Buy a nice flat farm. Live in the house. Rent out the fields to local farmers for some extra income.
Except for one nice long, wide grass airstrip. Turn the barn in to my hangar and workshop. Keep a small plane (or two, along with a balloon and a few classic cars) in the hangar.
If I’m as rich as I’d like to be: (Which won’t happen, but one can dream)
Completely redo the inside in to an RV-style inside. Attach some underwing seadoo pods (yes, they exist, unfortunately I’m unable to locate a picture right now, but it’s damn cool. The just winch right up in to an underwing nacelle, and after landing, you flip a switch and they lower in to the water, and you can drive right away) throw a couple folding scooters on board.
Spend a whole lot of time tooling around the the carribean, europe, basically, the world. Land where I want, when I want. You could stay aboard in any city you want, and if you don’t feel like going to a city, fly to some remote island, drop anchor and stay for however long you want.
I definitely plan to have some scheduled activities. If I have too much unscheduled time, I tend to do nothing. If I retired right now, I’d get a second major in Japanese at the university, spend more time rowing and coaching, and pick back up my ESL tutuoring. If that didn’t fill my days, I’d consider getting a part time job at a bookstore. But that may change, when I do retire (at least 25 years off, if not more), what I do will depend on what my interests are.
When I retire, I’ve got about nine kabillion Big Plans. I want to get an RV and go to every Monday Night Football game for one full NFL season. I want to learn to surf. I want to continue making movies. I want to learn to play the piano, at least a little bit. I want to build gigantic cameras (though maybe not as big as this one). And many, many others.
I work on this stuff whenever I have time, but I can’t wait until I have no job keeping me from doing all this stuff.
I want a Mediterranean farm (on the Mediterranean if I get fabulously wealthy, otherwise stay here in CA). Olive and lemon groves and grapevines and goats. I’m going to bake my own bread in a brick oven and make my own olives and goat cheese and I’m going to ride all my goods into the farmer’s market in a trailer behind my Moto Guzzi, which I will ride with an awesome leather helmet, goggles, a gingham dress and big 'ol clodhoppers, with my long grey hair trailing behind.
I haven’t thought too much about it, thinking it could be a “work until I die” situation, but…
I’d love to move into New York City, lower West Side, Chelsea, maybe and spend my days in museums and movies, take some classes at NYU, have dinner delivered from any of 100 places everyday, just sit outside people watching.
The major change is that I’ll probably want to belong to a decent club to play golf. If I’m retired, I’m not going to deal with shitty courses and duffers.
The best retirement plan I ever heard was a local junior high principal who said, “I have a cabin up at Estes Park, and on the front porch of that cabin is a rocking chair. I intend to move to that cabin and just go sit in that rocking chair for a year. After that, I may start to rock.”
For myself, I intend to get our home properly landscaped and improved over the next 20 years and, when I’m 75, retreat to my well-equipped woodshop and make things for other people for about ten years. If I’m still alive, my wife and I will sell the house and move to a condo and spend the next five years reading all the books I’ve never had time to read. And if I’m still alive at 90, I’m going into an assisted living home where I’ll eat whatever I damn please, nap whenever I damn please, whatch whatever I damn please on TV and try hard to remember my grandchildren’s names.
When I retire, I want to become a hippy. I’ll travel around the country, following music festivals, and spend most of time laying in the sun and listening to great live music.
Barring that, I want a nice big boat that I can live on, with all the modern boating toys they come with. One month, I’ll cruise around the Carribean. Another month, the Mediterranean. Good life, indeed!
Hmmm… the plan is for me to get a PhD in History. I’m targeting my return to school for it in about 12 years, when I’m 45. At that point I should have a fairly cushy CIO/CTO position where I can devote a lot of time to school and work about 20 actual hours per week. Following my PhD, I plan on finding a nice little position at some liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere and teach/pontificate until I’m dead.
Doing the typical retiree thing (golf, Florida, gardening, etc.) has never appealed to me.
Soup up my flying car when I’m not vacationing on the moon.
Probably 30 years to go, I can’t imagine what life will be like that far into the future. If nothing changes, I’ll probably alternate between going to Mexico for my arthritis medicine and hanging around the shooting range, aggravating my arthritis.
We’re talking about retiring in about 8 years or so, when the kids are out of college and we have enough set aside to live on. I don’t know if I’ll stop working all together, but I certainly will not be getting up at 5:15 AM any more. Maybe a part time job at a bookstore or a library, to help support my reading habit.
I’ll also leave time for some long-term vacations like a month in Rome or a month or two just traveling around the U.S. Then there are those trips I want to take to Asia, Africa, and South America.
Other than that, I’ll have lots of time to read, garden, clean, shop, and whatever else suits my fancy.
I’d like to be able to divide my time between traveling, volunteer work, and “puttering.” I truly love puttering. I’m going to take a week off soon and do nothing but putter. And maybe go to the beach one day.