A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Where are you and where are you going?
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Ego
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Ego »

IlliniDave wrote:
Thu Jun 17, 2021 7:59 am
I've decided I'm not going to retire. I'm still going to do all the things I've been talking about, including cessation of "monetized work" (I hate that term but it is efficient). To my surprise the word retirement is starting to come with a cost.
Retire is an end. Maybe the word should represent a beginning.

Scott 2
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Scott 2 »

Six weeks then!

Having worked from home for 10 years, I wouldn't do it in your situation. It could quickly feel like living at work. I think you are making the right choice.

Younger than you, but for the most part, I'm "not working right now, figuring out what's next". The word retirement creates too many expectations.

Married2aSwabian
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Married2aSwabian »

True. “Retire” conjures up too many images of a 1960s retirement party, where the honoree get’s a crappy watch, a hand shake and then goes off to play some golf for a few years.

Here some great alternate words as suggested by thesaurus.com:

depart
go
pull out
relinquish
remove
retreat
separate
surrender
withdraw
decamp
ebb
exit
part
recede
regress
repeal
rescind
resign
revoke
rusticate
secede
yield
absent oneself
deny oneself
draw back
fall back
get away
get off
give ground
give up work
give way
go away
go to bed
go to one's room
go to sleep
hand over
hit the sack
leave service
make vacant
pull back
run along
seclude oneself
sever connections
stop working
take off
turn in

I rather like: “absent oneself” or “decamp”. :D

Of course, this leaves out one of the Brits’ favorites, “bugger off”. For Deadheads, “fade away” also comes to mind. :D
Last edited by Married2aSwabian on Fri Jun 18, 2021 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Thanks for the suggestions. Synonyms for 'retire' have the same shortcomings as retire. It's both a conclusion and a beginning, and each are significant.

The image I am gravitating towards is harvest time. Until I come up with something more worthy, at sunrise 6 weeks from today I'll be heading out to the field to gather the bounty.

7Wannabe5
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Yeah, Harvest Time is a good image for a variety of purposes for people around our age. For instance, it comes in useful for me when contemplating showing up with my 56 year old body for a semi-blind date. Better to get out there and get some while you are still in the slightly puckered/over-ripe fleshy phase than waiting until the shriveled skin and meat is falling right off of your bones in the cold, cold winter soon to follow.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Jun 18, 2021 10:34 am
Better to get out there and get some while you are still in the slightly puckered/over-ripe fleshy phase than waiting until the shriveled skin and meat is falling right off of your bones in the cold, cold winter soon to follow.
Hahaha, I have a less fleshy version of "winter". More like sitting with a warm fire and a hot buttered rum, the days of lurking at he run down corner bar with beer-in-fist long in the past.

Although I arrived at the image for other reasons, autumn has always been my favorite time of year, which makes it seem more fitting. A small window during which my best days might still be ahead of me.

7Wannabe5
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Well, I will be rooting for you! (vegetable gardener weak pun humor intended)

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Thanks, 7Wb5

I found what appears to be almost my dream "home"! The main drawback is that the property is only about 6 acres. The asking price is is about $50K higher than what I want my total real estate stake to be as I deploy for the out years, which is roughly 1/3 of my net worth. The dwelling is a cool old log cabin built in 1946 that some prior owner went to the trouble of putting on top of a full concrete foundation/basement. That makes the 700-some sq ft dwelling workable in terms of having some space for workshop/music room stuff. It's on an iconic but below the radar lake with extremely limited development. But the cost is too high in the sense it would preclude having a home in Illinois and keeping the cabin. Since a) it's basically off-grid and b) employers are starting to dial back their tolerance for remote workers, which had driven a real estate boom up there for certain properties, it may dwell on the market for a time. The listing agent for it is my real estate contact in the area, so it should be easy enough to get the backstory. Maybe I'll get lucky and it will be around long enough for my circumstances to change.

I think the one regret I'll wind up having for pulling the plug early is that I'm going to wind up just short of being able to buy into what I really want while I'm not too old to manage it.

The real estate person here in Alabama has again inflated the anticipated listing price and is still implying a high likelihood it would sell above that. Not enough to change the math on the aforementioned Northwoods property. I'm starting to suspect a lot of upward sunshine blowing (since I have not "signed" with her yet) to try to coax a commitment out of me, but maybe she's shooting straight. If it even gets close to that it will provide a nice cash padding as I navigate forward. I still like having a big hammer in my low ereWL tool box.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

For some reason I thought you already had a cabin. Maybe I am just not remembering correctly.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:
Sat Jun 19, 2021 9:46 am
For some reason I thought you already had a cabin. Maybe I am just not remembering correctly.
I do, but it's not suitable for year round occupation. What I'm doing now is combining my desire to have a bigger fraction of my net worth in real estate and the possibility of making the Northwoods my year-round home base some years down the road when I no longer have a mission to accomplish in Illinois. Another option is looking for undeveloped land that I could build on down the road, or arrange to have passed to one of the conservation land trusts up there via my estate and use it in it's undeveloped state for recreation/resource exploitation in the meantime. But the table stakes for what I'd consider ideal for a last home are staggeringly high, driven by the land value (remote + accessible + lakeshore + ~10 acres or more = big $$). Fun to dream about though.

