Latest / Retirement Plot Twists / Episode 3 Carolyn's Retirement Journey
Transcript
- Cathryn: Hello and welcome to episode three of Retirement Plot Twists. I'm Catherine, your host, and today I will be speaking with Carolyn, who will share her retirement journey. Welcome, Carolyn. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. So if you could just share with our listeners how old you are and maybe how old you were when you retired and if you had any plans at that point. I am currently 69 years old and I retired just shy of fifty. I had no plans on retiring, but a package came out. that was really good, good severance package, good benefits. And I talked with my husband about it. And I was traveling a lot for work. So he said, why don't you just take the package? I didn't know if I could afford to do that. So I ran a spreadsheet of all our income and all our expenditures. He was he had a pension. And so I ran all the numbers and I said, I don't know why I've been working 80 hours a week. I can retire. Eighty hours a week. Mm-hmm. Wow. So I knew it was really young and in my head I thought, well maybe I'll go back to teaching because I used to teach English as a second language at night. I did that for years. when I retired, I did not go back to teaching. I joined a gym with my husband and we went there five days a week. So it was like my new job. I did a lot of babysitting for grandchildren I did not go back to work. Wow. And so for how many years was that your routine until maybe something changed or you had a change of heart or something happened in your life? Right. that went on for a long time. And then unfortunately my father got sick and so I became the person that took my mother to the hospital all the time, did a lot of making meals for them. I'm one of seven children. So we had a lot of support. But I was the one since I was retired, I had the time to be there at the hospital And my husband and I also had a house down in Cape Cod. So I split my time between the two places. But when my father's health got really bad, I spent more time in a caretaking role. And then he passed away and a year later my mother got very sick. And so the same thing happened with my mother. I did a lot of caretaking and she passed away and I did all of the executor things and that kept me very, very busy. Where are you in line with your siblings, age wise? I am not even a year younger than the oldest who are twins. So I'm at the top of the food chain. I had a lot of business sense, so I was able to take on a lot of responsibilities that I knew that I could do. And a couple of years later my husband died very suddenly. So after I got everything settled, he passed away. I took another real hard look at my life and what I had done and what I had planned to do and was kind of at a loss of now what do I do. Right. So what is your direction? 'Cause you had been in a caretaking role. For so how many years between your both of your parents? Thirteen years. Thirteen, that's a long time. It is. And then all of a sudden your husband passes away and now you're alone and you're probably thinking, what do I want to do next? I needed to figure out who I was. Yeah. So I needed to try to identify, you know, what could I do to figure out who I was or what could I do to keep helping people. So for a period of say a year and a half or so, I made meals for the homeless. I made lunches, put them together and I dropped them off with a woman who would distribute them to homeless people. So I did that for about a year and a half. But I also cooked incessantly and I became very skilled at baking. Cooking meals and I would make them and give them to my family. It gave me something to do to when I could focus on what I was doing in the kitchen. I lost focus of the grief that I was feeling, the not knowing what to do, feeling. And so I really honed a good skill. Still doing that or are have you added more into the mix? I've added more into it. I started traveling. I travel with one of my cousins and her husband took a cruise over to the Mediterranean, a cruise with chefs from the food network. I have another cruise planned. one of my sisters and I traveled to Nova Scotia to visit with family that we I hadn't seen in forty five years. spend a lot of time with my stepchildren and grandchildren, which gives me great pleasure Do you still see that that's part of a caregiving role or is that something that is just something you really enjoy doing and distributing? I actually find it it's a passion that I have now that I always knew I liked to cook. I found it therapeutic. But I've become passionate in branching out into different things. Like today I I had made a plate of cookies and scones and I brought them to the bank that I use all the time just because I really care about those people. They're so good to me. So I do it to just serve people, to give to give away things. I always say that I wanna make sure that I bake enough that I have things in the freezer in case nobody comes to visit. I got plenty of food. so stop by your house and and you'll always have something. If you call and say you're coming, you can you come in the house and it'll smell like fresh baked cookies. How nice is that. Yeah, it's really nice. But I I l I do I do like it. I do enjoy making food and making things for other people. I I have a passion for family. I have six grandchildren and I spend a lot more time with some of them than I did even before my husband passed away. Mm-hmm. And which is a beautiful thing to see them grow. Yeah. so if I could just stop there for a second, just now talk about do you feel that you planned As far as money goes, that you feel that you don't need to go back to work, that you are upset, that you don't feel that you have any issues that way, that you were left in a good place? I I made sure before I retired that financially that it would be a sound decision to make. I called myself the spreadsheet queen. I tracked everything. Yeah. And I was able to do that. And so I had a job where I had I I made decent money I saved a lot all through my career. And so financially I do not have to go back to work. I also am not bored. I've become more involved in my church recently in the last, well, the last couple of years I really I leaned heavily on my faith after my husband died. And so the church became very important to me and just Recently in recent months I've started doing volunteer work with them. I just, you know, call me when you need me. And I was it's sporadic, but I do I do some work for that which I find fun. Yeah. That's great. So if you had some advice to offer people who are listening about life. maybe the things you planned and the things you never planned for and how you sort of overcome some of the the grief which never leaves but just in enough to move on. What kind of advice would you give to people that are listening? I would advise people to live each day to the fullest. Make sure you tell the people around you how much they mean to you. Make sure you tell your partners, your family how much you love them. So that no words are ever left unsaid. Good advice. And how about for yourself as far as how to take life day by day? I lean heavily into my faith. I approach each day that it's a blessing and figure out something new that I can do today. I try to plan out my day the night before of what I want to get done, of where I want to go, of what I want to bake, pull the recipes out if that's it, and put them on the kitchen counter. so I don't focus specifically on just tasks that need to get done, but also on things that I think I might want to do. Nice. Yeah. So do you have a list somewhere of the of the things you'd like to do in the next year or you just do it the night before? I have a l I don't have a physical list of things I want to do, which is like to travel. I'm taking another trip to the Mediterranean. But I do have in my head of where I wanna go, of what I might wanna do. Work is not part of it. Volunteering is part of it as far as day to day, I I I write everything down on a list and then I check it off as I do it and then I have a sense of accomplishment. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you. My journey is not unique, I'm sure. You know, no no two people are the same, but maybe you gave some insight to somebody who's going through the same type of journey or is going to go through and maybe gives people some things to think about. I appreciate it. Thank you.