Occam's Razor

(Note: Part 1 was actually a post I made a couple of days before I retired.)

I’m about three and a half months into this retirement thing. Aside from the first eleven days when we were on vacation, there has been little retiring (as in leisure) so far in my retirement. I understand this is typical. My father said he was never busier than when he retired. What has changed is that mostly I am doing more of what I want to do, and less of what I had to do. But also preparing our house for sale has become something of a second job.

I’ve never been one to be passive. I prefer to have things to do. Fortunately, fixing up the house forces me to move around. It also requires a certain focus. It’s not something I work on every day. Tuesdays in particular are full of other activities as I teach a class on Tuesday evening. The work involved in teaching peaks on Tuesday but teaching activities occur during the week. I grade homework. I prepare a quiz. I monitor my faculty email. I make a lesson plan. It takes roughly six hours of work to do the work to teach the class. I do it at times that are convenient to me. As classes go this one is a great one to teach and it’s a subject that I enjoy.

Managing finances is taking more time as well. This too is something I enjoy. Perhaps I should have been a banker, or a financial planner. It used to be that I would open Quicken once a week. Now it is open all the time and I add transactions as they come in. My computer, which I used to turn off every night, now stays in sleep mode at night. It hasn’t been fully powered off in weeks.

Living on a fixed income is a challenge, particularly when you don’t know what your fixed income is. That ambiguity is gone. My pension was finalized on November 2, so now I know how much of that income I have to work with. It’s pretty much what I figured it would be, which is good. Still, it’s a lot less income than I am used to, and until the house is sold we are still carrying a mortgage, just not much of one (about $23K in principle is left). Meanwhile fixing up our house for sale is hardly free. It’s a major expense. As I type this I hear hammering in the basement as carpet tack strips are laid in the rooms down there. The basement carpet is being replaced before sale. Even with the cheap carpet, the job comes to about $3000, and that includes stretching the carpet upstairs that has expanded over the years. So there is a cash flow problem at the moment and it will continue this way for some months, all while our income shrinks. It’s predictable but it’s still a little unnerving to spend more than you take in month after month.

The regular trips to Lowes and Home Depot continue, and there are other expenses where I have to pay professionals. There are some aspects about our house that no longer meet the building code. We added a second rail to the stairs going to the basement. We’d have to add it anyhow. I’ve had plumbers out twice to fix chronic issues. We found a good handyman who took care of lots of little things like patching up the deck and adding a concrete step to our front porch. These were things that I would have done if I could have. It looks though like we are almost at the end of this phase. There is still a month or so of work to do, but it’s mostly stuff I can do that is straightforward and not too costly. New chores get added regularly to my task list. The latest: an upstairs toilet seal is broken and water is leaching down to the half bathroom below it. I’ll have to repaint the ceiling of the half bath after the toilet is fixed.

Months ago I complained about how hard it is to remove the clutter and crap in a house you have lived in a long time. We are still at it! There are still boxes of stuff to dump, donate or sell even after innumerable trips to Goodwill. The other day we attacked a closet in our TV room and discovered what my wife called a wardroom to Narnia. In an old trunk were decades of science fiction magazines. There was also a camcorder someone gave to us that we never used, and my 1984 Commodore 64 computer I still can’t part with, although it’s been twenty years since I turned it on. Also in there: a Betamax VCR that we posted online. Someone will pick it up today. All this work is necessary if you are going to move but not in the least bit interesting. It takes time and money, the sort of time you only have in retirement. I can’t imagine trying to fit this in on nights and weekends while I was still working.

In addition to teaching, I am still doing some consulting, mostly for pocket change. It’s clear to me though that my business is doomed to dry up. I sell consulting services for forum software (phpBB). The phpBB group recently released a new version of the software that will be much easier for people to upgrade and maintain by themselves. So my goal of writing apps in retirement may be a better way to earn some income. I haven’t actually written any apps yet, but that’s a minor detail. In reality though I don’t have much time to learn apps right now. This is something to do after we are resettled, if I can find the time then.

My biorhythms are changing. I had no idea what they were because until retirement I’ve always risen and went to bed on someone else’s schedule. Now, I seem to get naturally sleepy around 11 PM. Also, I am sleeping more than I expected, generally a solid eight hours a night. I wake rested and stress free.

One downside of retiring is not having some place (an office) to go to daily. Teaching a class and volunteering at my church gets me out and about, but irregularly. I do miss the daily interactions with my colleagues at my former job. I am out of the office politics loop unless someone posts something on Facebook or I attend some sort of event where they are. It was truer at USGS where I ended my career, but I have had the opportunity to know interesting people everywhere I worked. It’s hard to keep in contact with them in retirement in any meaningful way. And some use the opportunity of retirement to cut you out of their lives.

Mostly though I see few downsides to retirement so far. A couple of years of experience may make me more sanguine about its downsides.