Our Retirement Adventures (4 Year Anniversary)
As of May 2026, I’ve been retired for four years. Tammie retired in December, so she has been retired for 3 ½ years. Four years is long enough to have a good understanding of the positives and negatives of being retired. Here is what I’ve learned so far:
Grandkids grow up really fast. One of the joys of retirement is spending more time with grandchildren. But the amount of time is still limited. Grandchildren attend school, spend time with their immediate family, spend time with friends, and as they grow older, they get parttime jobs. It’s important to remember that our time with our grandchildren is limited by age and geography. Soon our grandsons will be heading out for college or career and starting their own families. We are doing our best to enjoy the limited time we have with them before they head out on their own life’s adventures. Fortunately, our granddaughter is still in elementary school, so we have more quality time left with her.
Structure and free time need to be balanced. When you are retired, there are a lot of hours in the day that need to be redeemed (“Redeeming the time, because the days are evil” Ephesians 5:16 KJV). For me having a certain amount of structure as well as a certain amount of free time has worked well. The structure in my life includes waking up between 5:00 and 6:oo am, reading my Bible, exercising, working around the house, spending quality time with my wife (pickleball, dancing, traveling), and attending church activities. My free time includes reading, playing games, researching and writing, listening to music and blogs, and spending time with the grandkids.
Travel is fun but exhausting. Last year we traveled away from home around 150 days. This year we will travel between 90-100 days. Travel involves long days on the road or in the air, different hotel rooms with sometimes uncomfortable beds, strange eating schedules, different time zones, lines at airports, rental cars, and the stress of new and interesting places and people. Most of our travel is between 7-14 days in length but can be as much as one month. As we have gotten older, we find that it often takes us as much as a week to recuperate from the exhaustion that is brought on by travel, and we often come home with cold and allergy symptoms.
While we are in the middle of our “Go Go Years” of retirement, we certainly foresee that within the next 5 years our travel may slow considerably. We have already begun to try some Slow Travel approaches where we stay for an extended time in one place (See our Myrtle Beach posts).
Currently, our plan is to complete our quest to visit all 63 national parks together by the end of 2028 (we’ve visited 47 as of this post). After that we still plan to travel but the majority of our travel may be to certain destinations where we may stay for a longer time in one location.
Staying healthy is hard work. The adage “Old age sure ain’t for sissies” is often credited to Bette Davis. What’s involved with trying to stay healthy as retirees? First, there is exercise which includes walking, stationary bike riding, yoga, weightlifting, calisthenics, hiking, dancing, and playing pickleball. During a typical day we each spend between 2-4 hours on those combined activities.
Second, there is trying to eat healthy. Watching calories, checking our weight, and eating the right foods has become more important to both of us.
Third, there is an increasing amount of time spent on doctor visits and lab tests. Since retiring the two of us have seen the following doctors: general practitioner, urologist, surgeon, dermatologist, allergist, cardiologist, dentist, and physician assistants. Combined we have had three trips to the emergency room. We have both had multiple blood test as we made decisions about medication and physical therapy.
Fourth, getting over illness or injury takes more time. Instead of getting a cold or the flu for a day or two it will now last four or five days. Pulling a muscle may take a month to recover from. Recuperation is now a frustratingly slow process.
What makes this interesting is we are probably among the healthiest couples in our 60+ member Sunday School class of older adults.
Retirement comes with lots of difficult questions to answer. You need to be a genius to answer all the difficult questions that face you throughout retirement. These questions include: Do we start receiving social security as soon as we retire or wait until 70? What Medicare plan should we select? What percentage of our retirement portfolio should be in stocks and bonds? Should we convert some of our IRAs into Roths? How do we best help elderly parents? How many trips should we take this year? How many activities do we want to be involved in this week? Should we move to a smaller house or to a 55+ community? How will we maintain social connections? How do we plan for long term care needs?
And that is just a small sample of the questions you must answer as a retiree. What makes these questions so frustrating to answer is that you often must make decisions with incomplete information and with the understanding that most of these questions do not have one right answer.
Spending is harder than you think. After a lifetime of saving and investing, it is difficult to stop saving and start spending your nest egg. We have spent more freely these last two years as we attempt to visit all 63 national parks. But the habit of being frugal and cautious with finances is deeply ingrained and hard to overcome.
Financial advisors sometimes tell retirees, “If you don’t fly first class, your children will.” The idea being that we need to find the proper balance between using our financial resources today and leaving an inheritance to our children and grandchildren.
Retirement is a lot of fun. Yes, there are certainly challenges to aging, but being retired has been fun and rewarding. We get to spend quality time with each other traveling across the country. We have been involved in the lives of our grandchildren as well as our own mothers. We have learned how to dance, play pickleball, swing a golf club, and write a blog post. We have seen an active volcano in Hawaii, climbed on boulders in California, kayaked in the Pacific Ocean, canoed in the Everglades, and jumped out of a plane in North Carolina. We have gotten more involved in our local church by attending multiple Bible study groups, volunteering our time, starting and attending an adult game night, and participating in multiple senior activities through our senior group and Sunday School class.
So far, our retirement has been a successful endeavor. We are looking forward to continuing to learn new things as we start our fifth year of our retirement adventure.