So, I retired “officially” on 12/31/15, but really, I spent all of 2016 trying to be retired while winding down my business affairs. Here it is early 2018, and I still have a couple of action items to take care of......but it is small stuff, like when do I shut down my QuickBooks account? It has been handy to have it for my CPA, but I think I’ll be able to get rid of it once my taxes are finished this year.PUCKER wrote:So - for those of you that have "truly" retired - what do you do all day/every day? I have no plans of living out of our coach and "seeing the USA" as a lot of folks do when they retire...I dunno what I'm going to do when that time comes...
At first, I mostly spent the time just goofing off, doing whatever I wanted to. That meant stuff like range trips whenever I wanted to during the weekday, or going for long walks or bike rides. It also meant buying a small travel trailer and taking some trips with it. This past fall, my wife and I bought a large home in common with our son and daughter in law, and we all live under one roof now. We have become full-time daycare for our grandkids during the work week. Our granddaughter will be 4 in May, and our grandson will be 2 in March, so they’re both a lot of fun AND a lot of work. There are days when when by the time our son and daughter in law get home from work, my wife and I are just whipped.
What’s next? I haven’t figured all of that out yet, but it will almost certainly involve some travel - although it won’t all involve RV travel. We’ve found the hard way that the travel trailer we bought is really too small for us to be very comfortable in. It’s a really nice little trailer, it’s too small for us for extended use, even with the slide out deployed. At the time that we bought it, the decision was driven largely by the fact that we had no room in the budget for acquiring a heavy duty tow vehicle, so the size/weight of the trailer was determined by what our existing vehicles could tow. So at some point down the road, we’ll probably trade that trailer in on something larger - whether that is a larger trailer or a motor home remains to be determined. Some of the things we would like to do - including the purchase of rural land to change the arc of my family’s legacy - depend on impending estate issues, so we are in kind of a holding pattern for some things. But, time is the great resolver, so it will be sorted out eventually.