I’m in my mid 40’s and I am starting to think about my retirement years and what I will be doing with all the free time I will have but also with how little money I will actually have to do it with. Knowing that most males in my family have died young I feel that I should retire when I am in my late 50’s or work part time until the grim reaper takes me away. As part of my retirement I can see myself going on long tours locally and overseas depending on my economic situation.

So I am curious, does your retirement plans include long tours?

Gordon p

I retired last year at age 55, the soonest I was able to leave. Freedom 55.
Bought a road touring bike - 700 x 32 tires, 3 x 10 gears. drop handlebars. Totaled 1000 kms touring this summer in 4 short trips to work out the bugs and get a system down. Great learning experience.
Now I want to do some off-road touring so bought another bike. 26 x 1.75 tires, 3 x 9 gears with a 22 tooth granny gear, low riser handlebars. The good weather will be gone by the time I replenish the bank acct so have to satisfy myself with trails close to home until next summer.
No need to wait until you retire to start touring! Just do it!

jeesh, how depressing, Tour now! Any of us could die any time why wait to live a dream. Unless it means you'll be going hungry in a box in an alley. But hey if you are hungry in a box in an alley in Chile with a bike, you're touring!

that's the rub - american 'retirement' for those of us in our 30s and 40s will likely be putting many of us into the box in the alley so to speak.

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This. Don't wait until you retire to do things you think you'll enjoy. You may not live to see the day, and that would be a pity.

Having said that, I'm going to be out of work in a few months time. I'll be 56, and while I'm a long way from being rich I'll have a modest payoff coming and I don't think I'll be getting another job - certainly not a permanent, full-time job. So being a wage slave looks as if it's over for me and yes, more touring is very definitely on the agenda. I have various plans - TransCanada first, or possibly a loop from Ontario through Quebec, New England and back to Toronto via the great Lakes (I have friends in Toronto I haven't seen for a while). A very serious European tour is also on my list - from where I live i can take the ferry overnight to Amsterdam, and I have in mind a route through the Rhineland, the Swiss Alps, through Northern Italy as far south as Tuscany then west and back home through France. Still mulling over whether to extend that to take in the Iberian peninsula or save Spain, Portugal and (gasp) the Pyrenees for a separate trip. Coming to terms with the realisation that one has no deadlines and can take as long as one wants is going to be interesting.

I retired for the first time in 2004 at the age of 37. I quit my permanent job where I had been for about 8 years, gave up my apartment, got rid of half my stuff and put the other half into storage ... then travelled to Australia and toured by bicycle for the next 3 months.

When I returned to Canada, I went to University where I got a degree, took temporary jobs between semesters, and made a point of travelling and touring for a month or more each year for the next 5 years.

Don't wait 15 years to do long tours locally and overseas ... start now. If you haven't gone anywhere this year, take a month and go travel!!

I try to do one tour of a month or more per year if possible, now before I retire. I have not managed to do that every year though. So far I have managed a 73 day tour, missed a year due to injury, did a 10 day tour, and did a one month tour.

I expect to tour two or three months out of the year after I retire. That seems about right to me since I have no desire for shorter tours than 10 days or so and the round the world thing doesn't interest me. Then again I have other interests that might compete for my time so who knows. I might end up running coast to coast, sailing, backpacking, or kayaking instead some years.

Uh.... If you know that most of your male relatives died young, why not use that information to live longer and better? E.g. if your family has a history of heart disease and high blood pressure, you can take steps to stay healthier and avoid that fate.

Otherwise, I see no particular reason to wait to at least do some short tours.

Good advice. If you know what they died of you can probably avoid a similar fate in most cases.

Also good advice to tour now rather than wait for retirement.

I retired last spring at 56. I have never talked to anyone that retired early and regretted it unless they had a financial problem. Although my pension benefit is less than one third of what my salary had been, I can get by on that with the savings that I have.

I have no really epic touring plans yet, but I have a few decades to change that.

I recall in the early 1970s when I was a kid in boy scouts, one of the scout leaders mentioned that he could retire the next week. I looked at him and said "but you are a young guy, how can you do that?" He responded that he joined the navy at age 17, got out of the navy and a year latter started to work for the post office. In a week he was going to be 48 and would have 30 years towards a federal pension. But, he said that he planned to work until he was 55 for the better retirement. He had also been working part time in the evenings and had all of his wages from that part time job go to social security so that he could double dip, that was before a double dipping rule took effect that would have limited that. BUT - - he died a couple years later from a massive heart attack. He never got a chance to reap the benefits of his hard work and long term planning towards an early retirement.

Don't worry about touring. Retire now and touring will find it's place in your life. The single most serious impediment to enjoying life is a full-time job, no matter how much one may like it.

Start touring now. Do some weekend and week long tours. I went for a week in June and am going for a about 4 days in Oct.

Get out there now, get some of the equipment and take shake out trips to know what works for you. By the time you retire you will have all the equipment (without large cost impacts) and just have to go.

I plan to continue to tour when I retire, just a lot of short trips, my wife doesn't ride much and doesn't tour, my trips with her will be without a bike or local rentals.

