Lifestyle

My washer stopped working the other day. No error message, no clear explanation. Just a machine that wasn’t doing its job anymore. Years ago, this would have meant a phone call, a service appointment, and a wait. Instead, I opened the washing machine door, found the metal label with the model and serial numbers, and took a photo…

I announced my decision to retire just before my 65th birthday. It wasn’t my first retirement. A divorce forced the sale of my business at the crack of Covid. My emergency back-up career in real estate served me well, but reaching Medicare age gave me a nudge…

Downsizing is on the minds of many baby boomers right now, but with that comes the concern that if you downsize your home, you might also be downgrading your life and your lifestyle. After all, you’ve become accustomed to more space…

Downsizing sounds wonderfully simple when you first start thinking about it. The kids are grown. There are rooms you barely use. The yard seems to require more work every year. You look around and wonder why two people (or one!) are still heating, cooling, cleaning, repairing, and paying taxes on so much house…

If you read the first article in this series, you already know about the night I had barely any food in my refrigerator. So, I told AI that I had cabbage, onions, eggs, and needed suggestions for how to make a meal. I ended up with the best baked cabbage I’ve ever tasted…

When you tell someone you are leaving your career, the standard response is usually a variation of, “Congratulations! Enjoy the relaxation.” But when I told my sister I was retiring, she asked me a much sharper, better question: “What are your plans?” It was a beautiful question because it didn’t assume an ending. It demanded an “and.”

Susan expected the call to last 10 minutes. “I need another pair of eyes,” Michael said. They had worked together years earlier, when Susan still spent her days in conference rooms reviewing marketing campaigns and trying to understand why customers didn’t always behave the way research reports said they would…

We spend decades preparing for retirement, and then somehow we’re expected to know exactly what we’re going to do with it before we’ve experienced a single ordinary day as a retired person. That’s an awfully high standard. Maybe we don’t need to have retirement all figured out. Maybe we just need to begin…

Who’s coming with me and jumping on the pumpkin bandwagon? Talk about moving from summer to fall quickly. September barely rolls in and suddenly everywhere you look it’s pumpkin. Pumpkin lattes. Pumpkin muffins. Pumpkin cereal. Pumpkin bagels. Pumpkin candles. Pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin…

The independent living lifestyle can feel unsettling if one is new to it. On the other hand, it can be an exciting new life phase. Whether you are new or are already swimming the deep waters, you do have freedom that is not achievable if you have dependent children…