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Limited income [navy pension which started around $1480/mo and has increased to $1600/mo, due to annual COLA increases over the past 17 years].
Aging is a bummer. My Dw has gone through five heart attacks, all stress related so there is no surgery that can help. I have prostate cancer, I had my prostate removed, then cancer came back, so now I am going through radiation and hormone therapy. The loss of energy, muscle mass/tone, night sweats, hot flashes, and emotional swings are driving me crazy.
Oh no. So sorry to hear the trauma you are dealing with on both fronts! That's awful.
2) Loneliness, due to being widowed and being blamed for his choices.
3) Adjusting to a new life that is not the life I chose.
4) Scrambling to eat better, exercise a LOT more (was already doing 30 minutes a day) and never see a doctor again (following a near-death experience and ensuing hospitalization a few months ago).
And I'm only 59. Retirement has lost some of its shine.
I’m so sorry . I hope the new year will be kind to you.
As others have said, health issues is the probably the single biggest problem for us. It is inevitable and has nothing to do with retiring, just aging. You just deal with it and move on.
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Spot on!! IMO, there is NOTHING more tiresome than hearing crabby old people wallowing in self-pity about being old. There is ALWAYS someone better--but also worse--off than you. Hey, it beats the hell out of the alternative...
I have grappled with a variety of chronic health issues since age 8 (thyroid, partial vision loss), and I know so many others (of many different ages) in the same boat or who faced far worse challenges. When I was a child, I couldn't imagine being 21. Now I am over 60. The joints ache, I have to squint to read, I'm not as limber, fast as I was when I was younger. But SO WHAT?? Celebrate what you still CAN do, instead of becoming bitter about what you CAN'T do.
IMO, youth is no guarantee of freedom from health challenges or anything. Like all animals, we are all mortal mammals with biological "hardware" and biologically pre-determined lifespans. Eventual decline and passing is just the price of admission to the glorious biological experience of life. While I would LOVE to have the lifespan of a coastal Redwood tree (hundreds, even thousands of years, in some cases), I am just grateful I don't have the typical lifespan of a butterfly (several weeks)...
I know what you mean, and I spent until I think it was well into my 50's hoping I could make it through my lifetime without ever having to see another doctor or have another medical procedure. Then I settled on hoping it could be limited to seeing my PCP once a year to get my prescription blood pressure meds, and for some time, I got lucky, and it was.
Then I hit my mid 60's and moved to an area populated by many retirees. The diagnoses hit one by one, or the age-related exacerations of conditions that had seldom bothered me earlier in my life. I say this facetiously, and with a knowledge that I'm still much more fortunate than many others who suffer from much worse chronic conditions than me, but it seems to me that healthwise, it all went downhill when I hit my 70's. Not terribly debilitating, or horribly painful, but still requiring management and medication, and occasional doctor's visits, medical testing and occasionally procedures so those diagnoses don't take over and ruin my life.
Kinda reminds me of the time I heard an old gentleman probably in his 80's saying "gee, without all these doctor and medical appointments I'd have no social life at all". I really felt sorry for the guy when I heard him say that. A few decades later, here I am.......
Still, it could be so much more worse, although I have way too many medical appointments than I'd prefer. And retirement is great otherwise...
Not having a fixed income. Some years my income is negative like this year, other years it is high but not steady so i can't really budget. My social security is enough to live on so i can pull back to that in a bad year.
The hardest problem for me is picking which activities I must sadly cross off the list of things I would have liked to start at a much younger age but didn’t have the time or money then. Now that there is enough to do at least some of them, aging’s effects have become the limiting factor.
Anything risky with a long learning curve is out of the picture. I am talking about stuff like sailing solo around the world. No, being a cruise ship passenger has ZERO appeal to me.
Fortunately, there are enough other things to do that I am never bored.
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