With my 70th birthday looming ominously on the horizon, I’ve started working with my supervisor on the process of finding a successor with the hope of retiring in the coming spring or early summer. The last time I checked with a financial consultant, I was told that I didn’t have enough money in my company’s retirement plan to retire unless I made some dramatic lifestyle changes, which I’ve done. I now drink only domestic wine, and I have discontinued our subscriptions to HBO and Rolling Stone magazine. Problem solved!
Fortunately, my company’s retirement plan is only one of the Four Pillars of my Personal Retirement Plan. The other Three Pillars are (i) targeted, strategic and measured investment in state Lottery futures; (ii) the possibility of discovering oil, gold and/or the remains of Jimmy Hoffa in my backyard; and (iii) the millions I’ll rake in when I complete my four volume history of the cummerbund.
Most of my friends of similar age have already retired, including both my two older sisters and my younger brother. I also have friends who have elected to defer their retirement, not because they can’t afford to stop working, but because they are afraid that without their jobs, they’ll be bored and find themselves with nothing to do all day.
There are a lot of things in this world that I worry about, but not having anything to do in my retirement is not one of them. I spend half my working hours now thinking how I’ll spend my time when I retire. (Now that I say that out loud, I wonder if those two things are related?)
For years I’ve been compiling a list of things I want to do in retirement. Many, but not all, assume that I will be more or less ambulatory and more or less reasonably mentally intact. I keep my list in a hermetically sealed peanut butter jar in the kitchen cupboard, right next to the list of possible conversation topics that Wendy, the woman who is my wife, and I have archived in anticipation for that day in the future when our conversations no longer consist exclusively of wondering what the kids are up to. When we’re not talking about the kids, most of our conversations these days consist of shouting “What?” or “Are you talking to me?” to each other from different rooms in the house.
One of my retirement goals is to improve my golf game to the point where I can shoot closer to my age than to my weight. I’m also planning to take up new hobbies such as stamp collecting, coin collecting, butterfly collecting and rock collecting, and then improve my carpentry skills so that I can add a room on to our home to house my burgeoning collection of collections.
To alleviate concerns about running out of money before I run out of living, I’ll be working hard on trying to monetize the things I have in most abundance in my life now: moles in my lawn, weeds in my garden and leaves on my roof. All are available to the highest bidder.
I’ve also begun practicing some skills I think I’ll need to see me through my reclining years. I’ve recently been working hard on growing hair in my ears to replace the hair I’m losing on my head. I’m showing surprising progress in that endeavor. I’ve also assembled a nice collection of mismatched socks and decrepit baseball caps to wear whenever I leave the house.
I am practicing not driving over 20 miles an hour leaving my left-turn signal on at all times. I’m close to mastering the art of eating dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon and waking up at 4:30 in the morning. Finally, I’m getting better at offering up impromptu and indignant (as well as unsolicited) rants aimed at whatever the lead story is on the evening news. Yep, I’m ready for retirement all right. I just wonder if retirement is ready for me.
Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.