I admire you! I'll be retiring in two years when I hit 50 and the first thing I'll do is the Northern Tier. After that I plan to do one big tour every year ( Rt 1 Iceland, SW France, NW Scotland are all on the list) and ride my bikes every day for fun and to do shopping and trips downtown. I have an excel spreadsheet count down to the big day when I can say goodbye to work and do this so I can fill my time with this

I've done a fair bit of cycling, including touring, in the Scottish Highlands. You'll love it.

I'm working on an early retirement right now. My "Plan B" which kicks in if my current business venture falls through (50/50 chance) involves both boats and bikes.

Sell the lot, buy a good used, outfitted C-dory 22 and a BikeFriday touring bike and live on the loop until I get bored or something presents itself.

If your not familiar with the Great Loop, give it a search, it's a year, 4 seasons boat tour that circumnavigates the eastern third of the US. It's approx. 7000 water miles / 365 days in a year = less than 20 miles a day. That means traveling about 80 miles a day and spending several days at a time in different locations. That's where the bike touring comes in, short 3-5 day tours from various locations along the loop.

Unlike RV travel, you can drop anchor virtually anywhere you can get out of the wind and boat traffic. No cost for a RV park and your not packed into a tiny parking lot, you have the best seat in the house every night.

Aren't there fees for dropping anchor in many places?

There are fees at marinas, usually about $1.5 per foot of boat length, and 50 cents per foot on mooring balls. But no one owns the open water way, anchor where you like as long as it's safe for you and other boaters. I'm sure there are some restricted areas in State Parks or protected areas, but they are all marked on the charts.

We decided life was too short to put our dreams on hold until "retirement". We just left work and took off to go travel the world with our children and figure we'll have to work a few more years as old foagies to make up the difference. To our way of thinking, it was better to take advantage of our (relative) youth and strength (we're both 50-something) and go touring now rather than waiting and then ending up too old to be able to do it.

We're now 27 months into this journey and are loving it! It'll be tough to go back home, but we'll cross that bridge when we get tehre.

Bike touring helped maintain what ever sanity I have had throughout my life whether I worked for myself or for others. Commuting by bike maintained or improved my base fitness and prepared me for touring. In turn each method saved money which paid for bikes, maintenance and travel costs.

I think of retirement at any age as removing oneself as much as possible from the herd driven consumption mentality promoted on most media. Bike touring is viewed as an eccentric non-productive activity by mainstream society. Yet the intangible benefits to health and mind are priceless in my experience. As are the people and cultures met along the routes. You can never start too early to retire TO bike touring even if you still maintain a job periodically to finance your other life.

Yes, though I'm not awaiting retirement to take those long tours. At age 29, I took a six week tour. At age 34, I took off for 3 months. At age 38, I took off for 12 months. At age 44, I took off for 10 months. The next likely mark on the wall is when I'm 50 and I'm already dreaming and scheming of different possibilities somewhere between 6 and 24 months (depends a little what my employer says - if I can get a LOA it might be 6 months; if I can't then I'll quit and find another job on my return). In total, I'm thinking of spending 8 of the next 18 years working and the other 10 on vacation.

So, while I enjoy my work and get a lot of satisfaction from it, I'm not expecting a single model where I only work for a set number of years and then retire and don't work again. Instead, I've been taking some longer breaks along the way. I feel fortunate enough to have had some circumstances that have helped: being in a profession that has paid fine and being good at what I do, as well as being flexible enough to have moved across the US for different jobs. I've also been quite frugal in spending below my means and thus been able to take those longer breaks.

Tour now worry about retirement later. We were SUPPOSED to retire in 2 years but 9/11 put a dent in that (wife is a 28 year veteran of the no longer friendly skies) We are probably about 3 years behind schedule, but we travel and enjoy things now. Longer term plans include a BF NWT with the suitcase option and a long term Amtrak pass

Aaron

It makes the most financial sense to work until I'm 64 with my particular retirement plan. I've been thinking about what tours I'd like to do when I am free to devote as much time as I want, and the first one that comes to mind is a Trans-Am, probably the Northern Tier route. But I'd also like to do more riding in Europe, and visit New Zealand and South America. Meanwhile, I commute to work, take recreational rides on the weekends and try to tour every summer or fall. I expect to be in good shape for touring when I clean off my desk for the last time (okay, the first time).

I never heard of the great Loop and I have actually canoed, kayaked, hiked and cycled the entire Canadian section of it! It sounds like a brilliant idea for part of my golden years.

Gordon p

My genetics had Glaucoma kick in, so touring away from my meds, = going painfully blind,
and medicated eyedrops need to be kept cool , no putting the stuff in a pocket.
and VA is my sole source of health care , no fluid address possible , fixed home of record only..

A quick search shows lots of options for keeping meds cool for traveling, from 18hr insulated cool packs, to micro-refrigerators like this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Medicools-Medi...f=pd_sbs_hpc_3

This one is 12 volts, but if you really wanted to tour, I'll bet you could get or make a custom that would work off a generator hub.