Retirement: A Full-Time Job

Am I Sad to Sell Our Vacation Home?

(Photo Details:  Croquet at Meadowood—July 2006)

 A lot of people have asked me if I’m sad to have sold my wine country vacation home.  I do get very attached to my real estate—it’s personal to me.  So it’s surprising that I’m not sad at all.

For 15 years we’ve made wonderful memories there.  Each year my girlfriends and I would go up for spa weekends.  Most years Doug and I would go for Fourth of July, no one does Fourth of July better than Calistoga.  Friends would join us once or twice a year for Silver Oak’s release party.  We played croquet at Meadowood, picnicked at Sherwin Family Vineyards, and housed wall-to-wall guests the night we celebrated a friend’s milestone birthday at The French Laundry.

We used the house to swap for vacations to Australia, Montreal, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Vermont, and of course year after year in New York City.  We made wonderful memories in other places by virtue of owning our house in Calistoga.

We escaped bad weather when we lived in San Francisco.  We donated the house to charity auctions.  We gave the house to friends for weekends.  We made some money renting it out on occasion.  We met wonderful neighbors.  I was introduced to my favorite writing teacher by taking classes at Napa Valley college.  We took beautiful walks with our dog on Bennett Lane. 

We made many wonderful memories.

But here’s the thing.  We get to have those memories whether we own the house or not!  And we weren’t creating new wonderful memories at the same pace over the last couple of years as we were over the first decade or so.  All I can really remember over the last year is getting the house ready for sale:  backbreaking yard work, window cleaning, trimming shrubs and scrubbing ivy off the side of the house, packing, moving, fixing.  And traffic jams driving back and forth.

Most of the new fond memories we’ve been creating are here at our main home.  Pizza parties with friends and family, playing bocce until the sun goes down.  Gathering family for Christmas.  Smoking ribs for our annual rib-fest with friends.  We don’t need a vacation home to create wonderful new memories.

And with all the money we are saving on carrying costs of that house, we are off to Bali to ride our bikes through rice terraces, snorkel in crystal waters, and hike tropical trails.

Nothing to be sad about.

Related Posts: 

Making New Memories in New York

Building a Relationship with Your Home Exchange Partners

In Praise of the Staycation

 

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Then and Now in Retirement: Travel

  (Photo details:  Our lodging on Ha Long Bay 2014.  The trip that was too long even for me.)
 

This post is one in a series I promised comparing my concerns in early retirement with how things are turning out now, eight years later.  My first in the series was about boredom in retirement.  Since I’m on my way to Singapore on today, I thought I’d tackle travel next.

Then:

When I first retired the thing I was most excited about was the freedom to travel more frequently and for longer stretches of time.  While working, I only had three weeks of vacation time each year.  And I used some of those days for short trips or personal days here and there.  So really I had more like two weeks and even then, I didn’t want to “spend” it all at once.  We usually took two vacations during the year no longer than a week each.

One year though, I negotiated a month-long vacation.  I would take two of my weeks of vacation and go without pay for the other two weeks.  That way we could spend an entire month in New York City.  That was my first taste of such a long trip and I loved it.  Doug was exhausted, but I was invigorated.  I couldn’t wait to retire so we could do more of these types of vacations, living for a month at a time in various major cities around the world.

When I retired, it became clear that this travel-fantasy was not shared by Doug.  He was a trouper and accompanied me on two more month-long trips to New York, a bunch of three-week trips:  to Australia, to Southeast Asia, and a few more to New York.  But it was too long for him to really enjoy being away and on our last lengthy trip something new happened.  It was too long for me too.

The first eight years of my retirement, I was willing to downgrade the luxury level of our trips so we could afford more days of them.  No longer confined to two or three weeks, I wanted to be away as long as possible and I didn’t care if I had to clean my own apartment or move a few times during our stay.  All I cared about was being gone for as long as possible.

Now:

We leave today for a two week trip to Indonesia.  And that’s all I really want.  For the entire year. 

And since I really only want to be gone for two weeks this year, I’m willing to spend the entire year’s vacation budget, a budget that used to fund several months’ worth of trips, on just two weeks.  No home exchanges, we’re staying at luxury hotels, travelling with a luxury bike-tour operator, and flying business class (well that’s on free miles of course.)

I’ve come full circle.  I’m now happy with the measly two weeks I was allotted during my working life and I’m back to blowing the wad on those two weeks. 

Why is that?

I guess because I’ve finally figured out I’m not trying to get away from my life.  I’m not looking for the antidote to work.  The truth is, I love being home.  I love having a glass of wine in my wonderful back yard after a day of gardening.  I love entertaining friends here.  I love going on my walking dates, my lunch dates, and being with my kitty.

I’m totally looking forward to experiencing Bali, Singapore, and Tokyo, and sharing that with some wonderful friends.  But I’m looking forward TO that rather than looking forward to being AWAY from the stresses of the workplace.

Don’t worry.  It doesn’t mean I want to work again.

 

Related Posts:

Looking Forward

Have Miles, Will Travel

Will Work for Wine

 

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Is a Vacation Home Worth it?

(Photo Details:  Murphy Brown in Calistoga)

Is a vacation home worth it?  Let’s just cut to the chase.  No, it’s not.  I mean, unless money is of no concern to you.

Of course it’s not always about money, is it?

Vacation with your pet

I have been joking lately that I bought my vacation home in the Napa Valley for my dog and sold it for my cat.  That joke is not really far from the truth, in that it actually is the truth.

