The Good Old Days

Ms. M&P wrote yesterday about her weekend, filled with the quiet of the country and thoughts about what it was like 150 years ago. (If you haven’t read it yet, jump over there. Seriously, go on. I’ll wait. Done? Ok.)

That got me thinking about “the good old days.” Not just the good old days when there were three radio stations and no TV, when you bought the cloth for your new dress with potatoes, but the good old days I look forward to in retirement.

Truth is, I am a material girl, mainly because I live in a material world. We’ve all felt it, that consumerist pull that beckons, that tiny little voice that says, “Go on, buy those shoes/plasma/vacation/coat…It’ll make you happy!” But more than that, I live in a world that is filled with so many tasks that it often feels like it’s a to-do list: go to work, go to bank, mail package, workout, read, blog…My days blur into weeks of running from task to task, many of them things I enjoy doing, but still I often feel that I have no time to just be.

That’s when I start to spend. After all, it’s so much easier to just pop a meal in the microwave or (horror of horrors!) order in than it is to actually cook something from scratch. I enjoy cooking, but the time and energy it takes from other things–running, blogging, reading–that I also enjoy doing means that it’s often pushed down to the bottom of my list. A lot of the things I spend money on, my personal “latte factors,” are things that I “outsource” to make my life run smoother: I outsource cooking in the form of eating out; I outsource laundry by having my dry cleaning company do it; I outsource sewing by buying my clothes from a store instead of making them myself. None of these things are bad ways to spend money, and I don’t feel bad that I do those things, as long as I can afford to.

Don’t get me wrong; right now in my life, I love living in the city. I love the people around me, the diversity, the culture. But I do get exhausted, and I often long for a break. Not just a vacation, but an actual, jump-off-the-treadmill break. I’m ready for retirement, and I spend many a daydream thinking about it: where I’ll live, what I’ll do.

I’ve always aspired to having a large nest egg in retirement, so that if I want to spend 365 days a year traveling abroad, I’ll be able to afford to. In fact, I always assumed I wanted my retirement income to exceed my income for my last year working. After all, I’ll have a lot of free time, so I’ll want to be able to have money to burn, right?

Thing is, when I actually picture my retirement, it’s not an expensive one. I already have a good idea of where I want to retire, even though I’m only 28. (I’m hoping to buy a home there in 5-10 years to use as a vacation home.) It’s a remote place, on a rocky coast, with cold winters and cool summers. I envision myself spending much of my retirement the way I have spent many a vacation in that same spot: reading, walking, biking into town for groceries or activities. Sure, there are other things I’ll want to do, but once you factor in volunteer work and my hobbies (will we all still be blogging in 40 years?), much of my time will be spent on free or low-cost activities.

My planning isn’t changing any time soon; I’ll still want mega bucks to make me feel secure and to ward off bag lady syndrome. But I guess I’m slowly coming to realize that what I really want from retirement is similar to what I look for when I go on vacation: the time and atmosphere to be, to sit on a porch and watch the sun move across the sky on its own. And to know that it will make the same journey tomorrow, with or without me.