The following-the-wife-around thing is ****ed up. I see it a lot and the guys are younger than I am! Ace Hardware, almost every time... guy dressed in clean clothes on a SATURDAY ffs. The wives usually look pretty fine. Wives like a guy they can control, which excludes me...
We share the same plan essentially. Things that keep moving never seize up. I still have the fire to keep building and am toying with the idea of a new stock car.
Me, too - after 40 yrs with Uncle Sam as a soldier & civil servant. Only bad think is that my wife died of cancer less than 2 yrs after I retired. Thanks to her managing the house, kids & money, I'm able to enjoy this hobby. I've had 9 surgeries since so am slowing down a bit but still do something every day even if I just go out in the garage & move stuff around. Only politicians do!!
P.S. Don't let the neighbors know you're retired. 3 of my neighbors stopped at my shop to tell me I could fix their cars since I didn't have any thing else to do!! I even told me he would leave his Blazer with me to rebuild his engine at school (I was attending Community College on the GI Bill) while he was on a cruise and would be happy to pay for the parts!! They're out there.
Retired 3 years ago at 64. I was a park ranger and loved the job. Discovered I love retirement even more! Having hobbies and interests to keep busy and retiring debt free are the keys. I have a good shop for my car projects. My wife and I paint when the weather turns cold. We volunteer at a local historical museum too. I had an unscheduled dismount from my horse this spring which slowed me down a little and emphasized how quickly life can change. Fortunately I recovered well for an old guy. Stay active, stay curious, keep moving and don't wait too long.
Retired in '09 at 63 and never looked back. I miss the crew that worked for me but not the job. I was the Engineering and Programming manager for a large machine shop. For the last 2 years I worked every 3 months I would ask myself "Do I want to work another 3 months?". Finally came the day I said enough. Fortunately I have a wife of 53 years, both of us are in good health, 3 married kids, 2 grandkids (so far) , a house on 23 acres with a 4 bay workshop (heat, ac and a lift). I have driven my '33 3w through 47 of the lower 48 states (missed North Dakota but I have a plan). It's been through all the Canadian provinces except Newfoundland and Labrador and the best part is my wife is right beside my and she loves it. I still spend a lot of time in the shop building cars. Right now I have 5 finished hot rods and 3 in progress. My boys both have hot rods and my daughter has a '66 Mustang that was my daily driver oh so long ago. Life has been very good to me and at 72 I hope I still have a little Hell left in me to be raised. Plans this year include TROG and the Hot Rod Hill climb and I might sneak in a little something else.We'll see... Many others on this thread have been fortunate as well, yet sadly some have not fared as well. To all I hope you stay healthy, keep building and live a long happy life.
I retired in 2004, 59 yrs old, built and inspected trucks for International Harvester/Navistar for 35 years. Happy to have retired as a UAW member, good benefits and medical.
Good luck with that retirement plan. At that rate you will probably be working till the day before your funeral
I've been in the mortgage business for 27 years, it's like a roller coaster, up and down and a few sharp drops. May have had a loopy loop a couple times. The lottery is probably a better bet!. "Just for entertainment purposes, not for investment use"
Gotta say, this might be the best thread of so many I've read on this site. I rarely post here, usually when my experience calls up a useful tip or a funny story. My best tip- when you apply paint stripper, cover it with Saran Wrap and wait for tomorrow. You're welcome. That being said, I worked on cars from my teens (body and paint and mechanical/a few hotrods)until about 1980 when I went full tilt boogie in the music world building/repairing/restoring guitars/playing in bands ( had a direct path to being Aerosmiths guitar tech but decided I wanted to sleep in my own bed every night) and that alone led me down many wonderful paths that had I not picked up a guitar and struggled with the OT diminished scale I would have missed out on a lot of the great things that life has to offer and THAT was the commonality that I found in virtually everyone who posted here. One of the very best things in life is a life well lived via applying one's talents and man, if you need to go looking for a reality-based example, this site is it. You guys rock. So I piddled around with the guitar thing for a while and got really good at it, worked on a guitar valued at 25 to 35 thousand dollars when it showed up on Antiques Roadshow and went through a divorce and suddenly had to get a real job back around '88 and found myself framing houses in the middle of the winter in New Hampshire for 8 bucks an hour. Yada-yada, I ended up In Pennsylvania in '97, got my own business going rebuilding porches on beautiful old houses, bathrooms, kitchens, wiring, plumbing, masonry, tile, painting, pretty much everything that nobody in my experience knows how to do anymore, at least in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. Old Money. I had to explain to a banker the intricacies of the Cotter pin so he could remove the wheel from his wheelbarrow to get it fixed in order that I could move a mountain of tile