4 Months from Retirement, or: “Me I Love It!”
There is a first grade student at one of the schools I work in who is currently learning English and is very, very enthusiastic about most everything. He is paired with a very patient tutor who delights in him (which he absolutely deserves, as all kids do) and when they are working together I will often hear him exclaim these words:
“Me I LOVE it!”
This student (let’s call him Oscar) loves most things- his tutor, the snow, recess, lunch time, books about dinosaurs, and every single kind of dinosaur within the books about dinosaurs. Sitting up on his tiny knees in his chair, with each page turned and each new dinosaur discovered- Oscar lets us know that him? Oh, he LOVES it baby!
Now, clearly Oscar hasn’t yet learned that you only need one pronoun at the beginning of a sentence- but I kind of love this because it only serves to make his pronouncements more emphatic. It really is the best thing ever.
I share this story for two reasons:
I’m planning to inform my supervisor this week that I’ll be leaving this summer, and that this will be my last few months at the literal best job I’ve ever had. This is obviously bittersweet (see: Oscar) and yet…
I have had more “Me I LOVE it!” feelings in my gut over the past few weeks than I’ve had in a long time- and 90% of them have been related to booking our post-retirement stays and perusing the nearby hiking options they offer, concretizing this big dream that we’ve had for 7+ years. #nbd
When I see the hiking options in Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia (or any of the stops on our itinerary) and scroll through the photos previous hikers have taken, I light up inside. It’s like being pulled to a place without knowing why, but knowing with absolute certainty that it is right. Following that feeling is like magic- as if little signposts are lighting the way and there is no need to see where they will take you, because you know it will be exactly what you need.
This does not mean that I expect all to be rosy and perfect every day of our retirement. Life will still be life. This whole retirement + slow travel thing is really just an experiment for us. We’ve never done it before- who knows how it will go? I certainly don’t. We never know what we are getting into.
But- as the dream becomes reality and the details have begun to fill in with color and become more defined, all that I feel right now is YES. Me? I love it.
What Happened This Month
What a month! Charlotte, NC saw record-setting snowfall and the city was shut down for almost two weeks straight. School was out, so I had plenty of time to book all of the aforementioned post-retirement stays. I learned to use Furnished Finder for the first time, and highly recommend it as a way to save money on monthlong (or longer) stays.
Ryan submitted paperwork for retirement online and I turned on Kool & the Gang’s wedding reception classic “Celebration” and danced around the kitchen. So, I guess you could say that we both played a pretty pivotal role in the evening.
My best friend from grad school brought her husband to visit for the weekend and we indulged ourselves in some Settlers of Catan and a nostalgic tour of our grad school offices, which are just 10 minutes away. We are both Cancers, and she is 6 months pregnant so there were a lot of feelings, okay? It’s fine.
Our Financial Picture
Though we hit our FIRE number last month (squeeeeeeee!) we also bought a new-to-us car so that when we are braving the wilds of the snowy north we can survive it in an AWD vehicle. So, we now need to bulk up our cash bucket a wee bit more. This is our current focus.
My hope is that we’ll be able to max out our Roth IRAs one more time before next April’s tax deadline, because if all goes to plan this will be our last chance to do so. But if not, that’s ok. It feels nice in my nervous system to have a bit more cash that we can access if need be going into our first few months of retirement.
What’s next? In March, Maya and I will be heading over the mountains to visit my family for a long weekend since the last one got snowed out, but beyond that I don’t know that we have much planned.
I suppose I want to end this post with a question, and then a bit of a challenge- when is the last time something has called to you in a “me I love it!” way? Did you follow it? Why or why not? If you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
See you in March!