This year I turned the age that rhymes with nifty-fun.  The DH is a couple of years older, specifically nifty-whee.  So naturally, we are starting to think about retiring. I actually think about retiring every morning when the alarm goes off, but it isn’t going to happen for another 15 years or so.

(I know this is a knitting blog – I swear this is related.)

Toward this goal, we are looking at financial things we can do to make it all go smoother as well as thinking about where we are going to retire to.  Unless conditions change quite a bit, we aren’t going to be able to stay here in AK after retirement.  The cost of living is way too high for that, and also finding primary care medical providers that will take Medicare is pretty difficult.  Our doctor that we are with right now says they keep their established patients when they transition, but there’s no saying they will be in business in a decade and a half.  So we have plans to go visit a couple potential areas over the next couple of years, and then we’ll plan more in depth from there.

The other day a much younger co-worker and I were talking about paring down our belonging.  She is Marie Kondoing her life, basically, and I was talking about gradually paring down in preparation for this retirement move off in the distant-ish future.  Then we started talking about our yarn stashes.  She is pretty disciplined, and has been able to keep herself from buying any until she knits up what she has.  I was a little bemoaning my easily distracted nature and how I keep getting the stuff to make more things than I practically will be able to make as I’m buying.  She started gently questioning whether I could let some of the yarn go.  No, I said.  I’ve already gotten rid of what I don’t want, and have gotten good at not buying stuff just because it’s on sale or similar. I still want to knit all the stuff that I have.  I just can’t knit at the rate that amazing stuff keeps coming at me!  It will all get knitted, just not for a while.

“You’re saving yarn for your retirement!”  she said.

And she was right – that’s exactly what I’m doing.  So it isn’t my ridiculous yarn pile.  It’s my yarn-based 401K.