I retired from my job nearly a year ago and yes, it has taken a great deal of adjustment to living with a far smaller income than I had while I was working as well as dealing with other issues as well. Yes, I will admit that at first, I was bored stiff and had nothing to do and it drove me nuts, but now I would like to be able to do things and enjoy my free time, but that no longer seems possible. I am struggling with the feeling that maybe I should just go back to work and be done with it, although that is something that I am not terribly eager to do just yet. I want to enjoy my free time, what little of it there seems to be anymore. Some folks seem to be under the impression that I have absolutely nothing to do, and yes, that was the case when I first retired, maybe the first few weeks until I did find something to do, a research project on pre-Civil War houses here in my hometown. I am finished with that and there are other things that I want to move on to, but unfortunately, it looks like those things will never be able to happen. I'm finding it next to impossible some days to be able to make plans and it's a bit frustrating. No sooner will I make plans to do something or go somewhere than those plans have to be shelved to do something else that I had not planned on doing. Some days it almost feels like I am working again and have to arrange for "time off" to do the things I really want to do. I'm deeply conflicted as to whether I should just go ahead and go back to work or just accept that being retired does not really mean being "retired", but just working for free instead of being paid for it. I don't know what to do right now. I mean, if I am going to work, I want to be paid for my efforts, so I may as well begin hunting for another job to work for the next 5-10 years or so. At least I'll be making money, even though I won't have any sick or vacation time anymore and probably won't have the kind of time off I had before. They usually don't give you any vacation for the first year or two that you work, so if I do go back to work, I won't have a single day of vacation until sometime in 2016. I hate the thought of working so long with no time off, but that's just how it is nowadays in the working world.
On top of all of this, I have come to find out that my landlord intends to sell the house where I moved into last year, meaning that I am going to have to find a new place to live soon. I just settled in here, but there's no way that a new landlord will let me stay at the rate of rent that I am paying now. I am getting a bargain basement price for this place, given how much space I have and its prime location. So it's back to looking again, probably sometime in the next year or so, maybe sooner. I'm really disappointed, but not surprised, given that the house owner lives in Arizona, 2000 miles away. Too hard for him to manage property from so far of a distance. My apartment could easily fetch close to twice what I pay in rent because it could be made into anywhere from a 2 to 3 bedroom apartment, and those go for big bucks in this town, especially in a walkable location close to the University and our newly refurbished downtown. I've heard some talk out of the city of a complete redevelopment of this corridor where my house is located and I pray that they don't intend to bulldoze all of these great old century homes and erect cheap crappy upscale housing and mixed use structures. Even so, now that I face the loss of yet another home, I'm going to have to scramble for new housing soon. I may just call my former landlord to see what he has coming open in the next year. I have my eyes on a property close to where I once lived that might be nice, but I wonder how much longer he's going to be in the rental business. Last time I talked to him, he said that he wasn't getting any younger and was looking to off load a lot of his properties as a result. So he may just be downsizing his holdings so he does not have to work on so many houses anymore. After all, he's retired and no doubt quite comfortably as a result of years in the oil and gas exploration business combined with renting dozens of houses around the area for years. So who knows, I may just be forced into moving into an apartment building managed by a realty company, something that I had hoped to avoid. But in the end, I may have no choice. This house will be on the market soon, so......time to go back to looking again, something that I had hoped never to have to do again, or at least not for a very long time.
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