Too Busy To Blog

Hi, Friends,

In 10 more days it will be official, I'll be retired. I had no idea how much work it would be in order to get retired. I had no idea how much paper work would be involved and how much planning I would need to have done.

First it took me a couple of months just to reach my decision to investigate retiring. I had to find out about how much I would receive from Social Security and my pension from the church. But still I did not know whether I could afford to retire. So, I consulted a financial advisor who was a great help. I would recommend her to anyone.

The first thing she did was to have me sit down and figure out what all of my expenses would be in retirement. I was surprised at how much I would need as a minimum amount. That made me question all the more whether I could afford to stop working. But she looked at my few investments and guided me into mazximizing my benefits in retirement by rolling over as much of my pension as possible and drawing on an innuity that I did have the good sense to set up years ago.

Doing all of this made me take stock of how foolishly I had handled much of my money over these years. A divorce didn't help at all, either. And I also realized that it had a greater cost to probably both of us than each of us ever realized at the time we went through it. (How I wish I had used my head a lot better back then than I did, but we can't go back, can we?)

At any rate, what I started out to say was that all this preparing to retire was a lot of work. (I advise you to start planning now, the younger the better.) And all this time consuming chore took away time from doing other things such as tending to my blog.

So here is what I have learned during this time:

1) Don't expect the future to take care of itself no matter how generous God is. God expects us to cooperate with the grace He provides us. It's one ting to rely on God for your future, but it's another to rely on God and plan for your future. The latter has much more of God's blessings than the former.

John Wesley called it "cooperating grace," that is, our working along with the grace God bestows. If we do work with God our plans work out a lot better and go a lot farther than just hoping that the future will be fine. My advice: plan as you would if you knew that the future will be bleak, and put it all in God's hands. You'll be amzed at the outcome.

2) While planning for the future, don't forget to enjoy the present. Some people can get so caught up in securing their future that the present becomes such a chore and only a means to enjoy the future. Instead of living today they put off living until then. But the truth is "then" may never come. Now is all we are sure of. If the future is to come, it will come. The quality of it however, does depend on our prpearing for it, but not at the cost of today's joys. Today has enough cares of its own. And if by the grace of God we live to have a future we won't know how to enjoy the future either if today is spent on what might be instead of what is. Plan, but don't forget to live.

3) Less philosophicly, seek help in planning your future. Seek God's help at all times in all things, of course, but seek practical help from professionals. The best thing I've done in preparing to retire was to seek the help of a financial advisor. I just wonder how better off I would have been if I had sought out such a person a long time ago?

4) Don't let things go. Wheter it's the future, or your house, or your health, or your spiritual life. TAKE CARE OF IT NOW! Things don't take care of themselves. Take care of it before it falls into disrepair, whatever it is.

5) Lastly, "Work as if everythng depends on you and pray as if everthing depends on God."