Welcome back!
Today I thought I would just summarize my “lessons learned” during my Roatan vacation! It was a great experience for me, and an eye-opener! I hope my list of lessons learned helps you to sort through some of your ideas about your retirement planning. They may or may not apply directly to you, but they hopefully will help you to think about whether they do apply, whether the opposite applies, or something in between.
- While I want time freedom, I also need some structure.
- Writing out my thoughts has helped gel what I am thinking I want my retirement to be, and to sort through some of the little things that I hadn’t really considered before.
- Even though Dave was diving for most of our time here, I realized that, in real life, he and I will be together more than we ever had been. We need to make our relationship as a couple be a high priority.
- Though I haven’t written about it yet, even though our “coupleness” is important, our individuality is also important, so we need to be sure those needs are also planned for.
- I want to take time to grow my relationship with my daughters and granddaughters, using the time I still have to leave a legacy of family, faith, responsible living, fun and love.
- I want to grow my own relationship with Jesus Christ more fully, so I live in great anticipation of who I will meet when He finally calls me home!
I hope more ideas than these have been flowing through your mind as you have walked through this set of my blogs! These all come from when I had the time to really think. I hope you have that same opportunity, but even if you can’t get away for a week right now or in the near future, try to block out an hour or so just for you each week and write down your thoughts. Remember, neither your list nor general “thoughts” journals need to be shared with anyone unless you want to, and you are not committing yourself to anything by writing them…you are just starting the process of making sure you don’t wake up on your first retired morning and saying “Now what?” OR, even if your retirement is a ways down the road, these times to think and write things down will help you so you don’t wake up one morning and realize you aren’t doing anything you want to do other than work, eat, sleep, repeat. Writing things down is VERY empowering to help you get your sights set on what you want to accomplish in your life, both before AND after retirement!
There will be one more blog from my Roatan experience after this, but after that, my next blogs will be from when I am back in the trenches of real life…work, home, etc. But, the day I went back to work after my Roatan vacation it was 7 months till my Retirement Date in October (but from date of actual posting, is only about 2.5 months!) That will hopefully keep me going!
Take care!
Mary