Tag: #retirement

My 2025 Word of the Year

Posted on by The Retired Alchemist

I don’t make new year’s resolutions. Probably because I hate failure. However, I have chosen a word of the year (WOTY) the last couple years to help guide my intentions for the year. The problem is that I get busy and forget to lean into my WOTY. For 2023 My WOTY was “awe.” I wanted to take notice of every single little wonder that was in front of me. It helped, but I still missed a lot of details because I was pushing and pulling through life instead of just being… and noticing.

Living out my 2024 WOTY

Last year I chose the word Upcycled to be my WOTY. I liked the traditional use of the word, but more importantly, upcycling is defined as creating something that is of higher quality and a better version than the original one. I figured that should be true of our lives as well. I wanted to find unique and creative ways of Living Our Best Lives. We started off strong by spending the month of February in Florida experiencing The Salt Life. It was a sunny month full of exploring and Living Like the Locals while we stayed at a weathered salty marina. We got to eat delicious fresh seafood under palm trees as we Ate Our Way Through Sarasota. Back at home it is very difficult to get really good, fresh seafood in the middle of February when you are buried under layers of snow.

We were back home and settled into our own lives again long before the crocuses and daffodils pushed up through the soil. I started thinking about the traditional sense of upcycling and how I could buy less and start Living More Organically. The ultimate in traditional upcycling was when I went Thrifting on Steroids. That was a little too hard core for me. By far, my favorite experience in 2024 was booking a house at Rockaway Beach and having our immediate family gather together for a full week. It was not upcycled or inexpensive, but it did take some creativity to pull off. And it definitely contributed to living my best life in 2024. Sometimes you have to decide what is worth your time and money and go for it. If not now, when?

Sitting around the campfire at Rockaway Beach, Oregon.

2025 word of the year

This year is the mark of a quarter century. It will also be a big year of change for us. It seems that this year’s WOTY should encompass that. I considered using the word change or even downsizing, but it is more than that. So, I am borrowing a term from the writer, Kathy Gottberg at SMART Living 365.com. My WOTY for 2025 will be, drumroll please… rightsizing. I give Kathy credit for using this term in the context of making your retirement life fit with your priorities and lifestyle choices. She wrote an excellent book on the topic, titled Rightsizing: A SMART Living 365 Guide to Reinventing Retirement. I highly recommend this book as you shape and mold your retirement to fit you.

Our retirement lifestyle will change dramatically in 2025. This spring we are selling our large home that we have lived in for the past 24 years. The bulk of raising our family happened within these walls and two of our sons got married here. It has served us well, but now Mr. U and I rattle around in this large home trying to hear each other from three rooms away. (Our new mantra is, “can’t see you, can’t hear you.”) We will be downsizing from a 3,600 square foot home on 40 acres to a 1,900 square foot home on .3 acres.

It will be really hard leaving this home of 24 years. So many memories here.

Downsizing will be a big part of this move, but we will also be upsizing in quality to create a retirement lifestyle that fits us. So really, it is all about rightsizing for our own unique situation, desires and interests at this point in our lives. It is living with intention and not mindlessly walking through these precious retirement years. In the coming months I will be going through every single item we own and determining what will be making the move and what we need to let go of. Tough decisions.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

William Morris

Moving forward in 2025

We will be moving to this lovely location. My BIL, Craig, took this photo years ago when the place was in its heyday.

We have started rebuilding the home where I grew up next to a small lake in the Pacific Northwest. A place that holds so many good memories. It is only 30 minutes from where we live now, but instead of being 25 minutes from town, it will be a quick 5-minute drive to town, or a 15-minute bike ride. We will be closer to family, restaurants and activities in our small city, and I will be able to drop my kayak into the lake right from our yard. It will be “right” for us at this point in life.

So, I guess you could say that I am coming full circle in my life. We will be living our best retirement life right where I started out in this world. I will write posts about the process as we move through it. I hope that you will join me on the journey of “rightsizing” our retirement lives for 2025.

Welcome 2025!

Posted on by The Retired Alchemist

Happy New Year to you! I always enjoy ringing in the new year. Not because we do anything special, but because we don’t. We don’t go out and party on New Year’s Eve, we don’t stay up until midnight and we don’t have a hangover the next morning. The end of a year is a chance to reflect. A time to review the last 12 months – the highs, as well as the lows. And more importantly, it is a chance to take some quiet time to consider the future.

