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Buying a much bigger house
On Fri, 1 Aug 2003 02:45:14 +0000 (UTC),
(D. Gerasimatos) wrote:
In article ,
Mary Shafer wrote:
[snip!]
We don't drive luxury cars or wear designer clothes or anything. We
have traveled a lot, but we've also invested and saved. Our income
has always exceeded our outgo. Frequently substantially.
Now we're retired and we're financially secure. We may be rewarded in
Heaven, but we're going to live it up in retirement first.
I am happy things worked out well for you. Personally, I think it doesn't
make a lot of sense to wait until retirement to "live it up". You may never
get there and if you do you may be too old or sick to do some of the things
you wanted to do when you were younger. Who wants to work for 60 years
to have 10 years of fun?
Thirty years, not sixty, for me and forty for my husband. I expect at
least thirty more years of retirement.
Besides, we both had a tremendous amount of fun while we were working,
both on the job and elsewhere. We've pretty much done what we wanted
to do. NASA paid both of us to do things that were incredibly fun,
too. Flying in an F-104 Starfighter, for example. Watching the
Shuttle return from space. Neat stuff like that.
This isn't directly at you personally, Marilyn. You did say that you
traveled a lot, which is indeed a luxury.
It's no more a luxury than are children. Actually, it may be less of
an expense than are children, at least while the kids are at home or
in college. Different sort of return on investment, though.
Someone, probably Robert Benchley or Dorothy Parker, once said that
there are two kinds of travel--first class or with children. There's
some truth in this, because the kind of travel that families usually
do is quite different from the kind of travel the childless do. Not
better, not worse, just different. So is the way you spend your
money.
Mary
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Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
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