Benjamin

I am surprised by the number of people I meet who claim that they never want to retire, or can’t imagine what they would do if they were retired. I admit it, I don’t like having to work! I know it is possible to have a fulfilling job and compared to many mine is not bad, but often when I hear people claim that they don’t want to or don’t know what they’d do if they did retire I tend to think they must have no interests, or they are trying to fool themselves somehow :-)

Anyway, I have plans underway to retire early. I don’t have it 100%, but the fundamentals are there. About 2 years ago I started really contributing to the 401K, and if I keep it up at the current rate I should have roughly 1 million by the age of 59.5. Still, that is too late for my plans, so I have to work out how to retire earlier. My 1st sub-goal on that was to pay off my house. If I am reasonable and aggressive about it I can do that in 3 years, or maybe 3 years and a couple months. Also, I am noticing with my budget that once the house is paid off, each month of working is equal to 3 months of spending (yes, I am overpaying my mortgage so that it is 2/3rds of my income, which I can scale back if I hit some financial crisis).

So, some might say that even though I am doing the retirement savings correctly, it might be smarter to invest some of the money I am now using to pay on my house. My reasons for not doing that are: I hate debt! Investments are not absolutely guaranteed to make more sense than paying the mortgage, interest-wise. Once my house is paid for, any job that at least provides health insurance should be enough for me to live on. Just knowing you own a home completely is a very comforting idea to me.

The big question then will be what I do with my freed up money once I get the house paid for. Honestly, at this time I feel I am enough on the right track that I can afford to mull it over for a while. I’m not someone who needs expensive cars or a boat or some other silliness, and I have plenty of toys (Imagine how many toys you can buy to add up to a vehicle, or camper trailer or whatever other expensive items people get into!), so I don’t feel like I am scrimping too much.

Yeah, retire early. I have other dreams, but this one is a biggie.

Well… I completed week 3 of the ‘Couch to 5K Plan’ I’ve been following. Turns out that the last workout of the week was my worst by far, mostly because of temperature I think. Somehow that led to me totally bombing 2 weeks of workouts. This is so very sad. Anyway, I don’t want to say that I’ve failed or get too down about it. Today is Monday, and I plan on doing week 3 over again and just continuing on from there. The beginning of week 3 was easy when I originally did it, just that 1 bad day at the end. So, I guess missing like I have means week 3 take 2 will be tough, but I am guessing do-able.

Good luck everybody.

Well, I had set a deadline of September 30th for getting an album done, but some things have changed. It turns out that someone I jam with has recently moved much closer, and also has been asked to play a show consisting of solo material he has. So, for the last couple weeks, and going on till the show I have been working on filling out his songs and mastering my guitar parts. Also, he and another friend of mine are aiming to make an album led by this other friend, and they have asked me to provide the percussion. So, while it doesn’t look like I will meet this deadline I had set up before in my last post, the important thing is that I am playing and will be recording. Getting my own stuff down is still important though. Still on the radar. In fact, playing again with some people gives me motivation in that regard. Ahh, well… We’ll see how this all turns out.