What Early retirement looked like for us

The master Plan

When I was younger, I had this notion I wanted to retire by age 50, thinking age 65 was too far away,

So at age 57 several events and circumstances made us consider early retirement.

Our new master plan was to sell our home and with the equity purchase our next home for cash.

But with the 2008 financial crash behind and no knowledge of what the future would hold, we decide that 2009 would be the time to move, and start a new adventure somewhere other than the Seattle area.

We made adjustments to our financial plan which allowed us sell out home and buy a new home. We would have sufficient monthly income, as in “money at the end of the month.”

After careful thinking we decide that our focus for a period would be, Volunteering and Learning.

Our new experiments and adventures would begin with the focus on Animals, Seniors, and Children

We would use our prior knowledge, passion, and life experiences to focus on these three areas. My wife volunteered in the animals area and I looked into the other two areas, Seniors and Children.

Animals

My wife volunteered with the local Animal Welfare group for several years. And then focused on two long time passions gardening and cooking.

Seniors

I visited the local Senior Center on several accessions, to offer help with computers and websites but no takers.

Children

I met the Executive Director of the Local Youth Club and they accepted my volunteering efforts. This adventure started in Aug of 2010 and is still ongoing today.

I have over the life of my volunteer service to the youth club upgraded their computers 3 times, along with monitors and networking equipment and cables.

We worked together and build a website which the club which they maintained over the years.

The club received a grant for a set of ChromeBooks for which I help set up and configuring for the children to use after school for homework assignments

Technology and learning

My background is in Information Technology. I registered my first domain in 1996 and had a small hosting account. I quickly learned the basics to self-maintaining my hosted website and email accounts. Since that time I have moved my website and email accounts around to several hosting companies until staying with the last one, Godaddy.com, for many years.

Prior to 2010 I had spent a small amount of time learning and creating HTML code for websites. But by the early part of 2010 with the advancement of software, the arrival of the software called CMS (Content Management Systems) for blogging and building websites. In addition to websites and blogging along came the emerging social media players. Many some social media players had evolved their platforms by this time. The various social media players and app available today are numerous, and too many to count.

My first CMS was Blogger, and I stayed with for I think several years. I soon learned that in my research the most widely over time was WordPress. Over the years I learned more and more about WordPress. WordPress’s Ecosystem has provided many individuals and companies the ability to create a mix of themes, plugins, frameworks, child theme, page builders, and services to manage multiple sites from a central location or site. These services would allow one person to manage many sites at one time providing the ability to do maintenance, updates, backups, security, and much more.

Websites Adventures
 In the beginning I created dozens of websites for local business to show that a website could provide a web presence for their business. A place for directions, business offerings, hours of operations, and so on. I made too many to mention and only about 5 non-profits accepted my offers. The rest saw no reason to have a website. There are still many business who back in 2010 had websites then and still none today. A few businesses have over the last three years have contracted with various website companies and today have a website. Sometimes things move slower than we want them to.

Desktop Support

I have over the course of my Information Technology career been able to fix many if not most issues with Computers, Desktop, Laptop, Servers. I have worked on Windows, IOS, and Linux Operating Systems. What I don’t know I can usually Google for the answer.

I have enjoyed helping a few friends and neighbors over the years with their technology challenges.

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Originally published at www.rogerskibowski.com.