Finished Work — Retirement Thoughts

[hogpatrol]

It's been my experience, those that keep working long past retirement age, have to finally quit when their health goes south then there is no retirement, just waiting to exit stage left.

 

[jds holler]

I worked until about a year ago, slowly cutting down to part time, and finally quitting altogether. I just turned 69.

My job was very physically active, and I had to decide just how long it would take to hurt myself bad enough to be a permanent wreck. In the last ten years I've had three injuries which required serious surgery and months long recovery, and I'm about to have another surgery to hopefully improve one of those.

When we get as old as I already am, we KNOW a few truths that can't be denied.
-- We've got somewhere between zero and twenty years left to live on this earth.
We should know about how much money we've got, or gonna have to use.
We've got a good idea of what our individual health and body will allow us to do.
We also know that some of this time we've got left aint gonna be easy or fun.
And we SHOULD have a plan about where we're gonna spend eternity when we leave this earth.
jd

 

[CF Junkie]

I retired in 2011 at 69 as an engineer and was the Director of Engineering for a very successful division of one of our Defense companies. I just couldn't manage the long airline flights any more. I had flown 2 Million miles, all commercial.
I had planned my retirement around golf, but in 2,005, I wound up with such bad arthritis in my neck that I had to stop playing.
I turned to target shooting as my primary hobby and built on my engineering background to really get interested in accuracy and reloading.
I also became a volunteer RSO for our range.

Since I retired, I have reloaded over 75,000 rounds for lots of rifle and pistol calibers, but over the last 10 years I have concentrated on .223 bolt actions, 6.5mm CM bolt actions and .308 bolt actions.

Recently, I have replaced barrels on two of my most accurate rifles and have become addicted to keeping my overall 5-round group averages under 1/4 inch at 100 yards.

Enjoy your retirement. Shooting has kept me entertained, allowed me to measure my improvements and kept me in contact with great shooting buddies. I have been amazed that now at 82, I am shooting as good or better than ever.