The majority of people look forward to retirement. Who wouldn’t? Endless days of sleeping in and doing whatever we want, whenever we want. Most people have a vague idea of how they want to live their retirement years but have not carefully crafted the days and hours that are the building blocks of those years. And that is where the nitty-gritty is. It is very easy to fall into the trap of letting the days melt into each other and never really building a lifestyle that makes us excited to get out of bed in the morning. We don’t want to drift from day to day, we want to curate a retirement that makes us feel alive.

How do we do that? It takes introspection. It takes knowing yourself. All of us, whether single or with a partner, need to determine our absolutes and curate a life that focuses on those. If you have a significant other that you are sharing your retirement years with, it takes A LOT of conversations. Conversations over coffee in the morning or a glass of wine in the evening. But before you engage in those conversations, know yourself first. Know what your absolutes are for a wonderful retirement lifestyle. Be sure of the things that you do not want to live without and bring those to the table. Then be ready to be flexible with everything else.

Retirement absolutes

My absolutes:

• Be near family and friends.
• Have a comfortable home that I love to be in. Preferably surrounded by nature, but close to restaurants, shopping, theatres, etc.
• Time to feed my spirit and soul; creating, reading, writing, reflecting and prayer.
• Good food! Not just sustaining food, but real, yummy, good food.
• I need water close by.
• Time for self-care. This is something I neglected during the busy work years.
• A place where walking, riding bike and kayaking are within easy access.
• Contributing to the greater good. While someday that may mean volunteering, right now it is being there for family when needed, and helping my dad so that he can remain independent as long as he wishes. I want his last years on this earth to be full of love and joy.

Mr. U’s absolute list was smaller. He is much less high maintenance than I am. His included:

• Have enough money to support our retirement comfortably. (He is also much more practical than I am.)
• Get away from the cold winters. He has had his share of gray days shoveling snow and plowing the driveway.
• Space for a garden and woodworking.
• Time with family and friends. At least we agreed on one thing.
• Have something engaging to do. This is where it gets a little tricky because that may interfere with your partner’s time or plans.

Blending retirement absolutes with your spouse

We need to start Living Our Best Lives right now. Today. None of us know how many more years we will be blessed with. Every new brown spot on our skin or stomach cramp makes us wonder if it is something more serious than a liver spot or what we ate for dinner the night before. While we have been thoroughly enjoying our retirement, it was time to take some next steps towards some of our retirement absolutes. It has taken a lot of conversations to determine what that would look like. I am sharing how we blended our absolutes to curate a retirement lifestyle that fits us, in hopes that it will inspire you to make any changes necessary to be living your best retirement life. Change is hard, but if not now, when?

Blending the common absolutes

We started with the easy stuff. The common absolutes. We love where we live but as we get older, we both know that we need to downsize and move closer to town. While this big of move wasn’t something either of us really wanted to do, we knew that eventually we would need to, and it was much easier now than later. So, when the opportunity came up to rebuild a home on the beautiful property where I grew up and have so many good memories, we decided it was the open door that we needed to make the jump.

We will be downsizing to 1,700 square feet less than what we currently live in. This change of location is just a five-minute drive to town and will save us about an hour of driving/day when we want to see family and friends or just go to dinner. It will be closer to healthcare services, which is something else to consider as we age.

Blending the individual absolutes

Fortunately, this move also meets my absolutes of being by the water and nature. It feeds my soul. Kayaking will be outside my back door, and I can hop on my bike right from the house instead of having to haul it in my car down our steep gravel driveway to get to a place to ride. Our bodies will rust if we don’t use them and so we need to make it as easy and delightful as possible to do that.

It meets Mr. U’s absolutes in that it already has space for a garden there, albeit much smaller than what he currently has. It will be an honor for him to revive the garden that my dad spent so many years cultivating. Same with the garage for woodworking.

Some of our individual absolutes were a little harder to blend. This is where it gets tricky. It takes conversations and compromise. Mr. U is thoroughly enjoying his part-time job. It keeps him engaged and he enjoys all of the people he meets through it. But it also means our schedule is dependent on working around it. This compromise came through him choosing something that is very part-time and has a flexible schedule with time off whenever requested.

The other challenging absolute was getting away from the cold weather. Mr. U has wanted to snowbird for a long time. While I get tired of the cold, gray days, I tend to be more of a homebody. We finally decided on a small place in Arizona, as I explained in the previous post, Should I Take Flight and be a Snowbird? However, by the time you add the square feet of the condo to the square feet of the smaller house we are building, I am not so sure we are downsizing all that much. Hum. I have to remind myself that it is more about rightsizing.

And in the end…

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and realize that I did not live the life I loved. And I want to make sure that I make space for the people I love too. None of us want to have major regrets. Change is not easy. It takes planning and a ton of effort. If you have a partner, it also takes heartfelt, honest conversations and some compromising. But if you design it around your absolutes, it will be worth it in the long run. This is true of any age or stage of life we are in. I wish you the best as you curate a lifestyle that makes your heart sing.