Sydney retired at 44 and wrote a blog

I'm retired and I write blogs. Nine blogs. One is about retirement. (I also do other things like volunteer, go out with friends, and travel. For the first 9 years I also painted). I found a really great retirement blog yesterday I'll return to. Here's something she wrote in 2013.

Things you won’t accomplish in retirement:
Sending out Christmas cards,...
Losing five pounds,
Cleaning out your closets,
Reading a ton of books,
Keeping your house and garden in pristine condition,
Watching less TV,
Mastering a new instrument, language, or other field of study,
Becoming Martha Stewart, or
Saving The World.

I do still send real Christmas cards, and I've lost weight twice, 2006 and 2015. I did clean some closets and repack everything about 8 years ago. Also when we remodeled our bathrooms, three closets were reorganized and things tossed.  Three years into retirement I started pitching all the stuff I didn't throw out when I retired. It was amazing to see what I thought was important.  I did join a book club. One of the club's selections actually started my husband on a reading binge--Maisie Dobbs. No garden and not much house cleaning. I do watch more TV--but mostly news and HGTV. Learned blogging. Received as a gift a lot of Martha Stewart cookbooks--and I do more cooking than I did when I worked, but also we go out to eat more. And yes, I am saving the world, one baby at a time at PDHC.

http://retiredsyd.typepad.com/retirement_a_fulltime_job/2013/01/how-to-be-lazy-without-even-trying.html

Christmas card 2015

Tips for your pre-retirement years

• Life tips for my friends and readers who are 45-ish.
• Put away about 15% in your retirement account, above what your employer or government is contributing.
• Take good care of your relationships--they are like gold.
• Ignore all the food fads and scares; eat all the colors, eat less and move more. Just like mom said.
• Everything in moderation; especially alcohol and coffee and just pitch the cigarettes. They've never been found to benefit anything in your body.
• Don't be a pot head even if it is legal--you need every brain cell you have working at full capacity.
• Take care of your ears--turn down the music--and your teeth. Don't become a deaf senior citizen with ugly teeth--it's not pleasant. Take out the ear buds and see a dentist twice a year.
• Go to church. There are thousands of denominations as a result of squabbles that happened years ago. One should meet your needs. The world is actually more religious now than ever before--don't lose out on the benefits.
• Enjoy the many pleasures of owning a pet, but they are not family--don't kid yourself.
• Think about the benefits and responsibilities of being a citizen of the United States. It's not perfect, but it's the only one ever created with idea that the state/monarch/king/president doesn't own the people.

Guest blogger Sarah on retirement

Illness forced Sarah to retire; so she's reevaluating her life.
* * *
It's an interesting thing to retire. We all dream of it, we work for it we know that someday we will enter into that time frame of our lives when everything is supposed to be amazing. Kind of like the ultimate carrot at the end of the stick idea. However, some of us (like me) arrive at that point unexpectedly and find that we don't know how to respond to questions from loving, caring friends about, "How are you adjusting to retirement?" In the interest of reminding myself of how things are progressing, I am going to keep a journal of sorts to list out things that I am finding that I can adapt to very quickly. If that in anyway helps some of my friends as they also make this transition, all the better.

There are certainly things that are different and I'm finding that it's OK, that it's different because life was never meant to remain the same. For me, right now in this first month of official retirement, it's all about perspective. I can bemoan those changes sometimes considered losses or...I can rejoice in the changes that I consider major gains.

The first of these gains is what I am considering to be the throwing out the rulebook about time. Having to go to bed by a certain time because you HAVE to get up by a certain time because you HAVE a major responsibility to others and yourself to show up and do your job. If you are someone that doesn't necessarily sleep on a regular schedule and the pressure of HAVING to do so only makes it worse, consider this a major gain. I think in time I will figure out what my "routine" will be, for instance I just started to cook at 9 pm on a Sunday night and it doesn't matter because...it just doesn't matter. If I am up until 3 am (as I often am) then so be it. Unless I have an appointment (which I don't have very many of these days), it just doesn't matter. So the rulebook for me about going to bed and getting up and doing it over and over again until I've reached the point that it took me 2 days to recover from doing that 5 days is a row - is now over and I will be making my own rules from this point out. It is an amazing feeling of freedom which reduces the stress in my life greatly, which in turn improves the quality of my life and so it all is a process...but a process that I will be defining and making fit this new period in my life.

Stay tuned!