I enjoy blogging, but not to the extent that I have to do it regularly - that wasn't the intention of this blog. Unlike others who blog to make money, my blogging was to record things we are doing, places we are going, things we enjoy and how we change over our retirement time. Sometimes I just don't want to sit inside especially at the moment given the beautiful weather or be hooked to a tablet while out and about. In fact the longer we are retired, the less I feel compelled to check emails, answer phones - so unless I really have something worthwhile saying I would prefer to say nothing at all. For those who know me well they would attest to this being a dramatic change in itself.
We have now officially entered our 2nd year of NINKERING and enjoying retirement living as of last week. We were never really sure how this lifestyle would suit us, or what our long term goals might be. Would we want to go back to work, would we want more, would we get bored ...... hence the reason why we always said we were having a gap year to establish if this was where we wanted to be, how we wanted to live.
This time last year we just getting ready to head off to Vanuatu - I know this because I was in big trouble from D2 because we were going to be away for her 20th Birthday - but not this year as she turns 21 on Saturday and we are all heading off to Tangalooma for a long weekend and birthday celebrations, which includes a lot of fun activities like sand tobogganing, snorkeling, feeding the dolphins, banana boat rides and sun set cruises. We had taken D1 on a 3 day P&O cruise last year for her 21st but when looking these up for D2 we found there was only 4 day cruises that went to Tangalooma so we thought, lets just head there especially given we are now on a count down to our 31 day Inca Discovery cruise in less than 4 weeks. No doubt I will have lots to blog about on our return from our 21st weekend.
In the last month or so I have been working - so does this make me less of a NINKER if I am earning a little money? It is amazing how out of the blue friends with businesses contact you and offer you nice little jobs to do. Its great to have some money going into the bank for a change, but for me it was a great confidence booster and so for the last month or so, I have been busy a few days a week working on strategies, marketing and proof of concept demand ideas, which has been heaps of fun. Out of the blue another few calls have come in so it looks like I might well have a few things on my plate in the New Year. Its nice to know that people still respect your skills and that they trust you with their business, but more importantly that they feel you are someone who can help them. This is has been nice and of course it been incredibly fun to be tossing ideas around for growth strategies but I will say the brain hurt there for a few days and I felt totally exhausted.
Other than that, we have been out on the boat (which we sold yesterday), sometimes you have to think about downsizing assets to upsize income and while we have loved our boat and boating experiences over the last 4 years and more especially in the last 12 months, it was starting to get a bit expensive on a retirement budget, and of course we have discovered other things we enjoy doing on the land. With going away for over a month, we thought, lets sell - one less thing to worry about while we are away, and selling the boat can give us another good years living without reaching into our hard earned investments. We have had great fun this year in the boat and probably will buy another one at some stage, but something a bit smaller and something we can just do quick day trips in rather than week long adventures.
Derek has still been busy with his detecting and we have continued on our walking adventures to get fit for South America. I have also had a need to go shopping for clothes both for the 21st and the cruise - can't be seen in the same outfits forever and I have been really proud of the way we have been able to live with what we have this year - I wasn't sure if some of the habits of years of earning great money and just going shopping and buying anything would be hard to give up, but we have been really good in this area and have not bought any new clothes in a year so its been nice to go out and shop!
Until the next blog I will leave you with this thought, as I feel this is summing us up nicely in our retirement.
Life is not about finding yourself, its about creating yourself.
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