“One more year” year after year

If you’re anywhere near retirement age, or are contemplating retiring early, you might have heard the term “one more year”. Essentially, it refers to people who can retire but for some emotional reason, they feel like they need to work one more year, pad the savings, set themselves up emotionally for not having a set schedule, whatever the case may be. It differs for everyone I am sure, but I am solidly in the “one more year” camp, unfortunately for me.

We have saved a fair amount of money, enough for us to retire comfortably and even more so that my husband is going to work for a while longer, as long as the work gods allow at least. Despite that, I went back to work five months after I retired from my last position.

I’m not sure if it was that I wasn’t convinced retirement was financially viable yet, if I didn’t feel like we had put in place enough financial safeguards for a secure retirement, or I just couldn’t bring myself to live on a fixed income. I really don’t know why I don’t feel that I can retire but what I’m doing now to try and get myself to that point is to have a deep understanding of our outgoing expenses (critical to be able to know if you have enough to keep you solvent for 30 plus years if all things health wise go well) and getting a better understanding of retirement distribution strategies to reduce taxes. It’s odd – I’ve spent almost 30 years as a tax professional but haven’t dug into how best to distribute everything that we saved. I suppose the good thing about having a tax background is that I feel that I should be able to pick this up pretty easily and get a solid plan in place.

One area I wish I had developed more over the past years is hobbies, and possibly a second income stream. While I have dividends and interest, and cash savings, I think having another income stream would only serve to ease the discomfort I have about living on a fixed income.

As I continue to move toward retirement, one of my goals is to find a few creative hobbies that will keep me engaged when I retire and also see if I can find some sort of additional income stream that could be done remotely, and even in other non-US locations.

I enjoy photography and food and during the pandemic spent a lot of time playing with photoshop so perhaps it’s time to get back to that. In the meantime, here are pictures of delicious food we had while traveling.

These dishes are from our friend’s restaurant in Dallas, Texas – Hello Dumpling. The food is all made in house, nothing frozen and everything we had was outstanding. Do try it if you are in Dallas.

The dumplings are all outstanding as are the noodles and the sides.