Do You Miss Working?

I doubt I will never retire as long as I can walk and hold a paint brush, oops wrong Forum.

 

Right now I'm semi-retired and work 21 hours a week. When I move to the Philippines in a month and a half then I'll go into full retirement mode. I'm interested in what other retired people do with their day in Dumaguete. I have a feeling I'm going to be bored for the first year until I get use to it.

 

It will take time, main thing is to keep your mind Active PatO A very good friend told me some 4 years ago. Keep active. Get a hobby. A Dog will walk all day, if you want to take it.
Both of us needed to keep active, both of us did not take that extra special care with health and that is all too important. Exercise my Friend.
Stopping Work can be a Big shock to the System and problems will occur if not checked.
Best of Luck. You will get there I am sure. Take things easy OK. If it tales twice as long to paint that wall so be it. Both the wall and you will benefit.

 

Retirement sucks bigtime w/o a time consuming hobby. What that hobby is for you is all on you but you'll definately need something. Those who say the first year is the worst its really about it taking a year to realize you need some new hobbies and after a year you'll have probably found some hobbies.

For some its as simple as chasing girls or drinking beers while complaini.... err fixing the worlds problems to other foreigners. To others it may be diving, exercise, family, traveling around, golf, running a business part-time, or simply watching tv. Most these days are no longer happy sitting out on the front porch in a rocking chair watching the clouds pass by day in and day out.

The sooner you figure out your hobbies the better off retirement will be. The problem comes in when some people just can't find much of anything that makes them enjoy and happy and then its time for a game change.

 

14 years into retirement I think about working only in occasional nightmares. After years of anticipating being put out to stud, this is living a dream.

 

Yep, same here. I think about work in nightmares also!

OP, I think people who worry about being bored during retirement will most likely be so. I knew, without a doubt, I would NOT be bored. Turned out to be true. But it doesn't take much to amuse me though. Sitting quietly inside my own head is all it takes!

 

I miss working, when i say that i mean i miss the money associated with it and the traveling to different places, the actual work part i could live without but i still pray for the oil price to recover to at least $100 a barrel.

 

Hang in there Charley, when the price of oil does rise, I think it will snap the rubber band and keep going. I am getting a lot of buyout offers right now which I receive the occasional one while prices are up very few while prices are down but recently many offers, more than one per week. Some are thinking this will be over in a year or less. If I answer them at all it's no thanks, I'm buying, not selling.

The oil supply and stable prices depends on continuous development which has for all practical purposes ceased and will stay stopped for a year. You can't stack a drilling rig for a year and then immediately put it back to work, they need extensive overhauls if they are not continuously working, breaking and being repaired. The oil industry has let a lot of people go, some will be thrilled to come back to work, others won't.

Oil demand is high and climbing higher, cheap oil does that. When the glut runs out, the demand will not instantly disappear. If demand exceeds supply at that point by 5%, the price of oil doesn't rise 5%, it will probably set new records.

The US has actually increased the imports of oil (about 8 million barrels a day total and roughly equal to China) even when all of the holding facilities are full which has artificially prolonged this crash. Much of the oil is from Nigeria but this may not be true for much longer. Research the Niger Delta Avengers. I'm thinking of sending them some T-shirts.

My holdings are Bakken. The beauty of this bust is that operators were paying far too much for materials and services including fracking. The cost of drilling the recent best wells to date is only 70% of the cost to drill mediocre wells 5 years ago. For me, $70 a barrel is the new $100, I am also benefitting from new multi-billion dollar ethane plants that produce plastic precursors virtually on site from natural gas that was flared before.

Just hang in there.

 

What are the chances that you could teach others to do what you do?

 

This depends on what specific part that you are referring to. Most of my bread comes in through being a programmer, but the money really comes from being good with dealing with my clients, knowing how to sell and generally just hustling like a motherfu**er. I can program out my *** and call it work but I won't get paid for it unless I get these other things right.

And once you get those other things right, then it doesn't matter so much what else you do. Find a need and handle it for people. You can do that direct as a service such as consulting (time consuming and doesn't scale) or package up and sell a product which can do the same (more difficult). That requires getting out into the world and talking to people.

The prerequisite is the "hustling like a motherfu**er" part. That doesn't necessarily mean working hard, but rather you need to be highly resourceful. You do whatever it takes to get things done.

On the technical part, I can't stand sitting in a class, reading a book or having someone else show me how to do something when I'm getting started. I HAVE to poke the thing and figure out how it works through my own exploration and jacking around. Technical references are good for getting that deeper understanding of a key piece that I have already twisted, bent, licked, banged on, etc. Courses and books are good for the things which aren't core to what I'm doing but are still important, such as basic bookkeeping / accounting.

These days with Google, Stack Overflow and an endless list of other resources, pretty much all of your questions have already been answered. You can get the first thread of building things by Googling "how to..." and just continue following that thread. Being able to do this research, finding information and absorbing information is the most important of the technical part. It's a bit of a catch 22. I could show you how to do something but you need to first develop the ability to teach yourself as that's your daily challenge. If you can't pick up the information on your own, then don't bother continuing until you pick up that skill. Once you do that, then you don't need me anymore.

Another important trait is drive and adaptability. If you don't have the drive to pick these things up on your own, then you probably won't have the drive to continue. If you think that you need a class or a certification then don't bother because your thinking is too institutional. I survive through adaptability, creativity and recognizing the game for what it really is rather than the smokescreen that everyone else thinks you should see.

NOTE: That's not to say that a CS degree isn't helpful. It's the safe way to get you a job. In some cases, a really high paying job. But you asked about me. I have been living in the Philippines for 7 years and I haven't had a real job for over a decade. And I'm far from retirement age.

NOTE: Mentors, courses and books can be helpful in certain cases. I believe that a great way to demonstrate that you understand something and to even solidify your own understanding is to be able to teach the material. But I think this is best for specific subjects which you have become a deep expert on and / or which people have a difficult time picking up. The areas in which your peers often struggle is good territory for this. For freelance programmers this is often such things like treating your freelancing like a real business and how to charge what you're worth. That goes back to finding a need, you can come up with courses / books and sell them.