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

When I first bought in 2016 I knew for sure the housing market was over priced, but a 30 year fixed can decrease exposure and maximize capital efficiency. My cash-out refi in early 2020 means I now have a free house, even as I know for sure-erer that the housing market is overpriced.

You are concerned about inflation and 80% LTV or 75% LTV provides 4x or 5x exposure with 1x downside of the capital allocation. Perhaps the dream can be financed with .gov subsidized rates.

After all this is not an end, but a beginning.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

That would be a whopper of a loan. And costly if sustained high inflation does not come about. Last time I tried this the property in question wasn't even eligible for a conventional home loan. I guess we'll see if the time comes--at the present juncture pursuing the property would require a major rerouting of my short/medium-term plans which is a non-starter.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

By nature I tend to identify strongly with places, and moving tends to be an injection of chaos that I avoid. I've heard people say that one should move every so often if for no other reason than to keep one's accumulation of stuff reasonably contained. I've recognized the truth of that for a long time, and so looked forward to my upcoming juncture as an opportunity to streamline. I'm pretty good about managing visible/functional clutter. But I have a fatal flaw that when combined with a good amount of storage space to relegate junk to out-of-sight/out-of-mind status is giving me headaches.

It's "I might need/be able to repurpose this one day" syndrome. While I'm two orders of magnitude below being featured on Hoarders or visited by American Pickers, I'm starting to approach getting stressed out in this run up to moving. Things are all in place with the decorating consultant/contractor herder I'd mentioned above, and the imminent beginning of work means I have to act now. I've been going through a process for the last few weeks of rummaging though all my junk hideouts and tossing about 25%, earmarking about 10% to definitely come with me, and the remaining 65% gets into the "I need to think about it" or "if there's room for it" categories. The reason I'm sitting here typing is because I'm stalling rather than going out to the garage and wading through all the crap that's there, staged or normally stowed, and getting it all disposed of for real.

It's my own fault for scheduling everything (retiring, selling, relocating) all at once, and having started the disposition of possession exercise "only" 3 months ahead of time. But I wish they had a pill for this. :lol:

I know exactly what will happen. I'll get rid of a proverbial 10,000 items and 6 months down the road a need for one of them will come up, and while I'm spending a coupla-three bucks at at the hardware store for a cheap float valve or whatever, I'll be kicking myself for having trashed/recycled/donated a functional equivalent. And I'll feel bad about it for a while.

Sigh.

But things are moving ahead. I'll only be slogging into the office 18 or 19 more times, depending on whether I opt to have a minor outpatient procedure performed before I move or after. After 34+ years, that's a negligible number.

The excited and triumphant feelings I can sense below the surface are still firmly repressed by the job at hand and a certain amount of future uncertainty. People have been asking me "How does it feel?". I always think of the old Bob Dylan song when they do: "How does it feel/To be on your own/With no direction home ...Like a rolling stone." It's somewhat appropriate. But I try to answer the question as best I can, doing a poor job generally. But the overall feeling was familiar and I finally placed it. Almost identical to how I felt around the time of my last couple of finals as an undergrad. There's an inner peace being confident you've won the game, but an absence where you'd long expected jubilation to be.

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Update: I just got back from taking all my "professional dress" work clothes, 5 large trash bags full*, to donate to a thrift store operated by a local no-kill animal rescue organization. That is the first action I have taken specific to this run up to the end that has made me feel thoroughly good. In the interest of full disclosure making donations always makes me feel good, but this went beyond that.

*That may seem excessive, especially for a guy, but when I went from beer gut guy to lean Crossfit guy I kept all my old stuff that was good as new(might need those one day!) then did the same when Crossfit guy became soft but not chubby/beer gut old guy.

Quadalupe
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Quadalupe »

Congratulations! A nice and tangible step, that will also help others. :-) Have you picked up some Hawaiian shirt at the thrift store to compensate?

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Quadalupe wrote:
Fri Jun 25, 2021 3:20 pm
Congratulations! A nice and tangible step, that will also help others. :-) Have you picked up some Hawaiian shirt at the thrift store to compensate?
Haha, no, I have not yet. I'm trying not to buy anything I won't consume prior to moving*. I already have my "official retirement shirt", a t-shirt that says, "I rescue walleye from water and beer from cans", or something like that--a gift from a friend. I don't drink much beer. And I practice at least 95% catch-and-release**, but it's the thought that counts.

