Be honest: Which of your pre-FIRE plans turned out to be coping fantasies?

[steveark]

Followed the plan

I started consulting a day a week the week after I retired. Kept that up for 5 years. Run in the mornings, tennis in the afternoons, pickleball in the evenings. Fish, hike and take road trips all over the country. Travel overseas. A couple of fairly intense volunteer roles chairing a college board and a large nonprofit foundation board. Everything exactly as I planned. It's a good life. Maybe because I'm an engineer my plan was just that, a well thought out plan that met our needs instead of some strange coping mechanism? But then I liked my job, I had nothing to cope with.

 

[levindb]

It was very important to retire TO SOMETHING rather than just FROM SOMETIHNG. We did not spend much time at home in Cincinnati, and took time to travel...a lot:

1. We spent 1 week on a cruise to Alaska, then 4 weeks in an RV up there.
2. We took a Round the World Cruise (137 days) and just loved it.
3. We went on a 7 week safari in 5 countries in Africa...and would like to do more of that.
4. We spend 3 months each year in the Dominican Republic
5. We volunteered at the local theater for many years until everything shut down.
6. We purchased our Forever Home in Hilton Head last year, and make quarterly visits back up to Cincinnati.

Not the specifics that we had envisioned 10 years ago, but definitely the general direction we were leaning towards. It is important to have a plan, and to seize those opportunities when they pop up.

 

[JRon]

This is an interesting thread. We also plan to travel and last year some of those plans were interrupted by Covid, but we have taken a couple trips so far this year and have a couple more planned.

We enjoy being at home so last year wasn’t really that big of a change except for not going out to eat. We’re back to normal on that.

 

[PointBreeze]

A few years before retiring, I made a list of areas of life such as creating, providing, volunteering, exercising, socializing, etc., and then listed activities in each area I might like to do in retirement. I forgot about it and found it recently, 6 years later. To my surprise, I am engaging in the vast majority of those activities. The only area I didn’t correctly predict is volunteering. I still can’t stand the idea of having to be some place at a certain time - it feels too much like w*rk to me. So I’m doing different volunteer activities than I thought I would - more episodic things.

 

[Markola]

^^^^^ Nice. Your comment raises questions for me about books like Ernie Zelinki’s “How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free.”

A lot of people have read that book, including me, but I wonder how many of the readers actually do the workbook exercises to design their retirement?

 

[Old Microbiologist]

Many of the things I did for relaxation I still do. I added a sailing yacht which takes up a lot of time and I enjoy it a lot. We have done a lot of traveling but COVID put a damper on that. We both learned new skills and I have become adept at CAD design with 3D printing plus designing and building IoT devices. My wife became a famous award-winning photographer and expanded her Day Trading skills (although ironically we haven't touched any of that and probably never will need to in our lifetimes). We over-planned financially and are always gaining rather than spending as we are spending a lot less than our incomes.