This is my last column for the Optimist - at least for now. It is time for someone else to drop into the Community Comment cycle.
Me? I will be dropping one more deadline on my quest for total retirement. It was six years ago this week that I gave my then employer six months' notice that I was retiring. Since I delivered the news on April 1, it took a while to convince them I was serious.
On the anointed final day, I was at a work-related conference in Honolulu. The next day we flew to Maui to start the "retired" portion of life.
It obviously was not that clean a break. I was back to work nine months later after a lot of traveling. I was back on the clock parttime for two-and-a-half years. That gave me time to think about retirement and how I should handle it. To keep busy I became more involved with community groups than was wise for a person going back to work.
I also started reading the financial columns on planning for retirement - probably a little late considering I was already retired. However, most of the advice was of the "give up your latte and put the money in mutual funds" variety. I've never been a fan of
mutual funds for a variety of reasons, so I avoided them wherever possible.
The problem with financial advice for retirement is the great unknown - how long are you going to live? If you knew precisely, it would be pretty easy to budget for the rest of your life, but we don't know. What if you have yourself covered to age 90 and you don't make it past 70? Or worse, you have yourself covered until age 70 and you are still going strong at 90.
It would seem that you have to be prepared for the long run and start living rather sparsely or develop a taste for cat food. But the recent real estate bubble in the Lower Mainland might mean, as Scotiabank advertises, "You're richer than you think."
Apparently there is someone out there who would possibly pay me a million dollars more for my house than I paid for it many years ago. A million bucks taxfree! A sane person would take the money and run. But I don't. Why not?
Well, we love our neighbourhood and don't really wish to move. Ya, but a million bucks!
Well, there is laziness and procrastination. I assume that if we put the house on the market, we would have to make it presentable. Aye, there's the rub.
That would be fine with the portion of the house under my wife's control, but problematic for my "office" and the garage. My protracted retirement resulted in several offices being amalgamated rather untidily into one home office.
Even worse is the collection of old unused equipment in the garage, including hockey gear that hasn't seen ice in 30 years. I guess it is time to admit the Jets won't be calling.
I hope the real estate bubble doesn't burst before I run out of money. It could be a great financial backstop.
Tom Siba is a former publisher of the Delta Optimist who hopefully now has time to clean out his garage.
