Tag: rightsizing

Looking Back on 2025 and my WOTY

Posted on by The Retired Alchemist

January is already over and it is time to look at 2025 in the rearview mirror. I hope you are looking back at it with a smile and fond memories. Last year was a year of change for us. A year that moved our retirement life in a new direction. It put me on a roller coaster of emotions as we evaluated our retirement lifestyle and made big steps towards rightsizing it. Scary steps that turned our little world upside down.

We knew that change was in the air, so I chose the word “rightsizing” to be My 2025 Word of the Year (WOTY). I hoped that it would guide our decisions and move us to a retirement lifestyle that fit our unique interests and needs. At this point, Mr. U and I have both been retired for several years, we are in our 60’s and have whittled down how we want to move forward in this phase of life. So, 2025 was our year of trying to rightsize our retirement life. Fair warning – photo bomb ahead. ⚠️

The year 2025 in review

Like all of you, we celebrated birthdays.

My dad’s 98th and my 29th!

We shared holidays with family.

Holidays are just more fun with kids (little and big).

And we welcomed a precious new grandson into the family.

Son #3 and his lovely wife, daughter and new baby boy.
Sons #3 and #4 (who are fraternal twins) holding the big sister and her little bro (left). Son #1 and his lovely wife made the trip back west to see their new nephew (right).

And amidst the joy was heartbreaking loss for our little city.

A city salutes its heroes.

Best trip in 2025

We did not do a lot of travel because we were so busy at home, but the best trip of 2025, hands down, was our trip to the Oregon Coast with all of our kids. We have done it for two years in a row now. Does that make it a tradition? While it was a busy year, I am so glad we made time for this. It is the stuff that gives family a common bond, shared laughter and memories to carry you for a lifetime.

Going crabbing and having a seafood boil is one of the highlights of the trip.
The whole crazy gang took time from their busy lives to make the trip.

Biggest changes in 2025

We spent a good hunk of 2025 preparing to sell our home. We went through every single item we owned and determined if it still served us as we moved forward into a smaller space. Hard decisions. It took me on an emotional roller coaster as I relived my life with each piece.

I had to decide whether or not to keep the afghan that I knit for a 4-H project in high school (left). I wrote about my struggle with whether to keep the wedding china in the post, Downsizing Dilemma: The Wedding China.
I am happy to announce that my lovely DIL #2 (left) decided to take the wedding china. She created this gorgeous table setting with some of it for Thanksgiving.

Once I was done sorting and packing, I mopped up my tears and we were ready. We said farewell to The House that Built a Family. It was a home that we loved for 24 years and held us during life’s storms – both physical and emotional.

We said goodbye to our house up on the hill.
It never looked better than when we were getting ready to sell it. Funny how that works.
So many good memories there.

In the midst of preparing our house to sell, we were also busy making the constant decisions on the new house we were building. We built it on the same property where I grew up, next to a little lake.

The years had deteriorated the original home to such an extent that we needed to start from scratch.
We wanted our home to be cozy enough for the two of us, but big enough for family gatherings.
I am thrilled to be back on the little lake that has so many good memories for me growing up.

As if this wasn’t enough going on, we added in buying a small condo in Arizona last winter. It was in our retirement plan for several years. We had been looking for a while, but then everything lined up and so we needed to move on it.

Our escape plan from the cold, gray winter weather.

Daily life continues on

And in between all of the big life changes, daily life still went on. It always surprises me how life does not stop when I have a big, major hairy transition going on. There were still burdens to carry and the house still needed to be cleaned, the wash done, groceries bought, meals prepared and health issues that had to be followed up on. But there were also coffee dates to go on, micro trips to take and life to be lived.

In between all of the turmoil and change, I made sure to squeeze in coffee dates with my wonderful friend (left) and wine time with my amazing sister (right). Therapy for my soul.

Looking back over 2025

As I look back over 2025, I realize how much life and change we packed in. No wonder I am tired! Perhaps my 2025 WOTY should have been change, because there was so much of it. Yet it helped to control it by keeping the concept of “rightsizing” in the back of my brain through it all. It reminded me to constantly ask, what was right for us, at this stage in our lives? What did we want the rest of our foreseeable retirement life to look like? What can we do now that we may not be able to do in 5 or 10 years? It helped to drive decisions. Thus, 2025 was the year we spent working to bring our planned retirement lifestyle to fruition.

As you look back over the past year, what were your 2025 highlights? Did it reflect movement towards the life you hoped to live at this point? Do you feel like your life is the right size for you? If not, what changes do you need to make? Maybe it is just a few little tweaks or maybe it is a big hairy change.

My 2026 WOTY

I don’t have one. Nope. Nada. I decided not to pick a WOTY this year. It is more a lifestyle that I want to cultivate, and that cannot be captured in one word. After the frenzy of 2025 and all of the changes it brought, I am ready to settle in and nest. I want to live a little slower, more intentional life. I plan to treat my health like a part-time job. And I need more time to sit by the lake to reflect and just be. I want to purposefully spend more of my time on what feeds my soul. We spent 2025 setting up our retirement lifestyle and now I just want to sink into it.

Do you have a WOTY for 2026, or are you feeling more like me and want to slow down and just live life well and appreciate the moments? Either way, may your 2026 hold lots of laughter, joy and be a life lived well.

Cheers to the retirement years!

Curating a Retirement Lifestyle

Posted on by The Retired Alchemist

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.

Take time by yourself to think about your absolutes. The things that, within reason, you would be very sad or disappointed if you did not have in your life.

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.

We have spent so many hours sharing our hopes, dreams and absolutes.

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.