Diet time!

Well, I have put on 12 lbs in 5 weeks since I stopped being so strict.

Time to get strict again. I have a goal, lose 25lbs by August 12, the day we leave for Playa del Carmen for our vacation. I want to look awesome there on the beach instead of looking like a washed up sea creature of unknown origin!

I also have my 30th high school reunion on August 1, even more the reason to get it off.

Here we go. 1800 calories a day, 1 hour of cardio and continue to lift heavy weight. I can DO this!

Still dreaming

I have found that my dreaming of moving to Mexico or Central America when I retire has not lessened at all.  I am still looking at websites, blogs and books about living in those areas.  I am in the process of refinancing my house to lower my rate to 4.75%, and am planning to put the difference in my payment into my IRA.  If I do that right away, I won't miss the money!

Also I met with the director of the Verbo Nicaragua Development Fund over lunch on Monday.  He gave me a great overview of some of the humanitarian missions being done in Nicaragua by his organization.  We have tentatively decided that I should go with him in late August or early September.  I have figured out a simple system that the businesses could use to track income and expenses, so I should be able to teach the workers pretty easily.  I look forward to the trip!

Colombian food is awesome!

Just got home from my dinner date with my old band teacher, Mike Kirby. Wow, our 4 hours passed in a flash. I had a platter of food, way too much too eat,but I gave it my best. The dish was called Bandeja Paisa, and it was definitely not a heart healthy meal. A small piece of steak, sausage, chicharrones (really thick bacon almost burned), refried beans, rice, a small half -avocado, a fried plantain, and one fried egg on top of the rice. Gut buster! Also tried an excellent Colombian beer called Aguila.


Mike and I had a lot of fun talking about the joys and pitfalls of learning Spanish, and I am glad we have reconnected. Next time, though, we have to speak Spanish a lot more than we did tonight.

a blast from the past

Tonight at 6, I will be meeting my Jr High band teacher for supper at El Desorden, a local restaurant serving Colombian cuisine. I have not seen Mr. Kirby in 30 or so years, and I can't wait to catch up with him. Facebook placed us back in contact after all these years. What is really interesting is, Mr. Kirby has recently taken up Spanish ( 4 semesters at a local communtiy college), and we are going to try to speak it some tonight. He is single, and travels a lot, just recently arriving back from a visit with friends in Venezuela. This should be a lot of fun tonight.

One of my clients is a ministry to Nicaragua called Verbo Nicaragua Development Fund.  The director has asked me to go to Managua in August to give a seminar in basic accounting to some of the micro-businesses the ministry has helped start up.  He told me that many people in Nicaragua have no concept of simple profit and loss principles, even the one that says you have to sell something for more than it costs you in order to make a profit.

This is exciting to me.  I am not sure God orchestrates our lives in a puppeteer fashion, but I do believe he has circumstances arise which give us choices, and opportunities.  I am just so happy that I will get to visit a prospective retirement country and do something good while I am there. Next step is to come up with about $1,000 to go!

Now I have to overcome my fear of public speaking, and figure out what I am going to say in a couple of days in order to teach these people some accounting! 

At least I have a few months to figure it out, and to learn as much as possible about Nicaragua.  I might even be able to get my Spanish skills up by then!

Where to begin?

Wow, I have a blog!  Now I just have to figure out what to write.  I am 47, married for almost 25 years, have 2 boys in their early 20's, a wonderful 10 year old daughter, and am a CPA in a small firm.  A CPA for 26 years, going through the motions, not passionate at all about it, just doing it to earn a paycheck.  Wanderlust runs in my genes, seriously, my father had at least 15 jobs as I grew up, among them:  truck driver, Army corporal, Methodist minister, milk delivery driver, cook on a tugboat, insurance salesman, disc jockey, business equipment salesman, the list goes on and on. Me, I have the wanderlust too, but have controlled it well.  I don't hate being a CPA, but it is certainly no passion of mine.

Now that I have 2 sons almost out of college, and am rapidly approaching the big 50th birthday (well, 2 1/2 years from now), I am finally realizing: I will never be able to retire if I stay in the USA.  I have about $30,000 in my IRA, no equity in my house and 28 years left to pay on it, huge health insurance premiums, a fairly low salary, and not a lot of time to save that $1 million I need in order to retire.  Because we decided to go to Playa del Carmen for our 25th anniversary, I began looking at web info about Mexico, and one thing led to another.  I have stumbled upon the possibility of retiring in Mexico or Central America.  This would really be a dream come true for me, and the much lower cost is just a bonus.

My wife, much to my surprise, did not laugh and eliminate the possibility right off the bat.  She asked if it were really possible to retire on social security alone down there, and I said, I think so. She then commented that she would need to learn Spanish, to which I responded, you and I have 15 years to learn it (I need to re-learn it).

We both are fairly down-to-earth, and don't need a lot of "stuff", so we may be able to pull it off, and be happy in Mexico. Another thing we want to be able to do is volunteer work, and Lord knows, there is plenty of that to do, no matter what country we live in.  Going somewhere inexpensive, where we could retire at 62, and have some great years left, to have fun again, chase dreams, help others, and be like kids again in some ways, has great appeal to me.

Anyway, I have to somehow make a plan of action for this, and save as much money as possible in my IRA for the next 15 years, and hope SS is still around.  I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never retire, so I really gave up on saving for it a few years back.  Maybe with this hope of going south, I can get motivated to do some serious saving.