The good feeling from yesterday afternoon has carried over to this morning. It's tempered from having contemplated the volume of stuff I've sent off to the landfill, and will send in the coming weeks. I take some small consolation in that most of it dates back to the married familyman years when I had basically no control over the inflow volume, and most of it has been used beyond the point of being suitable even for donation. I've been much more mindful of that in recent years, and take secret pride in the fact that under homeostatic conditions it usually takes 6 weeks for me to fill up the trash cart enough it's worth pushing down to the curb on trash day, compared to my neighbors who usually put out two overflowing carts per week, often with additional overflow heaped on the curb next to them. Even on a per capita basis I'm running well below "normal". And that's something I plan to focus on even more once I have more agency. I'd like to say my motivations are environmental/ecological or otherwise noble, but money is the prime motivator. One could probably calculate an average $ spent/lb (or carbon/lb if preferred) that trash represents. So to me low volumes of trash imply expenses avoided.

The mental rabbit trails a guy gets down from turning his life on its head are interesting. Much of it seems to be avoidance/denial of the fact there's a much more significant emotional angle to all this activity than anticipated.

It's getting to be time to cut off tv service and haul my vintage early 90s CRT TV and partially working "home theater" sound system down to the electronics recycling center of the local hazardous waste disposal authority. That's another pretty tangible step signalling progress versus inertia. The less home-like I make the house, the more impatient I grow to get it over with.

Also Wednesday will be the day I finally put the retirement package paperwork in the mail. Despite the fact that MyMegacorp experienced some appreciable de-scoping of contracts that affect the local site earlier this year, they are still throwing ridiculous signing and referral bonuses at hiring STEM field workers, so my odds of catching an incentivized voluntary separation package are effectively zero.

Lastly, this week I need to finalize my strategy for the move itself. I plan on making two drives up to Illinois, one in a week or two, then the final one way (sorta, I still have a daughter and grandson here so I anticipate being back a couple times per year indefinitely). I think if I stuff my Pilot to the gills I can get everything I'll need for the initial homeless period and/or value too much to entrust to a moving company to handle/store in those two runs. I'd been thinking about using one of those load-it-yourself "pod" containers for everything that would just be in the way until I finalize a place to live. All-in it looks like that would cost me a coupla $K, which is well below what I'd been carrying as a bogey for the physical relo. There are options to do it a little cheaper I suspect, but in this case I'm willing to pay extra for the convenience of outsourcing the transportation and possibly storage.

Time to quit stalling and get busy. First chore is a trip to the local big box to see if I can find a roll of bubble wrap.

*I think I'm going to have to spring for some sort of largish storage/tool chest, I keep most of mine hanging on peg board or stowed in drawers, as well as having some medium-sized traditional toolboxes kitted specifically for electrical/electronic, plumbing, guitar maintenance, etc. Taken altogether it's quite a hoard; and if I had a dollar for every one I bought and used once or twice and never again I could have retired years ago (another case of, "I might need that again some day"). "Tool libraries", something I know Jacob has talked about, really are an excellent idea.

**Aside from the active recreation it provides, I tell myself that honing my angling skills is productive in the sense it could provide a significant source of food in the event of a zombie apocalypse or similar calamity.

7Wannabe5
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Maybe you will have a crazy adventure on your way to new destination!

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat Jun 26, 2021 9:57 am
Maybe you will have a crazy adventure on your way to new destination!
It's possible. If I can keep to my schedule I should get a month or so in up at the cabin before I have to bail for the season. Quiet adventures there. But I am beginning to suspect things might get interesting here before I get away. :D

IlliniDave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by IlliniDave »

Some miscellany.

Retirement paperwork is finally in the mail. Probably should have done that last week but any adverse impacts will be trivial in the grand scheme. For my employer it's a completely separate process from termination, which I'll initiate the week after next.

I was looking at my YMOYL graph this morning. Since the start of 2019 my basic lifestyle expenses have been below my "FI Income" (I use 3% of stash as surrogate) 77% of months, and if I lump in expenses specific to pre-listing home updates I'm at 50%. So FWIW things still check out.

My plan is starting to fall apart in terms of timeline. The present hitch is getting stuff moved from here to there. I thought moving to an area with ongoing net population decline from one with net population growth would work in my favor. I guess there's something to the reports of labor shortages coexisting with elevated unemployment. Although it is something I'm just not going to do, anecdotal reports from friends indicate that if I were to opt to DIY, a one-way across-states truck rental would be even harder to secure. Local places are doing local rentals only.

I think things are just going to play out sequentially. Here Job 1 is wrapping up the ol' career. Job 2 is getting the house to the point of listing. Job 3 is getting all my possessions ready to move or disposed of. Job 4 is getting the keeper stuff moved out of the house. So that's how I'm going to prioritize my energy. I hope I can get all that executed by the end of August. The up side is that should mitigate my increasing stress and burnout levels. The down side is that my inaugural wallowing in the Northwoods as a newly minted retiree will get shortened by a few weeks. My aunt is also having second thoughts about selling her house, so it might take me longer and cost me a lot more money to get settled in my interim home base in Illinois.

Dave
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Re: A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

Post by Dave »

Lots of balls in the air for you, but sounds like you're juggling everything well. Hoping everything goes as smoothly as can be hoped for.

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