Please note: This article is transcribed via AI from our Healthcare Facilities Network video titled “Life is short: Retirement Adventures.” Please excuse any misspellings. Watch the video of this transcription here.
Peter Martin
Hello, and welcome to the healthcare facilities network. I am your host Peter Martin, president of Gosselin/ Martin associates. As always, I appreciate you clicking on this particular video. And today, I am happy and I am pleased to introduce Carol McCormick, my guest for today. Carol, welcome.
Carol McCormick
Thank you, Peter. Glad to be here.
Peter Martin
Well, thank you for joining. So Carol. Carol retired from healthcare facilities management at the end of this year just did you read on January 1 or December 31?
Carol McCormick
Actually, actually January 7, January. So well, and a tip for those people thinking about retiring. If you at least with my employer, if I if I at least work one or two days of the month. I had health care coverage for that whole month. So you know it, Peter, it’s funny the things you learn in retirement about how to do certain things. So yeah, so I retired on the seventh to January. Yeah.
Speaker 1 1:05
Awesome. Awesome. And that’s why I asked Carol, if she could come back on so just you whenever you watch this particular video because they do live on YouTube, we are recording during the heart of the summer. It’s July 10 is July 10, or 11th. Right. So you’ve been retired? Seven, six months.
Carol McCormick
Six months.
Peter Martin
Carol, where are you right now? Because you are the first person to appear at a location like this. Where are you?
Carol McCormick
Oh, believe it or not,
Peter Martin
where are you sitting? What are you sitting in?
Carol McCormick
Sitting I’m sitting in my in my motorhome, the motorhome that we bought so that we could retire and travel. Btinh, it is actually sitting in my driveway at home in Glenwood Iowa. We just got home yesterday. So
Carol McCormick
We got back from Lake Anita State Park, which is one of the many state parks in Iowa. It it’s it’s a little lake, they dammed up a little creek, you could do a lot of kayaking. There’s, you know, the week is a no wake lake. So there’s a lot of fishing, kayaking, bike riding, sitting around the campfire, things of that nature. We were there with? Were there were five other couples. So it was it was fun. We had a good time. We spent about five days there.
Peter Martin
Yeah. Nice. So I do I want to jump into to what you’re doing now Carol had appeared on our hybrid, high reliability podcasts probably two years ago now. And then when you were high reliability podcast right. Before you retired, you talked about how you had always planned on getting your mobile home and traveling, you know, traveling the country. So I kind of want to talk to you a little bit about that. But first, before we go that route, Carol, how has has retirement been for you? What you thought it would be relative to leaving work? Do you miss it? Are there times where you’re nostalgic? How has it been these six months?
When is the right time to retire?
Carol McCormick
You know, it’s it’s it’s been wonderful, really? No offense to those lovely people that I’ve worked with? I love them dearly. But I don’t I don’t miss it. I really don’t the uh, you know, I’ve been busy. I’ve been busy with some issues with family and then been busy traveling a little bit. And I’ve only been back once to say hi. And I’ve only got maybe half a dozen phone calls. What about this? So I either left them nothing or I left them enough stuff that they managed to get to get by. But it’s been really good. I really don’t miss I don’t miss go into work theater. I don’t I don’t miss it at all.
Peter Martin
That’s great. You know, it’s it’s funny, because I mean, you know, people like this, there are some folks who retire and they just want to stay involved a little bit and kind of maintain the retirement life, but also keep a foot back in there. And so you’re in that other bucket where you washed your hands and you moved along?
Carol McCormick
Well, sorta I mean, I’m still an ashy member. I still I still, you know, get the magazine I still read the magazine I still you know, when you’re when you’re when you’re the man you work for is going to be actually President next year, you stay a little you stay a little connected. I worked on a skin to skin to girl for a number of years. And I think honestly, Peter, I think if things were a little different with with my own life and with not having some of the some of the parental health issues that I have right now. I I might have I might have, you know, if the right thing would have come along I might have said yes. But right now it’s just not good possibility for me. You know, my my intention was to actually You’d probably be down near San Antonio, the first week of August. And that just, you know, that just didn’t work out. So at this point, you know, God works in, in, in wonderful ways. And I’m available to, to help with my parents health issues and still do a little bit of my traveling plans. And so that’s what we’re doing right now. But not to say that I’ve written off getting back into healthcare doing some some consulting stuff or something like that, when the when the time’s right, if the right if the right person calls.