For me, the very best thing about a new year is an opportunity for fresh starts. It is a mark on the calendar that reminds us to stop and think about our lives and how we want to move forward. It is a time to decide what we want to carry over into the new year and what we want to dust off of our feet and leave behind in 2024. And while we had some wonderful times in 2024, we also had several things that I am happy to leave behind. So, bring on the new year! May your year ahead be full of precious moments and wonderful adventures.

Goodbye 2024.

Liv’n On Someday Isle

Posted on by The Retired Alchemist

How much of your life have you lived on Someday Isle? Someday Isle is that ambiguous position between how I am living right now and how I want to be living. It is that time of waiting for “something” to happen in order to be happy. We spend so much of our lives waiting for something to change or happen in order to fully appreciate life. Waiting to start school, waiting to be done with school, waiting to leave home for the first time, waiting for the wedding day, waiting to hear back on the job interview, waiting to buy that first home, waiting for the baby to arrive, waiting for the empty nest, waiting to retire. Now what are you waiting for? Maybe it is time to quit living on Someday Isle.

Another boat to Someday Isle is procrastination. It comes in all sorts of forms. Someday I will lose those pesky ten pounds. Someday I will start the exercise class. Someday I will eat healthier. Someday I will put self-care first, or a million other promises we make to ourselves… someday. Today is the someday that we have been waiting for.

When Mr. U’s aunt passed away, we had to clean out the house she lived in since childhood. The upstairs had not been lived in for years and had become a storage area. In it we found unopened tins of Christmas cookies and unopened boxes of chocolates that were now stale. There were beautiful hand embroidered pillowcases. They were all being saved for someday. There were also stacks of styrofoam containers and even bags of cut hair. His aunt lived through the depression, and she kept these items for that elusive someday. Not really sure how the hair was going to be used though???

Many times, when you reach a certain age, there are less “somedays” to look forward to, so we start looking back. We remember, with rose colored glasses, the good ole days. The one perfect touchdown made, the soul stirring first kiss, the award we won, the big deal we landed at work, the abundant feeling of a full nest. As you get older, it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling like the best of life is behind you. Instead of living in the abyss of waiting for someday or remembering the good ole days on replay, why not enjoy the abundance of living in the here and now. As the song by Gabby Barrett says, “cause right here, right now, I say these are the glory days.”

Using some SKI fund money on the cheap. Yeah, we are “fancy like” two buck chuck wine in plastic cups with a gorgeous view.

SKI fund

A couple that was traveling in our area recently told us that they were here using some of their SKI fund for the trip. It was the middle of summer so of course we had to ask what a SKI fund was. It was their acronym for “spending the kid’s inheritance.” Smile.

We have never been freer to do as we please than we are in retirement. Our children are grown and building their own lives, and we get to reap the rewards from that. If we planned our retirement finances well, we are free from a work schedule and financial concerns. Yet, even in the glory days of retirement, it is still too easy to live on Someday Isle, especially if you have been living there most of your life. It can become our normal. It used to be called delayed gratification, which I believe in. However, we have delayed and saved and now is the time to enjoy the benefits of that.

We keep waiting to take the next big trip to Europe because my dad is 97 years old, and I worry about being that far away from him. We are reluctant to buy that condo in the sun because we wonder if we will use it enough to be worth it. And then there is the fact that we really need to downsize… someday. This is what liv’n on Someday Isle looks like in retirement and it is time to get off and start using our SKI fund.

Getting off of Someday Isle

Of course we want to be prudent with our money in retirement. We don’t want to run out of money before we run out of life. And of course we want to leave something to our children when we leave this earth. But we also need to enjoy the here and now. After all, have you ever seen a U-Haul trailer behind a hearse?

We spend our whole life being responsible, doing the right thing, being the good girl, and we forget to live out some of our dreams. The majority of people that are close to death have more regrets about what they didn’t do than what they did do. I don’t want to get to my deathbed and have regrets that I did not live out the things on my someday list, and retirement is the perfect time to do that. All it takes is one good health scare to remind you that THIS is the someday that we have been saving for. It is a beautiful life waiting to be lived. So, let’s take the plunge and swim off of Someday Isle.

Take the first available boat and get off of Someday Isle to live life to the fullest now.

Halloween Past and Present

Posted on by The Retired Alchemist

Halloween is typically a quiet holiday for us. We live in the country, so we do not get any trick-or-treaters. And now that the kids are grown, we don’t venture out in the cold and dark (and sometimes snow) to beg for candy anymore. Our celebration is several days before Halloween when we have family over for our annual soup and pumpkin carving night. It was a little quieter than normal this year since some family members were out of town and a couple others were sick and unable to attend. But our small group “carved” on with great concentration. Mr. U was highly criticized when he whipped out his power tools. He pulled the old man card… wimp.

