Portugal for a year, then Cyprus for three and back to SW Portugal where I have been ever since. I live in a neighborhood that is mainly Portuguese not foreigners, once again I have lost most of my new (heterosexual) friends to cancer, etc. even though they have been younger than myself. I have always had a very over-developed "bookish" side, and in some ways I live like I was a student....I love all kinds of music, and two of my most frequent contacts now are a 21 year old Brazilian waitress and a 32 Russian guy who fixes computer because we are nuts about making playlists and find new music from around the world. I have all I want and, thus, can live frugally without any real effort. Every second or third month I give half of my pension payment either to a small Buddhist monastery and center or a local center for severely mentally disabled children. And I walk in the early a.m. just to be alone with plants, birds, the weather, and recently a well-fed calico cat who meows, comes out of the bushes for a scratch and rolls around on my shoes. He goes back to the curb for a wash and I walk on toward coffee.
I notice that a lot of the easier lifestyles have been without kids.
I hear we childfrees are missing a very profound experience by not having children. Where I admit that might be correct, I am content to miss that point. No confidence that I'd agree about the pluses of being a parent.
I hear we childfrees are missing a very profound experience by not having children. Where I admit that might be correct, I am content to miss that point. No confidence that I'd agree about the pluses of being a parent.
You will never know how much I wish I had made the decision to not have kids. I realize a lot of people get great satisfaction from their kids and grandkids. But my experience has not been good.
Wish I had never married, too. Maybe a different man. But the one I married?? No thanks. Mistake.
Grew up in the middle of the country, small town, family of three boys and a girl. Family of musicians but never took with me. Graduated from state University as a Chemical Engineer and worked in the energy business for 37 years in 20 different roles. Married a girl from my home town and university in 1971. Retired in Houston and moved to DFW 3 years later. Been retired 11 years and just turned 71. Happy married to my home town girl. We do not have children as we were not able.
Played golf as a hobby and traveled the world with work and vacations on small cruise ships as my vacation time had to be during the fall and winter months and set well in advance. We spend our energy now focused on medical challenges an impaired immune system dealt her. The cruise vacations were compatible with her unpredictable health cycles.
We lived and worked in North Central NJ and western PA. Got an MBA at night school from Rutgers where I learned to appreciate the career I had. Attended Law School at night in Houston where I learned I was not a word engineer.
Summer job after high school graduation in the wilderness area of Idaho is where I learned living alone in the mountains was not for me. Summer job after junior college year in New Orleans was like a foreign assignment Two PhD Musicians in my family, a conductor and brass player, both recently retired from their musical careers.
Worked in refineries as a design and an operation consultant for a few process units. Internal financial reporting, HR management, procurement e commerce projects, real estate for profit and corporate real estate as well as IT and Planning functions. Had 20 different challenging varied roles in my career with some great people as associates and bosses. The last part of my career was in real estate functions for the energy company.
Enjoy DFW being closer to where most of family lives including my 95 year old mom. Learning more about medical conditions than I ever wanted to know. Gave up my hobby of golf as it was the first thing to make me feel old. We enjoy time at home with our three small dogs and the peace and quiet of a life not climbing on planes to fly around the world or even across the country. We enjoy time in the NM mountains visiting family too though going there less as we age..
Life is good
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