Peter Martin
Well, that makes that makes a big difference when you can pick and choose who the right person is. So I guess I was gonna ask you, and it doesn’t sound like it’s, you’re gonna be there, you won’t be at the Ashi annual downs. And he told you
Carol McCormick
no, I won’t. Like I said, that was the intention, but just a little too far away from home right now.
Peter Martin
So sure. Now, when we were talking before I hit the record button, you were talking about one of the things that you have found you missed from when you worked full time. What what what is that?
Carol McCormick
My it friends. You know, as much as much as we complained about the ID guys, right? Technology on the road, and our V is very, is very interesting, you know, you don’t have immediate access to Wi Fi. Unless you, you get it all set up correctly in your motor home and everything else. And you know, so right now I’m living off the hotspot on my phone, you know, but But I might have to reach out to one of them and say, hey, help me get this setup better. So that, like I warned you, Peter, at any point, this screen could go blank, and I won’t even have any idea why. Yeah, well,
Peter Martin
that’s why I want to ask that question number one, Carol, because like you just said, if you go blank, then people will understand why. But also, the other thing is you said it is always a convenient scapegoat. I mean, everybody can always point to it, whether it’s post construction, or when when you don’t have the money or when something doesn’t work. So it’s good to give. Give the IT folks some positive, positive visibility.
Peter Martin
So Carol, just last thing relative to kind of planning did you when you were considering retirement, so when you were still working? You know, I talked to I released an episode a couple of weeks ago, I talked to Jack Gosselin, who you know very well, my business partner, and Zach is, you know, he’s half in half out and Ed Brown. So we did a, we did a conversation with those two, they both have their captain’s license now. So they’re on the water here on the East Coast, you’re in the middle of the country on the land, and they were talking about some of the things that they had planned for in advance of retirement relative to finances and what your retirement gonna cover and, you know, different areas for you, when you considered retirement. What was your What did you take into consideration before you made the move, to retire to walk away?
Carol McCormick
Um, you know, Peter, I, my original intention was to work three more years than I did. Okay. I really had not planned to retire. You know, until 2025. And I ended up retiring in 2023. But most of it was financial, you know, you go you see your, you see your financial guy, and, and at one point, you know, he said, you can go anytime you’re ready, you know, you’ve done a nice job with your, you know, whatever. And I really think we’ll, we’ll, we’ll be good. And so, you know, then we started, we started having my wife and I started having more serious conversations, I guess, about it. And we just decided that, you know, life is short. And, you know, if we could do it, and we weren’t going to put ourselves at risk financially, to get it done. And our dream always was to buy this motorhome and travel the country and see things we wanted to be able to see him while we, you know, could still do it, when we could still enjoy it while we could still you know, hop in a kayak or hop on our bikes or, you know, grab our trekking poles and go wherever we wanted to go. And, you know, none of us are getting any younger. So we, we, we decided, Hey, let’s go for it.
a lot of our friends were retiring at the same time and I think maybe that had an effect on us as well. Not necessarily from you know, keep up with the Jones but I’m going to sneeze Bless you. Bless you, excuse me, excuse me, not necessarily keep up with the Joneses, but just just, you know, it’s it’s encouraging to see others that are in the same space being able to do.
Carol McCormick
We have very, very good friends. As matter of fact, there are next door neighbors that that retired a year earlier than we did, and are doing the same thing that we’re doing. And so we tend to meet up here and there. As a matter of fact, we were camping with him this weekend. So it’s, that’s kind of that’s kind of how it went. And I’ll be I’ll be real honest with you, Peter. You know, COVID kind of pushed me a little bit to COVID walrus all out, really did. And, you know, I was I was lucky enough to be able to play a major role in my health systems response to COVID. But it was exhausting. He really was, it was it was it was tiring. And health care, you know, health care changed dramatically. And so it was just those combination of things pulling together to help us to make the decision to go a little earlier than we had originally planned.
