Passion is important in life. People often develop a passion for their work because they work hard at it, get good at it, make progress and get positive feedback. It’s rare that they start out with this passion, they just take the first step ‘work hard’ and the rest follows...
Although I live in a seaside resort, I’ve long dreamt about owning my own holiday home, to provide some variety in retirement. I’m particularly attracted to the idea of taking holiday breaks off-season and renting my holiday home during the summer weeks. I’m happy to stay at home in St...
I’ve struggled to find good books about retirement, most of them focus on financial aspects and these are often specific to the US. These are the few that I’ve found and read. Brilliant Retirement, a reasonable book, providing a good grounding in the things you need to consider in planning...
When I envision my retirement it’s mainly characterised by movement, mostly cycling and walking. I’ve written my retirement planning series during a wonderful pain free month so that’s perhaps no surprise. Right now I’m in a flare and so it’s a good time to write this post. What am I...
When I first read the ‘4 hour work week’ many years ago, it’s recommendation to take mini-retirements throughout your life resonated strongly with me. Retirement should not be like jumping off a cliff into the unknown. For every other major life change we normally get to practice, we get to...
The series of posts that I’ve been writing so far on this blog have been focussed on planning for retirement because I believe that preparation is key to successful retirement. Planning what I’m actually going to do once I retire is less important though since retirement is all about freedom...
Now I’m getting to one of the most thorny issues in my series on retirement planning, do I want to continue to work? Since I started with my auto-immune illnesses over ten years ago work and health have always been inconsistent with each other. I’ve struggled endlessly to find that...
Foremost in my mind while planning for retirement is how to balance my costs and income and key to making this work is my assumption that my cost of living won’t rise that much in retirement. There are many reasons for this optimistic view, some of them are just general...
Over the last couple of years I’ve been adding to a list of things that I like to do, or would like to do in the future. This isn’t a bucket list, it’s a list of the type of things that I enjoy, mixed in with a few ideas and...
This post is part of my series on planning for retirement. It’s going to be a short post because it just provides an overview of how I’ve been thinking about the shape that I want my retirement to take and some of the considerations that I’ve factored in so far....