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Good Bye Grandma and Grandpa!
I wish we were leaving on a vacation to a nice warm spot for the winter to ease the Mr. Arthur Itus in our bones. Maybe a cruise around the Hawaiian Islands would be nice.
We planned on those things for our retirement, we even took a cruise or two and traveled in our RV across the USA for 3 months. It was glorious, all the fun of new places, new people and learning about this wonderful country. Visiting Landmarks we had never seen but heard about all our lives. We planned on living on our Retirement Income and managing till Our Lord called us home. We visited Family and friends on our journey and then headed back home. Truly the Golden Years we had heard about were even better than we had anticipated. My husband was a firefighter who went out on a disability after 26 years on the job. I finally had to put in for my SSDI after my MS took over my life, with Pain more than I could sometimes handle. We managed to do things pretty well. Unfortunately that all came to an end. Health problems in sued and then came the financial problems. We thought we were ready but quickly dipped into our savings to get by. Medical bills piled up, Prescription's piled up and then our dreams started to crash rapidly. We didn't have enough Health insurance to compensate for all the problems that were coming. Broken Legs, Surgeries, Cancer, Heart surgeries, pacemaker, valves, bypass, you name it. Near death experiences seem to be our new passion. We prayed to survive and make it through every time a new event occurred. We wanted to enjoy our Grandkids and watch them grow. Their smiles and giggles made our hearts smile and the pain disappear.

We never planned on being here, in this predicament, ever. We used our home and its growing equity to make our life easier. You see, when your old and disabled you now have to pay folks to do the things you always did before and took for granted. Like pruning a tree, fixing a faucet, repairing a fence and so on. Those little jobs add up and can shrink your wallet quickly. We took out loans to get by and planned on selling our current home in this big California Housing market and find a smaller cheaper home for our retirement.
It was going along as planned, we felt secure in our investment, our home. We spent some evenings dreaming about moving and looking at homes for sell. We had a great plan for our retirement years to be Golden once again. Health wise we had pretty much had everything fixed, replaced or removed

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