Peter Martin
Yeah, I don’t think you’d ever you got the finance part taken care of. I don’t think you would ever regret that decision. Right? Just step away a little bit early. Because you look, experiences that you have, and you’re like, Oh, fantastic.
Carol McCormick
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. I feel very blessed. Right. Yeah.
Peter Martin
Yeah. It you know, I was talking to a person last week, kind of about that. And he was talking about stress, and you feel this and that, and you he doesn’t want to wait too long. He’s not retired. But he’s thinking about, and I said that to him, because you do you hear those stories about people who kind of hang on, and then they never get the chance to enjoy retirement because something changes on him. And that’s a regret you have you don’t regret the other way.
Carol McCormick
Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you are. Theater, you know, give you mentioned stress. And until I retired, I never knew how little I I liked or disliked, I should say Sunday nights. You know, I noticed myself saying, Oh, it’s Sunday night, but it’s okay. I don’t have to get up and go to work tomorrow. Yeah, no, not that I didn’t like going to work. Don’t get me wrong. But there’s just not that inherent stress level that you’re gonna have, when you when you go to work. And I think we all know, the, the there’s a decent amount of stress associated with health care facilities management.
Peter Martin
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s, you know, it’s funny you say that, because I’ve often described for me at different points in my life, one of them when I was when I was still a kid, and I was in school. And another was a couple of jobs where I mean, I really love what I do. Now. This is a lot of fun to do this stuff. And so I don’t have many of different stresses, obviously. But I don’t get that knot in my stomach. And I used to describe it that way. I would get that knot. When I was doing something I didn’t like whether it was a job or whether it was school. Here on the East Coast, especially during the fall, as soon as I heard that 60 minute song coming out of football, you’d watch football, and you’d hear tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, illness, that stress would almost amplify because you knew Alright, Sunday’s over. I gotta do either work tomorrow, or I got school. And did you? Were you aware of that stress? Or did you become more aware of it after you retired? And you’re like, hey, I don’t feel that anymore.
Carol McCormick
That’s that’s what it was. Peter, I was not aware of that stress at all. When I was working. But But once I retired, and then I didn’t have it anymore. That’s when I realized, boy, I was maybe a little bit more stressed out than I thought I was. That’s interesting that things going on at work. Yeah.
Peter Martin
Yeah. Wow. That’s that’s that’s a really good realization and a positive positive realism. Yeah,
So I had reached back out to you. I think it was probably a month ago, or maybe six weeks ago. Now. You know, I knew that Carol was traveling and wanted to see the country via the mobile home and I was talking to another person weeks ago for I contacted you and he told me when he retires he wants to go the mobile home route and that got me thinking of you and I’m like, so there’s more Carol’s there’s more people who will wanna retire? And travel? So it got me thinking, Well, what do you how big you know, you’re sitting in your mobile home right now? How big is your mobile home? Had you ever had a mobile home before? And what’s it been like the reality of it
Carol McCormick
You know, I, we never had owned a mobile home before. Our mobile home is relatively small. When it comes, it comes to things, you know, when we started looking, you know, it’s like, Okay, do we want a mobile home? Do we want to pull a fifth wheel? Do we want to just have a travel trailer, and we decided that the mobile home was the route we wanted to go, we started looking and these things, you know, you can get tiny ones that are 27 feet long, and you can get ones that are 45 feet long. Ours is a 31 foot mobile home. And then, and then we we tow, a GMC Canyon behind it. So when we’re going down the road, we’re almost as long as semi trailer. That’s, that’s a good size. Yeah, it’s a good size. But both of us had had we driven larger vehicles before, you know, when you when you’re raised on a farm or, or a cattle ranch you you tend to get to drive big things. And so both of us had done that before. So that piece of it wasn’t wasn’t so bad. You know, they so so we went we went looking and you know, we, we, we bought one that, you know, fits our lifestyle. It’s my wife and I and our two golden doodles. And you know, there’s more than enough room for all four of us. So yeah, except for the dogs think that the couch is theirs. But that’s a different story that we don’t don’t probably need to go into.
