As I get close to my 1/4-of-a-year retirement anniversary and as I am starting what I not-so-secretly think of as my real retirement, I thought I'd post a quick update!
I "worked" pretty hard my first (almost-)three months out of work. Like, I didn't have a single day off and there were many days I worked 16 hours or more. I was organizing for the elections (part of my reason for OLYing and ending up here in this cohort) and while the activism doesn't stop, the long days and no days off do! So partly I don't have a really significant update since this was such a temporary situation, but I did start a few retirement bucket list things that I am so happy about and makes me all the more excited for the next steps of retirement.
The two things I managed to squeeze into my long days? Fostering kittens and establishing a meditation practice! I'm at 74 straight days meditating and really enjoying it and looking forward to digging in deeper now that I have more time. So much I want to explore. And fostering kittens has just been so fun! Since I was "working" from home since I left my job, I could squeeze in being a foster-cat-parent and it has been awesome. We are on our second pair of two kittens now, the first pair were 5 month old sisters that were fun and sweet and quickly were adopted. This pair came to us at 3.5 weeks old after having been found crawling out of a hole from a locked garage that the landlord of doesn't take responsibility for. And they totally would have been roadkill or snacks quickly if the tenant next door hadn't found them and worked with our rescue org to place them. We learned about bottle feeding (and burping!) every 4 hours, litter training, weaning and all the crazy things I never knew how to do when I only had kittens all my life that were 2 or more months old. Our kittens are now up for adoption and are healthy, wild, sweet 3 month olds and we're definitely gonna bawl and/or refuse to give them up when the time comes.
It has been just so wonderful to dip my toe in to the world of retirement and pull a couple of items off my aspiration list onto the action list these last few months. I am super excited and a little scared as I face a whole new world of options...as soon as I catch up on sleep!
ETA: on the money front, I haven't had time to do my expenses. And I'm not sure if it's just that I've been too busy to spend any money or if it is indeed the frequent experience I've read that you spend so much less in retirement than you think you will....but I've hardly been spending any money. I'm looking forward to doing the numbers soon to track down where I'm hitting and missing on my budget.