ABOUT ME
I recently retired after more than two decades working in operations at a Fortune 100 company preceded by just over a decade serving in the US Navy. Like many of you, throughout my career I dreamed of the day I could finally walk out of the office for the last time and begin my retirement journey. For me, that day came a little earlier than I had planned, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. My company was going through some restructuring and was offering an early retirement package for anyone within two years of their early retirement date. Because I was planning to retire when I reached that date anyway, and I was within 18 months of that date, I jumped at the chance to take advantage of this unexpected opportunity. Thus began my retirement journey!
The first couple of years proved to be much different than I ever could have expected. I experienced a divorce and found myself relocating for the first time since I left the Navy, more than 20 years earlier. The move was a significant one as I left the relatively flat Midwest and moved to Western Nevada on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. My new home presented me with countless opportunities to pursue some of my many hobbies, chief among those being fly-fishing, hiking, and camping. As I settled in I was able to rekindle old pursuits like skiing, and picked up some new ones like mountain biking and snowshoeing. As an avid amateur photographer and videographer, I often found myself documenting my adventures and trying to tell a story through pictures and videos, but more on that later.
With my new home-base, I am now in a better position to explore the mountain west and pursue another one of my favorite past-times, traveling this amazing country of ours. Since relocating I have had the opportunity to visit 11 national parks and 2 national monuments across 7 states throughout the west, and I am sure I am just getting started.
WHY RETIREMENT ON THE FLY?
As a recent retiree, I have frequently found myself scouring the Internet for hours on end searching for useful information on retirement, 401Ks, financial tools, travel information, and countless other topics related to my many hobbies. Nearly every time I marveled at the relative difficulty I encountered in having to wade through page after page of irrelevant and often inaccurate or misleading information in order to find the useful information I was seeking. My patience often wore thin and I would give up the search to try another day. Recently, as I traveled down another rabbit hole, searching for something I needed, I began to wonder how many people were out there doing the same exact thing. Would it be useful to my fellow retirees or to future retirees if I documented my efforts in order to save them some of the time I invested? If I could invest my time to help others, while I was helping myself, the investment would be worth it. This is how the idea for Retirement on the Fly was born.
WHAT IS RETIREMENT ON THE FLY?
Retirement on the Fly is a website, a blog and a vlog where I will document my retirement journey. I will post weekly articles with information that will be useful to those who are navigating retirement or just thinking about retirement, regardless of how far away that might be. Along with articles and videos, I will aggregate many of the best sources I have found for information on topics of interest such as personal finance, fitness, travel, fishing, camping, cooking, and more. Over time, I will grow the site to include other topics of interest.
WELCOME AND THANK YOU!
Welcome to Retirement on the Fly and thank you so much for your interest in my project! Please feel free to comment if you have questions and please check back as I will be posting new content on a weekly basis at a minimum!