Peter Martin
Yeah, I think all bugs think that they’re that the couch is in the house or the mobile home or there’s Yeah, yeah. Yep. So 31 feet, I, you know, we had when I was a senior in college, we took a 28 footer from Milwaukee, down the South Padre Island for spring break. And there were seven of us in that thing. And it was a pretty I mean, we slept three of us would always sleep on the roof once we got there, but 28 feet was a pretty good size. So 31 must be comfortable for you guys.
Carol McCormick
Yeah, it is. It is you know, you pull up the couch, you can sleep on the couch, if somebody needs to, has a queen sized bed in it. There’s a there’s a single bed that drops down from from above where where the drivers and passenger seats are. So yeah, we have if you know we need to get away from each other one of us can be in the back one of us can be in the front. So yeah, and then you have the great outdoors. You know, you have your you have your awning that comes out and your chairs and you know, you there’s there’s more to it than just being inside the motorhome.
Peter Martin
Right. Right. So I know and you’ve alluded to it, I know that you haven’t been able to get as far away as you want to do to some family issues, but relative to your travels so far. Where have you gone and what have you seen?
Carol McCormick
Um, you know, mostly we have stayed in the in the Nebraska and Iowa area. It is amazing what, and I encourage everybody to do this. It’s amazing what you have right in your backyard that you don’t know about? Yeah, no. Yeah. We spent a couple of weeks in a small town, Gothenburg, Nebraska, which is about 30 miles away from from where? From where my parents live. And yeah, you just get on the internet. And you you say okay, what is there to see? I know more about the Pony Express than I did before I retired. There’s a there’s an artist, his name is Robert penrhiw. And, you know, I’m not just me not into a whole lot of art. But he spent a number of years as a young man in a town named coset, Nebraska. You know, some of his artwork is in in the Museum of Art in New York. Well, so you know, he you know, and so we walk into this place one day, where the only people in there and the museum director gives us a personal tour. Not only of you know the museum piece of it, but then takes us over into the art gallery. And we literally explains every piece of art in that place to us. We spent two hours in this in this very small museum and goes out in Nebraska I learned about this guy’s really super interesting. You know, I we spent some time in southwest Iowa at at state we tend to go to the state parks. They’re they’re a little less expensive than like an RV Resort. Oh, Um, they have less amenities, but that’s okay. You know. So we so, you know, by a small town called Renda, Iowa square, Glenn Miller was born. And so we went to the Glenn Miller museum, you know, also in this small Iowa town, they turned their old library is now Carnegie Art Museum. And the traveling exhibit was an exhibit, all of the artwork was done by either African artists or African American artists. It was fascinating. It was fascinating. It’s literally an hour from where I’ve lived since 1994. Ya know? Yeah. So, so although we haven’t been able to go to the big places, you know, I was hoping this summer, maybe we get up into the upper peninsula of Michigan and some places like that. Although we have not been able to do that. The, if you find it, you know, it’s, it’s, I’m sure right in your backyard, if you if you just look, yeah, no. And then we we really liked to play golf. And so we and we like to go to all these tiny little nine hole golf courses that are out in the sand hills in Nebraska, or, you know, down in the canyons of Iowa or whatever. And so, we found some very inexpensive yet nice golf courses to play.
