Crack That Nest Egg

  Uh, yep, I went out and bought a big-ass van – now to be referred to as the BAV. Everyone asks me if I’m going to travel now that I’m retired. Yes! And sure, I’ve taken a couple of small trips, but I really want to do more. Plus… I love a road trip. I mean really love. So my first plan was to buy an RV and travel around the USA. There were two problems with that plan: I want something small and easy to drive/park. So, I looked the RVs that are built in a van – known as Class B RVs. Holy cow they are expensive! They average over $100K and even the bottom of the line models are $70K. No can do. Then I looked at the Class C RVs which are built on a truck chassis. These look like your typical RV camper built onto a truck cab. They are nice with plenty of room inside and there is a better market for used Class C RVs, but they are just so big and wide. Traveling alone with no one to help back up and navigate into tight spots, that just didn’t make sense either. I REALLY ...

  With all my retirement free time these days, I’m certainly susceptible to a good rabbit hole. Here’s one definition of a rabbit hole from the Urban Dictionary – To go down a never ending tunnel with many twists and turns on the internet, never truly arriving at a final destinationyet just finding more tunnels. Clicking one link, then finding another on that page, then clicking another link on that page, which gives you the idea to search for something, and the process repeats. Now I love a good rabbit hole, but to be honest, it’s not often that I go very deep. It’s shocking to no one that I’m a bit of an arrogant know-it-all, so 30 minutes or so down a typical Internet time suck I usually start to run into things I already know, I get bored, and bail. So, it was really surprising to me a few days ago when I stumbled into a new rabbit hole and went deep. Like four hours of my evening gone, deep. What I stumbled into was a show on Audible.com where a bunch of women s...

  The is me right before I grabbed my last box-o-crap and left my cubical for the very last time! It’s been a little over a year since I walked away from a perfectly good job and retired. It seems like a good time to look back and see how things are going and what I’ve learned. I understand a lot more now about life in retirement than I did a year ago. The truth is, nobody understands what it’s like to be retired until you are actually retired. During my long career I’ve taken time off from work,  I’ve been self-employed for a few years, I’ve been laid off and without a job for six months, but none of those experiences are even remotely like being retired. Being retired is different in ways that are hard to explain. And I’m really just getting started. The First Year of Retirement is Probably the Hardest I can admit that I’ve struggled a bit this first year. And I’ve probably been a little hard on myself about it. The more that I read the more I see a pattern – ev...