to the back of his house to tile his ba*****t. I'm not making this up. Cotter pin. You with me? I heard ALL the horror stories from customers regarding contractors and I thought "DAMN, these guys are making it hard for me". Then I quickly smartened up and applied one rule that I believe is the one principle that will absolutely guarantee success in any business. Ready?...........SHOW UP. And by that I mean be on time, have the tools and materials and ideas and listening skills and adaptability and sobriety and enthusesism and the vastly overrated element that gets it every time, STUBBORNNESS. The more refined a**** you might call it "perserverance" but no, it's just being stubborn to get it right until the customer is happy. I used to tell my customers "I'm not good, just stubborn". I realize I'm preaching to the choir since all you guys here had successful careers and applied some semblence of what I'm talking about. So, I wrapped up my one-man show at age 67 ( worked 60-80 hours a week, 184 hours in one week is my personal record, went home and chugged a bottle of wine and slept for 3 days) and moved to the homeland (Hungary) of my insignificant other in Dec 2016 (she's a bad*** in her own right) and have been taking on major house projects armed with a mountain bike and wheelbarrow as my main power tools and let me tell all you good Americans, life exists beyond the borders of what you think you know about the rest of the world. Getting a little political but we're all grownups here and have learned to respect the opinions of others, right? All that being said, and against my own wishes, given the current political climate, I find myself with a kind of personal clout by being an American in this foreign land. I've been working on our ****box of a house on the best street in the best suburb of Budapest. for the past 6 months and loving every minute of it. I'm hellbound to dispel every misconception that the locals might have about Americans. " Well, the son of a ***** ain't too good to get down in the cesspool and shovel the **** of the last people who lived here and probably some of his own". Only too glad to help. That's a way more graphic image than anything CNN can dish up. Much has been said about America on the global stage but from where I'm sitting, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holley and Hank Williams and Ray Charles and Eddie Cochran are STILL the best thing that ever happened to the world and they're STILL respected here long after America forgot everything that made them great. "Two, three the count with nobody on, he hit a high fly into the stands, roundin' home he was heading for home, it was a brown-eyed handsome man"- Chuck Berry. "We'll put aside a little time to fix a flat or two. My tires 'n' tubes is doin' fine but the air is showin' through"- Hank Williams. G'wan, write a better lyric, I dare you. THIS is what made America great to the rest of the world. Not the politics, it was the art. I say Candy Apple Red and "That'll Be The Day" had WAY more to do with the demise of Communism than Ronald Regan. I'm done, back to the correct way to wash a barn find for the rest of you. Fight the power. Mike
Actually Joe Ballion did not invent Candy Apple Red. It was called Tartar Red and was the factory color On BF Avery Tractors long before Joe sprayed it on a custom and called it candy apple red.
OOPS, my bad, it was 134 hours. It was a new Stationary store that was opening and had a heavily advertised Grand Opening date so it HAD to get done. It was another guy's job that he badly underestimated the time frame on and got me in for the last 3 weeks before opening. I was still slopping paint on the baseboards the morning it opened as I recall but was done an hour later. Yay.
Cancer ****s, so sorry for your loss Sir. My wife was also responsible for my retirement earlier this year managing the household. She took my Mother in to live with us when she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and was with us for four years until her death in 2014. When I got home from work that day and my Mother was there she told me she was now living with us. I asked her, "can we discuss this"? Her answer was, "NO". When she p***ed we questioned ourselves as to why we added onto the house and now what were we doing to do with this big house. Her parents then fell on bad health, and when she asked me if they could come and live with us, I responded, "there would be no discussion". Her Father had a second amputation of his other leg, Diabetes, and then her Mother p***ed unexpectedly in May of 2016. With her father a double amputee it was a challenge but talking him into a wheel chair accessible van made life so much easier for my wife to transport him. I applied for my retirement from the State back in February of this year. Her Father p***ed away in late April. Things worked out rather well for us timing and all as we were actually able to do some travelling this past Summer and she got to her first NHRA event in Norwalk. Since then we made it to Bristol for the NASCAR race then to another NHRA race in Maple Grove. So with both of us in reasonably good health and she is not going back to work at the Hospital as she resigned when her mother p***ed. The VA keeps telling me "you need a new knee". Blew out too many times jumping but I tell them "yea, need it but don't want it yet". Keeping busy with all of the projects that we didn't have time for, my "toys" in the garage and out travels. Hell yes retirement is good.