Carving pumpkins is serious business.

My favorite part is having the grands arrive in their costumes and come to “trick-or-treat” us. We had a pink dinosaur and Frankenstein stop by. Unfortunately, the “bloody nurse” was sick and could not come. Probably caught something from one of her patients.

Our trick-or-treaters arrived.

We started the soup and pumpkin carving night tradition several years ago. I decided on soup, just to make it simpler. Besides, who doesn’t love soup in the fall? But really, let’s face it, holidays are all about the food. So, we have lots of delicious finger foods to go with it. This year, Mr. U got creative with the vegi tray. I always make my pumpkin sugar cookies. I double the batch because they make great little hostess gifts to send home with people too.

It looks to me like this skeleton has a severe case of diverticulitis.

The hit of the night is making Witch’s Brew. We got the recipe from a cookbook that a family friend gave us for our wedding. It is really just a recipe for homemade root beer, but the dry ice elevates it to Witch’s Brew and the grands love to make spells over it.

Making witch’s brew.

Halloween past

How Halloween is celebrated has changed from when I was a kid – both for better and worse. The costumes are definitely better. We used to create our own costumes from whatever we had on hand at home. That meant that I was typically a hobo. Just grab an old flannel shirt of my dad’s, roll up one pant leg, put some brown marks on my face and top if off with a well-worn hat. Boom – done! On a morning radio show the other day, they asked what people’s favorite Halloween costumes were from their childhood. Everyone from the baby boom era said they didn’t really remember having a costume. Most recalled being a hobo or a ghost (made from an old discarded white sheet with two holes cut out for the eyes). It was all about putting something together with what you already had on hand or found at a thrift store. Now there are pop up Halloween costume shops everywhere with every type of costume imaginable.

The other thing that is quite different is trick-or-treating. This is defiitely worse than when I was a kid. We used to take an old pillowcase and roam the town like feral children stocking up on candy. Back when a pack of kids could run all over town and our worst fear was that a bully would come by and steal our candy. We did not return home until our pillowcases were so heavy we could hardly carry them anymore. My favorite part was coming home and everyone throwing their loot out on the carpet to see what you got. First though, mom and dad had to check it to make sure we threw out any unwrapped candy or fruit (thanks to some crazy person putting a razor blade in an apple and ruining it for everyone.) I would separate my candy by type, and then… let the trading begin. I will trade my large Tootsie Roll for your Snickers bar and back and forth until you had an almost perfect selection of candy. Ahhh, life was good back then. Now the kids go to Halloween parties, trick-or-treat at the mall or only their neighbors.

Halloween present

Halloween night Mr. U and I will stay home, dim the lights, put a fire in the fireplace and pull out the candy we always buy for the many, many trick-or-treaters…. that we know we will never get. 😊😊😊

Have a fun, safe Halloween.

Walking Through Life

Posted on by The Retired Alchemist

When you have lived long enough to reach retirement age, you have experienced quite a few ups and downs in life. I remind myself to thoroughly enjoy every up. Drink it in and let it fill my cup to carry me through the darker days. Because, if you have been blessed with bonus years in this life, there will be difficult days too. My personal quote for tough times is, “the only way out is through.” You just have to walk through it and do what you need to do. It isn’t fun or easy, but there will be light ahead. The sun always rises again. I hope that your retirement years are full of many more wonderful days than difficult ones. But when the inevitable challenges arise, it is also helpful to remember this famous quote by Mary Stevenson:

One night in a dream, I walked with the Lord on the beach. There were two footprints, mine and the Lord’s. But during tough times, I just saw mine and I wondered why. I asked the Lord, “why leave me alone when I was down?” The Lord said, “my precious child, I never left you during your times of trial and suffering. When you saw only one set of footprints… it was then that I carried you.”

I try to keep this blog positive and fun. There is enough difficulty and sadness in the world. But I don’t want to gloss over the fact that life can be hard too. As we get older, we often experience more losses than gains. My 97-year-old dad is seeing that. But, as I observe him through this, I have learned a few things. I have learned that you have to roll with the punches. I have learned that some days “the only way out is through,” and I have learned to seek out and appreciate the joy and beauty in life. It is often hidden in the little things. Be kind and gentle with one another, even the person that cut you off on the road. We never know what someone is going through. So, this post is to acknowledge the difficulties and losses that we will all face and to remember that there is still wonder in life too. The sun will rise again and there is always light at the end of the tunnel.