Shifting Priorities in Early Retirement

It's been quite interesting to observe how my priorities have been shifting over the 18 months since I retired. It's also been interesting to observe the change in my perspective, but I'll save those thoughts for another post. For now, suffice it to say that people were absolutely correct when they suggested I would continue to change for many months and years to come.

As the year draws toward a close, a review of our 2012 budget worksheet shows how our priorities have changed. Keeping in mind that our budget is very specific, containing some 35 categories, this is what just a few of the more telling categories seem to be showing so far:

• Clothing - I had fully expected to utilize this category at 100% based on my pre-retirement clothes shopping behavior. To my pleasant surprise, we appear to be on track to end the year at less than 30% usage. Entering retirement, I had wondered how much of my pre-retirement clothes shopping behavior was a form of stress-release. It appears I now have my answer.
• Electronics - This was more my husband's category than mine, but again, as we approach year end, this category is way under budget, at just 14% usage currently. In discussing this with my husband, it would appear that similar to my using (abusing?) clothes shopping as a way of relieving stress pre-retirement, he enjoyed hanging out at Best Buy for pretty much the same reason. Now that he's retired, he's finding that he rarely daydreams any longer about chasing down the newest electronic gadgets because he's far too satisfied with the life he now has, just as it is.
• Entertainment - We're way under here as well, primarily because we utilized Goldstar so heavily, saving 50% on almost every entertainment decision we made. Many of the discount offers on Goldstar were last minute, but because we were retired, we had the flexibility to jump on them.
• Groceries - I was concerned about staying on budget initially, which I detailed pretty comprehensively here in this post, but once I began following a meal plan and preparing almost everything from scratch, our spend fell back in line, and we're on track to end the year right at 100% usage.
• Hobbies - We are on track to be at 100% usage in this category as well, which I had expected, because pursuing our various interests is, of course, so much of what we had hoped to do in retirement. What surprised me however, is how much more bang we ended up getting for our buck. We modified a lot of the expensive hobbies we used to do, like buying new books at the drop of a hat, or taking private dance lessons, by changing over to equally satisfying, but less expensive, alternatives, like getting books from the library and taking group dance lessons. As a result, we ended up doing a whole lot more of everything we enjoy without blowing our budget.
• Gardening and Housecleaning Services - These are my guilty luxuries, and even after 18 months of retirement I have no desire to give either one of them up. Ever. I have, however, cut down on the frequency with which my cleaning service comes to the house, primarily because of how much less often we're even home to mess it up.
• Pet Care - I'm very sad to report that we exceeded our annual allocation here by about 100%. The reason for the overage is what I'm particularly sad about - our dear, sweet dog developed liver disease, and we almost lost her as a result. She surprised all however, including our vet, by making a full recovery. Although we do have a Major Expenditures allocation we could have turned to, we had enough under-utilization in our other allocations to more than make up this category's overage, so it's ending up to be a non-issue, budget wise.
• Restaurant Dining - Up until now, we've been running well under budget due to our regular usage of Groupon and TravelZoo for obtaining dining deals. Entering December, however, it feels nicely decadent to have a surplus. I'm looking forward to using up some of it on special holiday meals out with friends and family. 
• Travel - Well, you can probably already guess the situation here . . . it appears we will end the year at almost exactly 100% usage - just $3.00 under as a matter of fact. And I wouldn't change a darn thing, nor take back one single trip we enjoyed this past year.

What I'm finding at this point, is that we are quickly distancing ourselves from the type of spend that results in an accumulation of things, and are instead focusing our spend on an accumulation of experiences. This is exactly what we had visualized for our early retirement when we first began discussing it some years back, so I'm very happy to see that that appears to be precisely what is occurring.

As my very wise blogger friend Suzanne wrote below, Funny how the things that used to matter get replaced with what truly makes us happy when we have the time to enjoy life.