Barcelona Smart Streets: Living The Semi-Retired Life

For a review of what we’ve done so far in February, see the Never Retire archive.

This is post #18 of 20 for the month, which is coming to you from Barcelona, the last leg of our month-long, five-city trip in Spain and Italy.

Today’s Never Retire checklist item—living the semi-retired life—ahead of a full treatment of the subject in March, when I’ll write 20 posts in 31 days, meticulously detailing each of the 20 checklist items.

If I made any mistakes when I launched this newsletter—and I’m sure I did—the biggest was probably calling it the Never Retire newsletter. Even though we dispel it regularly, when people hear Never Retire they take it as a negative. Because the popular media tends to frame the traditional retirement crisis alongside cries of I’ll Never Retire. They don’t offer helpful advice, concrete solutions, or alternative strategies. It’s almost always here’s how much more you must save to catch up.

I probably should have called the newsletter something like How To Live The Semi-Retired Life. Because, for many of us who will Never Retire, this is the alternative.

We will spend post #18 in March defining the semi-retired life generally, then specifically based on different situations. We’ll consider ways to structure it and why it beats the hell out of the life many people lead on the road to an increasingly elusive traditional retirement.

We will also spend a meaningful amount of time on how important your surroundings—the built environment—can be to your semi-retired life. Young and especially old, good mobility matters. And nobody does it better than Barcelona, as I attempt to show in a second.