Retirement disaster...

[genearnold]

I watched the dream of my sister and brother-in-law get radically altered when she had a double mastectomy only a year after retirement. They were full-timers and building some great relationships as RV volunteers doing church related construction projects. She survived, but ten years of ensuing problems have put the kabosh on RV use.

When my wife and I began our own serious thoughts on retirement (I had been a pastor for nearly fifty years and she was my secretary at the church so when I retired in 2002 at age 67, so did she) I said I don't want to wait too long and then not be able to do things we wanted to do. I don't know how one can predict that, but one is wise to consider this. We had no exotic plans but since 1983 we've thoroughly enjoyed Airstreaming. Our primary use of the Airstream is when we visit family in Colorado and Nebraska. It sure is nice to have our privacy and to not take away the privacy of our family!

Since we had about twenty years of camping together we had no major glitches upon retiring. We like doing things together. With the high fuel costs we've had to plan our trips a little more carefully but we've decided that our clock is ticking and within reason we're going to travel wherever and whenever we want becuse there will be a day when we can't. We have very simple tastes on most things so we are able to handle the current fuel costs OK.

Since I belong to a denomination that did not require churches to fund retirement I had to do my own plan. I didn't "wake up and smell the coffee" until I was in my mid-forties so we didn't accumulate a really big retirement account but we're doing OK. I worried a lot when I used to read the AARP and other publications about how much would be needed for retirement because mine was a drop in the bucket compared to their recommendations but I found their philosophy to be flawed. We were already living very conservatively so we haven't needed what their experts predicted. The key to doing this is that in the late 1970s we committed to living debt free except for a home mortgage. Our goal of a mortgage-free home was reached during the first year of retirement.

Gene