Since I started my official working life from when I was just 18 years old, by the time I was 40, I had planned on retiring when I reached 50. I was able to at the age of 52 but after just a short time in retirement, I was pulled out to work for three years on an assignment. Subsequently too, during blissful retirement days, I was pulled out on three different occasions.
Be that as it may, I have now been in full retirement for the past nine years and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I am now too old to be pulled out of retirement again.
My retirement timing has coincided with India’s exposure to the internet, mobile telephony, multiplex cinemas, movies on DVDs etc, and online shopping. This enables me to live quite an active life with constant touch with friends and relatives as well as visits to and from them.
Online shopping enables me to buy DVDs, books and kindle downloads which ensures that I have enough to keep me entertained when I am not busy with my reading of newspapers, magazines and solving crossword puzzles.
The internet exposed me to to the blogging world and I have been actively blogging now for nine years. I have slowed down to just one post a week to keep the LBC weekly blog posts going, but I intend correcting that to increase the frequency to at least three blogs per week soon.
Blogging and visiting other blogs has introduced me to some wonderful blogger friends and that is another advantage of living a retired life which enables me to find the time to indulge.
You can see what the other LBC blogger Shackman has to say about retirement in his blog. The topic for this week was suggested by me.
Had my circumstances been different – my wife not dying and my company not folding – I doubt I would have retired. I enjoyed the income, worked from home and most importantly enjoyed the work. I had 5 weeks of vacation and we could have made some exciting trips.
shackman recently posted..Retirement – LBC Post 07/22/2016
I suppose that your situation is not very different from most people’s. Most would not retire if given an opportunity to continue to work and earn.
You already know my opinion of retirement. 😀
Cheerful Monk recently posted..WiFi
Indeed I do.
Retirement gives us the time and money to do all those things of which we dreamed. Now if we only had enough health… 🙂
And energy!
i always gave 100% at work. it was simply the work ethic my father expected and got.
so i learned early.
however…
i longed for the retirement years simply because of TIME! it’s more important to me than money really. though having enough money is always a good thing.
but the BEST is having enough time finally to do just what i want to.
and as you know… i too love it. i’m as active as i want to be. and i have wonderful friends! now because of the internet and blogging… they’re all over the world.
one special one is even in mother India of all things! 🙂 xo
tammy j recently posted..imagination and reality
The one in Mother India thanks you and wishes you many more years of happy retirement.
People at work make a joke about retirees; The contractors, like me, that have come back to work, like me, have all failed at “retirement.”
I’ve been back 5 times now since retiring at 55 — nine and a half years ago — the last one ending a little over a week ago after being back at work for 18 months. (I’ll probably be back one more time.
I have read your other response and can relate.
I wish all of you an enjoyable retirement.
And those of you, like Mike, whose skills and expertise are still in demand be happy. So many, still in their prime in their chosen field, are forced into retirement purely on the strength of their age. I often wonder, and regret, how much expertise of the older (retired) generation lies bracken and is wasted, not being made good use of by their juniors.
U
Ursula recently posted..Future
The workforce where I worked expanded dramatically after the accident at Three Mile Island. Many like me, were just out of the Navy and most have retired. Others were local hires, many not long out of high school, and the youngest of those are approaching 55, the earliest age that they can retire with a pension — which most will do. For a long time, turnover was extremely low, largely because the plant has the highest salaries in the area. Then this post-TMI group started hitting 55. Two workforce reductions compounded the loss of expertise problem since I left. The pendulum has swung and they are expanding the workforce again because of issues related to not enough people to do the work. But that’s why I “get” to go back. I am part of the lost expertise. Before I went back the first time, they had not had a contractor fill a position in our section in well over 20 years. When I was “laid off” two weeks ago, there were 4 of us, all “retirees,” — and I was only laid off because of an interpretation of regulations on the use of “Perma-Temps.”
Mike recently posted..Seedol Kelpamalt Tablets
I had great problems with adjusting to retirement. I stopped working because a new opportunity to organise my personal life in a different country coincided with very lucrative voluntary retrenchment. I took the money, packed my things and moved to Poland. After few months I was missing my busy professional life. I was too strongly conditioned to keep being busy. I started to study to become a coach, got my diploma but did not get clients. It is only recently that I decided that it is time to drop ideas of working again. I must confess that even if I like reading, blogging and playing bridge, I miss something. Is it work? daily contact with people? feeling important? feeling useful?
Immediately after retirement, I too felt that I was missing something and even now sometimes I do wish for the trappings of office. But the advantages of a retired life far outweighs the trappings.
My take is different – due to ill health, I was forced to become semi-retired with the essence in retired! But I was nowhere near retirement age…a gov’t pension helped me to have a roof over my head and the bare necessities of life.
Then ill health magically began to be different, and so to get me back in the workforce the gov’t granted me a quantity of monies – but at the end of it all, things didn’t go as planned and the workforce didn’t want someone who was still “ill” …so I carried on studying. Many of you have followed my ups/downs…
I suppose it’s been a combination of things but just last week, I found “a dawning/an epiphany” – which at this point is a bit too new for me to talk about… and I won’t really know the outcome for a few months (lots of pieces of jigsaw still not in the picture)
I have now come to know of your epiphany and am with you one hundred percent.