Great thread, seeing everything from personal finance to ear wiggling LOL!
As for me......the skills which have served me well, some more for my working years than since I ERed were:
(1) Learning how to program in SAS, the programming language I used at work for nearly all of my 23 years there.
(2) The supervisory skills I picked up after being promoted to that level in 1993 and staying at that level for the remaining 15 years of my career. Other than running my school Scrabble tourneys, I don't get to really boss people around like that any more (which is fine!).
Other skills I picked up over the years, many at work, which have helped me beyond work are:
(1) Learning how to type, even though I never took any real typing classes.
(2) Learning how to write well. I had to somehow combine all the various and sometimes conflicting things I learned, from the college writing classes (not very helpful) to the business writing class I took (more helpful), to simply having to write business letters early on in my career (very helpful), learning that skill from my boss, to fine-tuning and wordsmithing for clarity by my other bosses (also very helpful). Being able to write well enables me to be taken seriously both within and outside the workplace, from dealing with business (i.e. consumer complaints or disputes) to getting letters to the editor printed in newspapers, to getting the attention of locally elected leaders, and making posts in various internet forums such as this one.
(3) PC math-related skills such as Lotus and Excel. I started with Lotus in the 1980s and still like it over Excel which I learned in the 1990s. I use Lotus 9.0 for Windows as well as Excel, depending on if I need to share the spreadsheet with outsiders (Excel). This was extremely useful for my next skill.....
(4) Personal finance skills. While I picked up a lot of these skills from the Economics and Finance classes I took in college, I also learned some of these skills at work (I did actuarial work for 23 years) and from just picking them up over the years as my interest in the topic grew from my growing portfolio and ER planning (which led to an actual ER in 2008).
(5) PC skills not related to math such as learning Word in the early 1990s and general PC knowledge such as troubleshooting problems I picked up over the years. The things I picked up over the years which seem so routine to me are so foreign to most users (re: my thread about my snakebit friend and his PC problems) which make me look like a genius, the "big fish in small pond" scenario.
(6) Believe it or not, playing Strat-O-Matic baseball back in the 1970s enhanced my ability to compute mathematical things at a young age. Already good at math, being able to play with numbers this way such as figuring out many batting averages in my head kept me sharp at a young age.
(7) While not a useful skill much any more, being on my high school's chess and Mathletes teams taught me how to think well under pressure at a young age. This came in handy when taking college exams and later, actuarial exams, adult Scrabble tourneys I played in back in the 1990s, and when facing strict deadlines at work. Being retired, this rarely arises other than running those school Scrabble tourneys.
(8) Learning how to cook has been a vital skill not just for the money I have saved but also because I am a bit of a fussy eater, so the food I make I know I can eat without any fears of how it was prepared.
(9) Various other homemaking skills I learned or picked up over the years such being able to change light switches and lighting fixtures without frying myself have been handy. My dad is a good woodworker so I am pretty handy with those tools. My mom was good with sewing so I picked up a few things from her although I don't really do that stuff any more. Thanks to the internet, I have picked up a few more tasks I can DIY.
(10) After some unsuccessful DIY attempts involving my car, I don't mess with that for things even pretty minor any more. Better to pay my local mechanic $100 for something relatively easy than 5 or 10 times that amount if I screw it up.
(11) Organizational skills. My dad's dad and my mom were well organized. I remember visiting my dad's dad in Florida back in the 1970s and seeing how he used lists before we went on our morning errands. My mom was similar in that way. This got me into the good habit of creating shopping lists before going out and for creating lists in general. Both people also had good filing systems to organize papers so they could find them later without difficulty. I very, very rarely lose anything or throw something out by mistake while being able to balance that with not being a pack rat, a necessity when living in as small apartment. This was also handy during my working career. I have seen some truly awful organization skills by friends who have tons of clutter and/or can't find anything important without having it become a major project in itself.
