Yesterday we had a little fun trip to surprise Leslie’s dad on his retirement day.  They live a short drive away.  I think the round trip total was 321 miles.

We left early about 6:20am and when we got into town we picked up a bunch of balloons and then headed over to their house.  We rang the doorbell, and the look on her mom’s face was priceless.  It was a fun day.   We went out to lunch and sat around most of the day just listening to some of his stories from the past.  It was a good day.  We headed on home about 6:15pm.  Leslie and just chatted our way home.  We talked about church, her co-worker who was looking at engagement rings, and my soccer team and their game this weekend. We arrived home about 8:45pm.

It was a long, long day but very well worth it.

After all the recent talks about the market, etc. I was thinking back to when I actually did some rather small online trading in my attempts to make some money.  Now I did make some but not a whole lot really as I never invested more than $1000, and after looking back over the years I probably should have just kept that money in the account and put it on some long term growth accounts, but I was younger and obviously I didn’t care.

Now I really should be looking into some type of retirement fund so it can start building over the next 30 years.  Crap I still have 30 years to go, wow, that sounds horrible, lol.  Anyways my goal in 2009 is to get back to investing somewhere so we are actually trying to earn something with our money instead of spending it.

While I was doing some filing in the home office I ran across some quarterly reports that talked about my wife’s retirement.  After reading over the statement I came to a realization that we are technically losing money in this 403-B account that she has.  This is pretty much our only fund that we have money in.  Well I take that back.  We do have a teacher retirement account from Washington State when she worked up there and that still makes some money every month.  I do not have any 401K accounts of stock accounts.

We have thought about talking to someone we met at one of our community groups who is a financial planner and trying to straighten out some things and find out how we can make more instead of losing (like we have done the past 3-6 months).  Maybe we need to check out stocks? Mutual Funds? maybe we need to talk to a futures broker.  I don’t really know.  But we probably shouldn’t put this decision off to much longer as by the time we retire we probably won’t have social security.  lol

We all have a preferred method of how we get around these days. Bike, Car, Truck, Boat, Bus, Plane, you name it. But what do most do when you get closer to retirement age?

Well a lot of people usually opt in to get a RV to cruise around the country. That would be fun wouldn’t it? Maybe you could check to see if there is a bus for sale and cruise around in a bus. Or just by car and make some mini trips.

Some may just spend their savings on some beach front property and just get a bike or motorcycle. Well I have a bunch of time before I reach these decisions, so for now I will continue to drive my SUV..