I’m going to revisit a family theme while hopefully not leading you to the conclusion that this blog is going to be mostly about my family. It’s not. But for the second time in three weeks I visited my parents today- yes, one of those couples who’s average age is 90, and who are coming up on 70 years married life together. Still living independently, barely. They cooked lunch for me and for three hours we talked about computers, investments, mental cognizance, their great grand-daughter, and the houses we used to live in. As an older couple stuck inside in the middle of winter with snow piled up all over, they were thankful to have a visitor and someone to talk to. But I was lifted up as well.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I did try to take them out for lunch. Between us three brothers, we are successful about once every twenty times we try.
On the way back I listened to another retirement podcast- this is where the endorsement comes in. I’ve listened to several different podcast authors, but have really enjoyed one called Sound Retirement Planning. I think the guy’s name is Josh Parker. He’s a Christian retirement planner who’s been doing podcasts for about seven years: plain-spoken, has a couple of books out, and is easy to understand. I haven’t signed up for his program, so I’m just listening to his older podcasts. They’re only about 25 minutes long and I listen to them on Spotify.
That’s another family story (oops). For years my son’s been diplomatically encouraging me to sign up for Spotify as a one-stop source for music. Without going into details, for $10/month you can go in and build you’re own music lists and listen whenever you want. So when they offered a free three-month trial last Summer, I finally pulled the trigger and signed up. Made a couple of long playlists and enjoyed listening to them. Then I discovered they have tons of podcasts and I got hooked listening to them. Haven’t listened to my music in three months. But they’re there when I’m ready to go back.
No, I don’t get a kick back for every one of you who signs up for these services. That’ll come later when I have over 100K followers and each of you can’t wait for my next post. Right now I have zero followers.
Which brings me to my last subject. I keep threatening to start marketing this forum, and by golly, I’m going to begin this week. My objective is to get smarter on retirement by listening to others, and I can’t do that unless people start reading and commenting.
(Update three years later…..I still have zero followers, and still not started marketing/commercializing this forum, but have a whole lot more content built up. Just haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with all this content. Yet.)
I’m happy to see that I, the diplomatic son, am single-handedly enabling you to retire comfortably via Spotify. /s
(For those unfamiliar, “/s” is an internet notation to identify sarcasm.)
A shameless attempt to boost my numbers by asking my son to check out the blog. It worked. I’m not sure he read my earlier post commenting on how he got me to subscribe to Spotify.
See, this blog is already working. I increased my internet savvy, and from now on will look for that internet notation for sarcasm within my blog.
Oops, this is the post about Spotify. Learned another lesson. Read the original post before commenting next time…….
Dear Mike, thanks for intimidating me into NOT retiring! I foolishly thought I’d just look at my 401k balance, take FERS how to retire class and drop my letter.
No I guess I’ll have to start a blog and do research for years before I’m ready. Thanks bro.
Well, Gordo, you COULD keep reading other peoples’ comments here and we’ll both get smarter at the same time. BTW, when I found that cover picture of the guy just sitting on the rock ledge, I looked real closely and could have sworn that was you.
Don’t worry, I’ll think of some retirement subject that might be of interest to you……