Practical Advice for Retirement: Stock Up on Underwear

If you're getting ready to retire, you can find plenty of advice out there on what you need to be doing. You'll find advice on saving and investing, pursuing hobbies, staying healthy, choosing where to live, and volunteering or working part-time.  But no one ever tells you another fact of retirement:  you're going to need more underwear.

When you work, you pretty much keep to one pair of underwear per day.  Wake up, workout, shower, put on nice clothes, go to work, come home, change into sweats, and plant yourself on the couch and watch t.v. until bedtime.  What you have here is a one-pair-of-underwear day.  (Unless, of course you were compelled to wear thong underwear with your work outfit, in which case you will want to immediately de-thong upon arriving home, therefore making it a two-pair-of-underwear day.)

Since I pretty much wore the same pair of scraggy sweats every night when I was working, the laundry basket didn't really get too full all that fast.  And I had enough underwear to get me through a week or two.

But in retirement, the meandering nature of the day can often require several changes of underwear a day.  A typical day might include waking up, working out, hitting the shower and then getting dressed to go meet a friend for lunch.  After swinging by the library for some books, or running some errands, you might find yourself home and eager to get working in the garden with plenty of daylight hours left.  So, you change into gardening clothes and come in a couple hours later dripping in sweat, covered in dirt, and feeling like there may be a few bugs that have worked their way into your bra.

A second shower and complete change of clothes is definitely in order; so far a two-pair-of-underwear day.  But possibly you are going out for dinner and want to wear your favorite jeans, you know, the ones that you have to wear thong underwear for--which means you will arrive home after dinner and promptly de-thong into your third pair of underwear.

Since many of my activities don't actually involve going out into public, I can wear a mishmash of clothes that I've accumulated over the years.  So having something to wear doesn't depend on my having to do the laundry very often.  But going through two or three pairs of underwear a day could mean having do to laundry just to get some clean underwear!

Before you retire, head to the Jockey store in the outlet mall and triple your underwear wardrobe; you're going to need it.

Comments

[Cinzea]

You're still wearing underwear?

Ah! we have to have a sit down.

[bongo]

DETHONG? Did anyone do a spell check? Isn't that a Thai dish with lots of peppers and lemongrass? I like Cinzea's comment about you still wearing underwear! This is pretty funny stuff, retiredsyd, maybe at cocktail parties you can tell people you're doing stand-up comedy. If that doesn't shut them up I don't know what will.

[Retired Syd]

I like to call it sit-down comedy.

[Minerva]

I wondered while I constantly run out of underwear... now I do not have to research that issue on my own ;-)