At the height of the pandemic, I started to think a lot about retirement. When I was 12, my father started me on the path to retirement by setting up an IRA for me. While this may seem young, experts say that time is the best way to build a nest egg (unfortunately due to tax law changes, I can’t establish an IRA for my son as it requires him to have income to offset his contributions). Throughout my life I’ve been thrifty (some may say frugal) with my finances. Combined with being hard working and frankly, quite lucky, financially I’ll be ready for retirement.
Being set for retirement only leaves me with a big hole; what is retirement? I’ve always told myself that retirement is doing what I wanted on my own time. That vision hasn’t changed. However with retirement on the horizon, I need to figure out how I’m going to fill my time. I know what I don’t want to do and that is sit around all day in a recliner, read the paper and watch TV. Sure, maybe I’ll do that occasionally (well, what is a newspaper?), but being stagnant isn’t in my nature and studies have shown that being active mentally and physically are keys to living a long life.
Friends and family have asked what I like to do. That’s a really good question; I’ve spent the last 17 years (almost) with my main goal being to help raise my son. So I’ve put what I want to do in the backseat. I’ve always wanted to help other people (yes, I know it is part of the Scout oath) and have done that through volunteering. I’m definitely going to spend more time volunteering. I’ve been a regular volunteer at Feeding San Diego and I plan on increasing time there. Also in the last 1.5 years I’ve changed how I work with the Scouts; I’ve gone from being a troop leader to helping at the district level. This has brought me a lot of joy and I feel like I’m making a difference. It’s good that I’ve discovered happiness in that as they can always use more of my time. Is volunteering the only thing I want to do?
What will I do for myself? Yes, I could argue that volunteering fulfills me and it does. However, there must be more. That’s the part of retirement that I’m still working on figuring out. I really enjoy 3D printing and my son is dead set on teaching me how to use OnShape. I also enjoyed flying a drone (gave that up years ago as I didn’t find I had time) and am thinking of taking a drone class to get licensed; that may open up a business opportunity if I want to film this commercially which sounds cool. Not sure it will pan out, but another piece to occupy my time.
Any suggestions from the peanut gallery on what to do in retirement? I’m not quite there yet, but I’m not going to work until I drop (I hope).
Help out charities with your programming and other technical skills.
Contribute to open source software.
Do something that involve creating things. Art, music, woodworking, writing, …. Feeds a part of the brain and spirit that is good for us.
Being a dad means I’m thinking about what I can do to help the array of things involved in climate change – from reducing causes to coming up with creative ideas about increasing resiliency starting with my family and moving progressively through our neighborhood, our city, our region, our country, and the world. The idea being that instead of the armed compound mentality (unlikely to succeed and an unpleasant headspace to be in), we build resilient communities of people who can work together to help each other through the next 20-30 years until we can stabilize and start improving things again. And we build cities full of such communities. And regions full of cities and towns of such resilient communities. Etc.
peace
It looks like you and I are along much the same trajectory. I have recently retired and starting to pick up projects that have been floating around my brain. I came across your blog searching for CT30 thermostat information and saw how you rightfully predicted the cons of small companies and web portal access. I too went through a lengthy process finding a nice thermostat and settled on Radio Thermostat CT-30 for much the same reasons you did. As you undoubtedly know, Radio Thermostat shut down their web portal in 2023, leaving thousands of customers with no remote access. I have been limping along with an Android app on my tablet to control my thermostats locally. I’d be interested to hear what you have done. I hope you haven’t followed the thousands which simply replaced their thermostat with a Nest. There are a few home automation systems/hubs which now support CT30, but I have little interest in controlling more than the thermostats and even less interest in subscription based web access. So I have begun working on rolling my own using the CT30’s API access. Still working out some bugs, but I think I have a good path to restoring remote access with only the small hardware expense of an Arduino while not exposing my network to an open port to achieve it.
About 12 years ago, we moved and I went all in on automation basing my system on Z-Wave. I installed a Honeywell Z-Wave thermostat which still works today. My system is controlled with Home Assistant and remote access is achieved via VPN into my home network. I try not to rely on web portals and external API access. My system has expanded since I started, but local access is key to everything I add just for the reason you outlined about companies shutting off their web portals or charging money for them, not to mention security of having home devices talk to some random cloud.