Fifteen years ago, when we bought our cute little cottage in the wooded hills of Calistoga, I did have more in mind than just vacationing with my beagle Murphy.  We lived in San Francisco where the weather is cold and foggy in the summer.  I would commute home each evening from the sunny peninsula into a bank of fog, don gloves and a knit cap, and brave the wet wind to walk my dog after work.  All while knowing 30 minutes in any direction it was 80 degrees.

The idea of owning a vacation home some place warm was appealing. 

Add to that the fact that I was only allotted three weeks of vacation each year to get away, and a weekend get-away property just seemed dreamy.  The icing on the cake was that we could bring our doggy to our home-away-from-home and so the whole family could be on vacation together.

Vacation with your friends

Not only that, our vacation house became a great gathering place for our friends.  Friends would come up for winetasting weekends.  We’d dine al fresco on the warm summer nights and play games by the fire in the winter.  And of course our friends loved it even more because we often loaned it to them for their own getaways, even without us.

Life changes and you still own that house

A few years after buying that house, we moved down to the peninsula so I could eliminate my grueling commute.  That put us 1) farther away from our vacation home, and 2) in a spot where the weather was just as good as Calistoga, if not better.  We didn’t go quite as often.

And also our friends’ lives got busier with kids and life in general, and those wine-tasting weekends dwindled. 

Retirement

After I retired, we figured it was only a matter of time before we would be selling the house so we decided to move there for two years and convert it to a principal residence so we could sell it and exclude the gain from our taxes.   We could kill two birds with one stone--save some taxes and get our fill of the place before we sold it. 

That was 2008-2009.  The housing market tanked and so that tax plan turned out to be irrelevant.  There was no longer any gain to worry about if we sold the house.  So we held on until now.

Back to pets

So here we were, using the house less and less, when the neighbor’s kitty decided to move in with us.  Cat’s don’t like to go on weekend getaways like dogs do.  And if I’m going to be away from my cat to go on a little trip, I’d rather it be somewhere else, not the same place I’ve been going to for 15 years.

The money

So there you have it, I bought the house for the dog and sold it for the cat.  But when you read a title like is something worth something, you’re thinking about money, not pets, right?  So let me tell you about the money.

Yes we sold the house for more than we paid for it.  That would make you think it was worth it wouldn’t it?  Wait a minute.

Don’t forget all the money we put into it, taking out dead trees, rebuilding a damaged bridge on our private road, the new water-heater, the kitchen and bathroom updates, the landscaping, the furnishings, I could go on and on.

Not to mention, it costs money just to keep a house, property taxes, insurance, utilities.

Basically it was a wash.  After considering all the net costs, we walk away even.  Which sounds great really, right?  Because that means you got free vacations for 15 years.  Sort of.

The other way of looking at it is if we took all the money that we put into that house and instead invested it, the earnings on that money would have paid for all those vacations and then some.  Even at the Four Seasons.  Oh, and at the Four Seasons you don’t have to do yard work or clean up after yourself when you’re done.

But then I couldn’t have vacationed with my doggy.  So I guess it was worth it after all.

Related Posts:

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish (or Stupid Tax Tricks)

Two Dumb Financial Decisions I Made--and Why I Made Them

My Short Career as a Landlord

 

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How Did I Ever Have Time for Work?

(Photo Details:  Staged patio of the vacation home I no longer own--as of yesterday.)

You’ll hear this question from retired people all the time, “How did I ever have time for work?”  And I know what working people think about this.  But I don’t think it has to do with the time.  I think it has to do with the re-wiring or our retired brains.

I can’t multitask anymore.

I used to work 40+hours a week, fit in time for exercise, AND manage to accomplish other bigger things that were going on in my life.  All at the same time as holding down a job.

Last month I gave my piano teacher a check for the month’s lessons--one week late for starters.  I forgot to bring the check in at the beginning of April.  Then on top of that, I received an email from my teacher that I had not written his name anywhere on the check.  Instead of his name on the payee line I wrote out the amount again.

That’s because the part of my brain devoted to simple tasks has been taken over by the part of my brain that is involved in selling our vacation home.  Because my brain can’t operate with the same lobes as it used to, now it needs all the lobes to manage a complex task like that.  And I don’t even know if I mean lobes.  I have bought and sold a few houses over the years of my working life and I still managed to keep up with the complex finances of a venture capital firm.  But I can’t manage the simple finance task of writing a check right now.

It seems to be the same thing when it comes to fun hobbies.  When I’m really into piano, I don’t make time for blogging.  And same thing in reverse with blogging.  And both of those are displaced by planning for trip when I have one of those on the horizon, which I do.

I can’t even multitask fun anymore!

Since my last post ions ago I have been focused on one or the other of the following things:  planning for an upcoming trip to Singapore, Bali, and Tokyo, practicing the piano, or doing the myriad of tasks (including worrying) involved with the the selling of a house.  Only one at a time, of course, as we have just established that I can no longer do two things at once. 

So now you’re wondering how I have managed to sit down right now and write a blog post, aren’t you? The trip is planned and the house is sold!  So why am I not playing my piano?  Because I have had the flu all week and that would simply require more energy than I have right now.

Today I was supposed to be at a class called “Developing a Sustainable and Rewarding Writing Process.”  But I was too sick to leave the house.  And the truth is, I know the answer already--which is a good thing because it’s too late to get my money back:  Get your butt in the chair and write.  And it turns out that is really easy to do if you’re just getting over the flu.

Just the same, next year I’m getting the flu shot.

Related Posts:

Lusting for Boredom

In Defense of Boredom

How to Get Nothing Done in Retirement

 

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