Occam's Razor

No gold watch upon my retirement, but likely an early afternoon party at work with sheet cake and punch in a conference room. This is sort of expected and it is nice. There is a lot of paperwork when you retire from the federal government, but perhaps the most onerous part of it is sifting through all the choices. Our retirement system has evolved over many years into a complex labyrinth. You almost need a degree in retirement management to handle the complexity of it all.

The hardest retirement decision is figuring out whether you can really afford to retire. That took many years of work with a financial adviser. Some part of the decision was made for me. Stocks did great last year, lessening my need to hang around. In any event, on August 1st I should be officially a retiree and a private citizen again, free to run for public office should I choose, and with no need to worry about accidentally investing in energy stocks.

Gone also will be certain benefits that come with being employed, like a health savings account. It allows you to pay for medical expenses with pre-tax dollars. It’s not so much the tax savings that I’ll miss, but having some system automatically paying most of our voluminous deductibles. A lot of this will now have to be done personally, involving time and hassle. Well, I guess being retired I should have more of it.

Except like most retirees, I won’t be quite retired. To start, I’ll teach two courses at the local community college, and likely two more the following semester. Something work-like but not full time work will be good to feel engaged and part of the world. But I don’t just want to teach again. I also want to learn. On my list of things to do is take a couple of courses, including one on how to write apps. I don’t know what kind of apps I will write in retirement. With luck they will bring in some income. I’m hoping to find an underserved and specialty market. If you only sell a thousand copies of your app, does it matter if you can get a hundred dollars each? The popular apps have been pretty much been written, along with dozens of variants of each. In any event with a pension and investment income, I’ll have a roof over my head and food on the table, so whether I succeed or fail writing apps doesn’t matter much.

This blog has satisfied my itch for writing. I am trying to decide if retirement will be the excuse I need to write something more creative and enduring, i.e. a book. We all have a novel in us. I probably have a lot of them. I just hate to write something that won’t be marketed. Since my daughter has an agent, perhaps I could shamelessly use her connection with her agent to get my novel read.

For me, retirement probably won’t be a lot of leisure. Rather it will provide a financial floor to explore pursuits that time, energy and the grinding business of maintaining a standard of living largely did not allow me to pursue. So, yes, there will be work but I am hoping it will be more part time work. I hope it won’t be something I get too passionate about. Passionate work can become wholly consuming, which might mean sixteen hour days happily sitting in front of my computer banging out code. I will need more time outdoors instead. I will want to have the leisure to take daily walks, perhaps with a dog on the end of a leash. I will want companionship.

For the next year or so a lot of my time will be consumed by the business of relocation. I’ve run the numbers and not only does relocation agree with me in midlife in general, but it’s a financially savvy move as well. This is true if you end up somewhere with an overall lower cost of living and with enough things to do to feel engaged and part of the community. I feel the need to be closer to nature again, as I was in my youth. I imagine something I haven’t done regularly in forty years: walking outside my house, looking at the night sky and seeing the Milky Way visible and splayed across the sky.

We’ve been studying western Massachusetts for a year now and the Pioneer Valley (Amherst/Northampton area) in particular. It looks like it has all we are looking for, although finding the right house will be a challenge. It helps to have zillow.com as a resource and when surveying potential communities to use Google Street Maps to get a reality check. Right now the city of Easthampton, Massachusetts looks particularly inviting. It is close enough to Northampton to be close to its amenities, but it is not overrun with students. There are five colleges in the Pioneer Valley, and some like the University of Massachusetts in Amherst have a reputation for problems with boisterous and drunken students. Choose your neighborhood with care, we’ve been warned. In general though crime is not a problem. The crime index for the area is incredibly low.

Easthampton is a very small city. Some would characterize it as a town or even a village. It has around 16,000 residents. It sits next door to Mt. Tom which offers convenient nature trails and scenic views from about a thousand feet above sea level. Easthampton is picturesque, just not as snooty or expensive as nearby Northampton.

We’ll go back this summer to focus on specific neighborhoods, but our brief tour of Easthampton last year was encouraging. It’s an old fashioned city with a small but real downtown full of local businesses. It comes with beautiful parks and even city managed cemeteries. After I pass this world, I think my ashes would be happy at Brookside Cemetery (assuming there are any remaining plots), overlooking White Brook and Nashawannuk Pond.

Easthampton is big enough to be a distinctive community with its own character, but not big enough to have be overrun by national chains. The are no Applebees in Easthampton that I can find, although there is a nice little breakfast place, locally owned and managed called The Silver Spoon that looks inviting based on reviews. You actually have to go to Northampton if you want to shop at Wal-Mart. Should I take an interest in local politics, it would be easy enough. The area’s less attractive areas, the cities of Holyoke, Springfield and Chicopee, are conveniently on the other side of Mt. Tom.

As for homes built for us retirees, there are a couple of condo communities, but only a couple. One in particular on the south side of the city looks very upscale. These condos are basically single family houses with a common wall. The condo fee takes care of pesky chores like shoveling snow and mowing grass. 55+ communities typically come with a master bedroom on the main level and accessible facilities built in. They anticipate the day when you will need to live on one level. It’s called aging in place, which sounds much better than aging in a nursing home. But they often have other levels as well, where guests can sleep and where my office will be located. As for nature, it is literally in the backyard. A bike trail is just blocks away.

The logistics of buying and selling our house are pretty daunting, as I have not moved a household such distances before. It will have to be done professionally. Fortunately our house is largely in shape to market and I’ll have time to work on it being “retired”. It’s clear that we can buy with cash from the sale of our house pretty much any house on the market in Western Massachusetts. So we’ll pocket a lot of equity, add it to our portfolio and hopefully use it to do more traveling.

The grandparent joke is, “If I had known how much fun it was to be a grandparent, I would have started as one.” I suspect retirement will be a lot like this. If you are fortunate to retire, you may be able to do it right. We’ll find out.