Options

One of the things I have been thinking about lately is options – options for future employment and future lifestyle.

When I was in my twenties and thirties, I had lots of options; the world was waiting for me to choose what I wanted and where I wanted to do it.  I had always found it easy to land a job; Jim was the same way.  We would dream and talk about what our future held and how we anticipated retiring early.

That was then, and this is now.  We are at the age where we had expected to retire.  Now the dreams are more realistic, the options fewer.

Somewhere along the way, options began to disappear  Once we both hit 50, we realized that we weren’t prize candidates for new jobs anymore; for me, it was even worse because I couldn’t find a full-time job at all.  It wasn’t until about a year ago that I really lucked out and was hired at what I call a real job – meaningful work in an industry I know, doing work I really enjoy and for decent money.

But where do we go from here?  We’d like to travel, we’d like to have more time to volunteer, we’d like to have more time to work at our hobbies.  Retirement isn’t an option for us in the near future.  Do we continue at these same jobs for the next 8, 10 years and try to position ourselves for some sort of retirement afterward?  Do we try to move to where we’d prefer to live, knowing that any jobs we get would be a real backward step?  Can we even expect to get different jobs that we’d half-way enjoy?  Could we scale back our lifestyle and make the sacrifices we’d need to make to semi-retire? Should we? 

The lack of options concerns me.   It’s no longer a matter of choosing where to live, where to work and how long to work; now it’s more about whether any of those are choices we can make.  To some extent, of course, they are; we always have a choice.  But the practicalities of real estate values, lack of employment for mature folks like us and family circumstances are at work as well, and they can’t be ignored. 

Lots of questions; very few answers.  Time continues to slip away and so, seemingly, do the number of options open to us.  Are there things I’m not seeing; opportunities that I’m missing?  Maybe it’s time to think outside the box and see what else there is out there for us.