Work is starting to get in the way of what I like to do. I work with a guy, he will be 65 in May. He's one of those guys who crunches numbers from every direction. He was going to retire in 2019, but sees little difference between 65 and 66. So we will lose a good man, making my job harder. I worked the past 5 years for an idiot that made real bad decisions, my job will become even harder. I have a very fat 401k, I have my late wife's 401k as well. The pension, I can grab the lump-sum (over $130k..) and take a reduced pension. That money can get my place in better shape (expand garage, new Bridgeport, etc..., new pool). If I decide to go out at 63, I can work somewhere else with less stress and take a month off in winter to soak up some sun. I've paid my dues and have nothing to prove to anyone.
I got laid off in the oil industry aged 55, two years ago exactly, but luckily that was retirement age too, so I took the obvious step. I had poured everything I could into the pension scheme for the previous 12 years, because it was the only one I had, so I had a usable sum coming in every month. I have always been okay with money, and we had two houses, all but paid for, nice hot rod, large workshop, dream home in the Philippines and 6 figures in the bank. I was literally living the dream, life was good. And then suddenly it wasn’t. Things went wrong with the wife, won’t go into details but I realised I was being played. Now I am back in England, with my daughter, got our house there, in the throes of divorce, the same old thing. All my motivation, the retirement I had envisioned for years, spending all day in the workshop, tinkering, building, relaxing, has gone out the window. I have no current projects, can’t really get into anything until,the divorce is over and I know what is mine and where I stand. For years I had a queue of projects backed up in my head, hot rod, V8 trike, cl*** Harley chop, always ideas coming and going, but now my enthusiasm is gone, and I watch tv far too much. Losing all the good stuff has just gutted me of interest in anything. My 16 year old daughter is the only reason I get up every day. But next year is a new year, I WILL be back, I WILL start to build something again.
Hang in there, things will work out. Just keep your head about it. My 1st wife, (practice wife) tried to ruin me, but I hung in there and it all worked out in the end. Although it seemed to take forever.
after reading all this it appears some of you guys have done good , and some have had some trouble i'll just say i will be 65 next month and doing good
I'm nowhere close to retired, but I'm a firm believer that when you get older and stop thinking and working, even if just for fun, you die. I saw it with my great uncle, sadly. Worked his whole life, retired, and just sat around. No hobbies, no friends, no real p***ions in life. In time his mind went. We are fortunate with this thing of ours here that there re always projects to tinker with, always shows and cruises to go to, always another skill to learn or hone. It keeps you mentally sharp.
Some guys retire and plop down in the recliner and wait to die. Other guys sell the recliner to get space for another workbench. Life on the go is good.
"The VA keeps telling me "you need a new knee". Blew out too many times jumping but I tell them "yea, need it but don't want it yet". warhorseracing - Don't let the VA do it. I was on jump status for 25 years thus the 9 surgeries, both knees,left hip X2, right shoulder X2 (still not right), cataracts X2 (can drive safely at night again), left wrist & hand & countless MOHS for skin cancer. I go to the VA to get a flu shot, lab work & a couple of prescriptions just to stay in touch since they send me a check every month (for car stuff). They have gotten better the past couple of years, but the Doctors rotate too fast, especially the ones that speak English. Picture was yesterday, my latest cancer removal (melanoma - the scary kind). I consider myself fortunate to have Tri-Care for life & Medicare (was all supposed to be provided at no cost when I signed up). I miss my wife dearly, but not quite ready to join her.
I was lucky, I got out of the #1 wife thing very quickly. Lost a lot of good car parts in the deal, signed over the house to her (zero equity in a shaky market) and never looked back. She was so hot to trot to get married to what turned out to be someone worse than me, her mother picked up the tab at my lawyer's office. I lost my 2nd wife to cancer 3 years ago and I'm bouncing back slowly. I never thought I'd recover from that.
The winters are tough for me. I'm not huge on the cold and snow. Plans right now are to do the snowbird thing for at least a month in the winter. Spring comes along, all of a sudden I'm as busy as a one-armed paper hanger on a shaky ladder with a case of the crabs.
My Dad has been enjoying his time on the West coast of FL in retirement. Lots of time to chill and golf all year. I get the winter thing. That being said, a $200 bullet heater changed my life when I was a young buck, could work in the garage all day with it freezing outside and toasty inside. Sure beat working in the freezing cold.
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