Early-retirement wannabe

Marine_life wrote: »

According to my travel statistics on the airline I fly the most, since 1 January 2015 I have flown 152 times and covered 150.000 miles (that's roughly one flight every 3-4 days). To that you can add other flights on my "non-status" airlines which probably adds 10% or so to that total. So you will believe me when I say travelling is not necessarily one of my retirement priorities ;-)

Fair enough, but what ARE your retirement priorities? If you even know at this stage really, but you know what they are not it seems.
Travelling for leisure is so different to travelling on business. But I am not sure how many of your airmiles are for business or pleasure.

Anyway, many people focus on the financial end of things, and I am not singling you out here, but they often forget about the practical and enjoyable side of potential retirement. Each to their own though, and I hope I am not coming across as patronising or anything like that.

Then again, it depends on the person I suppose. Some love working, some want to get out pronto, some are insecure about retirement, some want freedom, some want to travel and enjoy life, some want to fill every minute with hobbies and interests and so on.

To me, I have two things that I do part time now, one is being a guide in our lovely medieval city, the other is volunteering with a local special needs facility. Both I enjoy, and have done for a while pre retirement, but I made the decision to just change the times I could do these things, rather than the number of hours. This works for both as it is difficult to get volunteers outside of the main working hours sometimes. And it allows me the free time to enjoy indolence sometimes if I feel like it, that's what retirement is all about!

Look, we are all different I know that. But I cannot help avoiding a silly grin every day at how fortunate I am, and how much I am enjoying it all.

No matter what, I still adore Sunday nights now!

Marine_life wrote: »

There is a plan about a bunch of stuff.

Firstly, I plan to ski a decent amount during the winter. This year despite working full time I managed 31 days skiing of which only 10 days were on designated "holidays". I suspect that in retirement I will become a little more picky on the days I ski but can imagine 50-60 days.

Summers, will be mountain biking, road biking and hiking.

Most of the above is health dependent.

There will definitely be some travel but having already covered a lot I suspect that will be mainly limited to visiting friends and family although there are a couple of locations still on the bucket list (South Pacific Islands, Easter Island, Alaska and a couple of others).

I plan to play poker one day a week - I've made a decent amount of money online over the last 10 years and I think I would be a reasonably successful tournament player.

Then there's the "definitely want to do more of):

- cooking
- investing (stock picking)
- blogging (I already have a travel blog)
- renting out our holiday apartment
- become a wine expert

Then there's the "might be interesting"

- Learn another language
- Learn to play tennis
- volunteer

I'm sure there's lot of things out there but at the moment I focus on functioning

That sounds like a plan alright.

I am so lazy in comparison, but I still love it!

Best of luck.

On the subject of travel. I am not looking forward to the longer que at the arrival airport for non EU citizens with my British passport.

I may apply for a Polish passport. I have no connections there but they are pretty cool.

Marine_life wrote: »

Corrected that for you

Sadly ... your loss! More for me!:)

The only dose I ever had was in Bangkok. Whilst I wasn't impressed with cooking hygiene on the streets, I had no problems. The only problem was a celebrity Indian guest chef at the Intercontinental cost me three stone after some tandoori chicken.

In Singapore, the home of genuine fusion street food, hygiene is very highly regulated and much much cleaner than the UK.

Jeff