Like an Aster, You May be a Late (Retiring) Bloomer

Guest Blogger John Brady:

As a successful Baby Boomer, you’ve worked hard, raised the kids -- and most importantly -- learned valuable lessons about life along the way. Retirement will be here soon, and it should be an autumnal blast of beauty and joy in your life, much like asters bring your garden back to life in the fall.

Retirement could be your second chance on life -- if you spend some quality time thinking about what you want out of this next phase of your life. But, if you don’t make that investment, your retirement could fizzle. Even if you have worked hard all your life, a beautiful retirement is not guaranteed by what you have done so far.

I write a lot about the best places to retire on my website, www.TopRetirements.com, which has a lot of resources to help you find where you should live in retirement. The where question, however, is not the only decision you have to make in retirement. For an enjoyable and satisfying retirement you must also answer the when, why, what, how questions. Planning, evaluating your options, and ranking your priorities will greatly increase your likelihood of success in retirement.

Anyone can skip this planning process and still enter retirement. The problem is that if you haven’t done the right spadework, you might miss your chance to bloom in the third season of your life.

To help get you started on your personal planning process, I have prepared an article that explains the most common retirement planning mistakes that people make. (Teri was once kind enough to link to it in her wonderful newsletter). Although the article concentrates on the negative, you will easily see how to turn those common errors into positive choices, taking the steps to achieve a happy and fulfilling retirement.

Spend a few hours planning and discussing your retirement with your significant other and you can effectively start your life over again, becoming a late bloomer like that beautiful flower, the aster.

Earth Day, Libraries and Free Jewelry

I have always hated waste. I try not to buy too much or too little, but like Goldilocks, try to find what is just right. That's not always easy to do, as we all know, but it's a worthy goal.

Since the world is now so focused on going "green," attempting to be just right has become a way of life. Sitting at a board meeting for our local library one night this week, I realized that libraries, so often threatened by budget cuts, are the ultimate green spaces. As we honor Mother Earth today, we should extend that to our libraries where being just right is an everyday thing. Want to read a book? Borrow it and return it, no waste involved, no cost either, another glowing tribute to our library systems.


In honor of Earth Day, I will be giving away two Bead for Life bracelets through this blog. These bracelets -- fashioned from recycled paper by women in Uganda who are now able to make a living wage through their labors -- are lovely and a terrific use of recycled resources. To enter to win, simply send an email with your mailing address to tkflatley@gmail.com.
Happy Earth Day!


Congrats, Jade, on winning the contest! Your beads will soon be on their way.

Twitter Times Two

Some days, you think you are zooming along on the Cyber Highway, thinking you've got everything under control. That is until you try to do something new and then it's a different ballgame.

I signed up for Twitter last week and when finishing up my profile I was told that my email and Twitter UN were already in use. But how could that be? It was me after all. So I redid the whole profile thing and got a confirmation that all of those details were good, only to find later that I now had two Twitter accounts.

I am not quite sure how that happened, but I guess what they say about it being easy to sign up is true.

So I am sticking with the second UN -- twitter.com/boom_this -- since that one has the most tweets and followers so far. Who am I to mess with success, no matter how small?

Mystery Solved: Why Robins Want in House

Since a particular robin is still trying to smash his way into our house through a window (see blog below), I decided to do a ltitle research. It turns out that robins (and cardinals) are very territorial and when they see their reflection in a window, they try to engage with the "other" bird to get him out of the way.

Since the window pecking began a couple of weeks ago, we had been trying to stop the bird from crashing at the window by placing stuffed cats in his line of sight, placing some garden statuary in his path (a bunny and St. Francis) and propping a folded up lawn chair in his way.

No luck. Yesterday he started pecking at a different window in the dining room. He would perch on the rhodedendron outside the window and then make a kamikaze move directly into the glass. I shook the blinds at him a couple of times but to no avail.

I'm not sure how long this will go on. You would think the bird would have figured out his task is useless by this point, but I am not sure that is going to happen. Being a bit on the stubborn side myself, I realize this could go on till the birds fly south in the fall. Hoping the windows hold up!

Thinking about Downsizing?

In a program last evening, my friend Vickie Dellaquilla of Organization Rules, Inc., offered some great tips for people who are thinking about downsizing their homes, whether they are Baby Boomers or seniors.

Here are some of her great ideas:

Get someone to help right at the beginning. You will need it.

Give yourself the luxury of time. Don't try to do everything in a week!

Set aside time on your calendar for downshizing and keep those appointments with yourself. They are as important as anything else you are doing.

If moving, get a floor plan for your new place with measurements marked off so you will know ahead of time what kind of space you will have and what you can bring with you.

Start de-cluttering in rooms or spaces you don't use every day, like the basement, garage, attic or a spare bedroom. Having some positive reinforcement after making headway in these rooms will keep you motivated.

And lastly, there's no other way to do this then to go through everything you own. It may seem daunting but if you limit yourself at first to small areas (a dresser, a closet) and stay focused, you will get it all done.

Stop back for more tips and visit Vickie's website at www.OrganizationRules.com.

And now Twitter too. . .

Well, I took another plunge today and signed up for Twitter. I'm sure that most of you have been on there so long you are true veterans -- it is THE place to be on the web at this particular point in time, but I was a little leary of joining. But once I launched the blog, it seemed like a logical next step -- if there is actually anything logical about the web.

My Twitter address is www.twitter.com/boom_this. Someone had already chosen the Twitter acoount using "boomthis" sans underscore, which bummed me out, but such is life for the not-so-early bird.

I hope you will join me here often and will "follow" my tweets if you are so inclined. I may not be Ashton Kutcher, but hey, I promise we will still have a good time!

Can you ever have too much chocolate?

Guest Blogger Kathleen Ganster:



“Is this edible?” I asked the helpful sales woman at the spa shop at The Hotel Hershey after I had slathered chocolate scented hand cream on my arm. “That is our most frequently asked question,” she replied.

I was in Hershey, PA -- “The Sweetest Place on Earth” -- with my daughter, Eliza, for a girl getaway and we were making the most of our time together. I love Hershey – I mean, who wouldn’t love a town built around chocolate?

I took it as a sign from God when I opened the morning paper the day of our trip and read that a daily dose of chocolate may actually help us live longer. Yippee, a license to eat chocolate! Not that I needed any encouragement.

Hershey has an amazing amount of fun things to do including the thing that Eliza and I loved best – a visit to The Spa at The Hotel Hershey. First, the Hotel was beautiful and had a very European feel to it (the intention of Hershey founder and hotel builder, Milton Hershey). We were delighted just driving up to the place! But then the spa...there is a variety of services offered many to do with chocolate. Eliza chose the chocolate fondue wrap and I had the cocoa massage. Although they weren’t edible, they were delicious!

Another fun task was the Countries of Origin chocolate tasting -- six shots of hot cocoa at the Cafe Zooka in the Hershey Museum. We couldn’t have been happier, drinking our chocolate and comparing notes. We also had the opportunity to visit Chocolate World, the gardens, the museum, and take a class at the Chocolate Lab at the museum. By the end of the two-day trip, we had to pass on a second chocolate tasting -- we did reach our limit. But we stocked up at the chocolate store at Chocolate World for the ride back home, just in case.

For more information about Hershey, visit http://www.HersheyPA.com/.