Plans
Ward and I are pretty good about making long term plans, not the best but pretty good--especially if the stats I hear in the news these days are true. Most Americans aren't ready for next month let alone retirement, but we're in reasonable shape.
We have always put maximum into our retirement plans and lived below our means. This was whether we had two jobs, one job, a good job, or a mediocre job. This has allowed us to mostly live debt free.
We're now in our late 50's and retirement is becoming very real--particularly for Ward who has talked about retiring for a few years now. So besides making sure our finances are in order (a trip to the financial planner recently confirmed this), we have been talking about what we want to do, where we want to live, etc. And the conclusion has been, that we want to stay in the area we are in to be close to the family here.
However, what we do want to change is the house that we live in. We want to get a house where we can age comfortably in place. And that mostly means, no steps. We have watched our parents age in houses that were not good for this and the subsequent problems that occurred. So while we love many things about where we live now (just look at the Second Looks to get an idea), three level living with a two acre lot to take care of is not the way we want to do things in the future. And this is a change we want to make before we need to, so it is not made in a pressured situation as we have seen both sets of our parents deal with.
So you can probably guess where this is going. We're in the process of house hunting, etc. This was what I eluded to in another post when I said I was pretty busy these days. I will be chronicling here, some of this process.
So, until next time...
