Living The Semi-Retired Life: How A Diverse Community Forms Around A Common Theme

I want to build something bigger and more meaningful than your garden variety newsletter. And I think—together—we are.

In today’s post, I detail why I think this and what it means.

It’s easy to build a community around a shared interest or interests. Initially—and, turns out, naively—that’s what I thought we were doing here. However, as this thing of ours has grown, I discovered a great diversity among subscribers.

While the hook for reading this newsletter centers around Never Retiring first and, as it has evolved, Living The Semi-Retired Life, we have a great number of subscribers who fall into neither camp. And, of course, many others identify with one or both themes. No matter where you find yourself there’s something about the things we discuss that resonate with a broad swath of people. This makes me feel like we’re doing something right. Like we’re building a long-term, sustainable community.

The other day, I jotted down notes about how this community functions in my day-to-day life:

• Three years ago and, at the time, 12 years into my writing career, I started writing on Medium. Thanks to

  Ben Le Fort
  and his Making of a Millionaire publication, I was able to start this newsletter.

• Also, thanks to Ben and Medium, I met

  Charlie Brown
  . Pretty incredible that we became friends and I can now say that me and my partner are friends with Charlie and her husband, Sam. We saw each other earlier this year in Barcelona. We’ll do likewise early next year.

• I was going to list names, but, for fear of leaving people out, I’ll just say we have a solid core of subscribers who regularly like and comment on articles. There are people—I’ll call out

  Olaf Ransome
  as an example—who, if they didn’t leave a comment or otherwise engage, I’d worry about their well-being or that they no longer enjoy the newsletter!

• Then, like I tend to be, we have an even larger core of people who regularly read (I can see this in the data), yet don’t engage. This is also typical—and even a healthy element—of communities, particularly ones that form and grow online.

The people who subscribe to this newsletter have opened my mind and broadened my horizons on things I either never thought of or know very little about—from working in the pit at a casino to the specifics behind farming and local/global food supplies.

At the same time, via emails, comments and other engagement, they help me make sense of my life—past, present and anticipated future—and semi-retirement plans. Case in point, I recently got over the nervousness and told my almost 20-year old daughter about my plans to move to another country. I probably should not have been nervous, but I was. I plan to write about how it went, but an earlier post on the subject helped me through it.

So it’s a two-way street.

A give-and-take that’s resulting in something many of us crave—community.

With all of this said, I will continue to—

• Chronicle m,y partner and I’s journey on the road to Spain as well as our travel adventures prior to, during and after the eventual migration.

• Discuss practical personal finance ideas and strategies that apply specifically to those of us who Live The Semi-Retired Life, but are easily adaptable and accessible to people in other situations.

Speaking of Ben Le Fort, he recently asked:

I said I prefer #2. And that’s what I will do for the duration as my situation changes and evolves. I’m recently 48 years old with plans to write this newsletter for the duration. If you don’t hear from me for more than a week, you know what likely happened. But, don’t worry, we have a solid 52 years to go. Knock on wood and all of that.

Anyhow, I like to survey the landscape from time to time to keep focus, update long-time subscribers and get relatively new subscribers up to speed.

The big money lesson here—surround yourself with diverse people and influences. Because that’s where you’ll expose yourself to thoughts, ideas and even strategies you likely would not have thought about otherwise. This includes, but also goes beyond this newsletter.

One of the best moves of my life was taking a partial hiatus from writing to work in the hospitality industry. If I never did that, I likely would not have met my partner. We’re going on three years now and planning the aforementioned move. So, right there, it was worth shifting gears for a while.

In addition, I met and became friends with people through working in the service industry who I probably never would have met or became friends with if I didn’t work in the space. People who are very different from me in many ways, but also share broad and even some specific similarities on how we view quality of life and such.

This move also led to a new writing opportunity during the pandemic. Which led to this podcast I appeared on early last year. While it’s a year-and-a-half old, it remains relevant.

Plus, it helps situate for new and old subscribers why I started writing about the things I have been writing about for the last three years, during this second and, hopefully, final act of my career.