The ghost of retirement future

This is my 8th blog post for the Blaugust 2026 community blogging project. Join me all this month for more blogging. Today I am celebrating the one-year anniversary of the next chapter of my life: retirement. I am having a great retirement. In the years approaching, I gave it a lot of thought and was prepared for it. The way I see it, I am no longer employed, but I have a job: be retired. I had an experience back around 2009 that showed me what a bad retirement could look like. It scared me, like Scrooge being visited by the Ghost of Retirement Future, and made me determined to follow a different path. The location was The Villages, Florida. It’s the largest retirement community in the US. People in The Villages tend to be well off. It’s a very Trumpy place. In other words, it’s full of ignorant, entitled assholes. My spouse and I were there visiting a family member. (If you ask me whether they were an ignorant Trumpy asshole, I will plead the Fifth.) One morning, we went off to find…