Peter Martin
Well, that’s awesome. I should say to you know, as I was listening to you talk, obviously, I know that, you know, you worked in Omaha, Nebraska, big crate and bluejay fan, we’ve talked about that before, but just for people listening, kind of your home base is Iowa, Nebraska, and you retired out of a common spirit Catholic Health Initiatives Hospital in Omaha. So that’s just as a little bit of background. So do you? Do you guys plan? Or do you just see where kind of the day takes you? Or do you just go on on a whim? How do you how do you determine? We,
Carol McCormick
we usually plan to, we say, what I’ll do, I’m the planner. And I will, I’ll find where we want to stay. Okay, so, you know, you don’t want to have this 31 foot mobile home going down the road, and then you don’t have anywhere to park it. You know, our, our, you know, our dream in life is not to sleep in the Walmart parking lot. Right? So, so you, you know, you find a place, and then we’ll tend to stay for a couple of weeks. Okay, I was gonna ask that, you know, some of my health care facilities, brethren will just laugh at me, I took I and I got, I got an atlas and, you know, kale and everything. And then I made myself a template, cut a hole in the middle of it. And I can look and see what’s in the 60 mile radius, no matter where I put it on the map. So I tend to do that I plant that on the map and say, Okay, well, here’s all these places. And then I, you know, I use the internet. And I go look and see what is there to what is there to do you always Google breweries near me, from wherever you’re at. So you can find some good beer. And you check out what golf courses are around and then putt putt there is to see. Now once once we get to the point where we’re able to go a little further away. Planning, you know, which National Park do we want to go to, like I had mentioned earlier, I really want to go up to the Upper Peninsula of to the up of Michigan, probably next summer, at this point is what that will be. We have friends that live in Williamsburg, Virginia, that eventually we will make our way all the way down there. And on those kinds of trips, we probably won’t be as well planned between here and there. Sure. So you know, we’ve kind of had to change our thought about how we were going to do it, we were going to be more wanders. But since we kind of have to stay closer to home and find things to do so to speak. We’ve we’ve planned a little bit more that way.
Unexpected challenges of retirement
Peter Martin
Carol, when you you know, we were talking about it stuff. When you move. You freeze out a little bit. Okay. And you don’t have to necessarily old stuff. But sometimes for whatever reason the sound goes maybe, maybe I’ll do a commercial for you if you’re an IT person who can help Carol on that part of it. Feel free to reach out, I’ll put your your email address they can, they can reach out to you. So if you, me being a weather nerd that I am, I know that through that part of the country, you’ve had some pretty good thunderstorms rolling through this spring a little bit into the summer. Have you encountered any? From a weather perspective? Have you encountered anything that was concerning or interesting?
Carol McCormick
Um, a little bit not, we haven’t, you know, there haven’t been any tornado warnings or, or anything like that. But the thing that we learned that we have to watch for a lot is the wind. Of course, we knew we knew that, that we weren’t going to drive it in the wind, you know, if the winds, you know, you check the wind before you leave, and if the winds gonna blow 30 miles an hour, we’re gonna probably stay put, it’s just, you know, it’s not worth it. It’s, I don’t have to be somewhere, right. So I can stay wherever I’m at. But on on our particular RV, we have one, one side of it, the whole side slides out. And then and then there are little, like awnings over the slide. Well, if it’s too windy, those things flipped around, and they can get torn and ripped and so forth. And so there’s been a few days where we had to spend the day in the in the RV with with the slide deck, which makes it pretty small, pretty small, you know. But other than that, that really, you know, that’s really all the problems we’ve had. Last week. We were we were at it rained all day long on on Friday. But it wasn’t windy, it was just raining. The retired farmers we were with were thrilled. So we went to the Iowa Aviation Museum in Greenfield, Iowa, because it was raining all day. So we went there. And then we went into the old Greenfield and had a nice lunch and, and you know, you always find something to do. Yeah, we just find stuff to do.
Peter Martin
You know, you really paint a nice picture of retirement.
Carol McCormick
Yeah, yeah. It’s it is good, Peter, it really is. It’s good.
Peter Martin
Have there been any unexpected challenges that you’ve encountered being retired?
Carol McCormick
Um I can’t I wouldn’t say real, real bad ones. You know, these. These motorhomes are. I mean, you know, you’re a friend of mine who did this. She’s She’s since retired from this part of her retirement. But she says, you know, you got to remember, you’re, you’re, you’re driving your house 55 miles an hour down the road, and a rattle, you know, first thing we do is we look for any loose screws. Once we get somewhere and we have a little we have a little container, we put all the loose screws until we can figure out a clever bug flying around in front of me now. But you know, those little things like that. But but nothing big. I mean, we haven’t been dead alongside the road or anything like that. So we’ve been we’ve been lucky that way. But I also am now a you know, I belong to every like, RV group there is and I just, you know, I read a lot of stuff about you know, well, if this breaks, this is what we did. If that doesn’t work, this is what we did. So, yeah.
you know, we still have a house. We sold our large home and then just bought a little one bedroom. My wife is like now I gotta have I gotta have someplace to go home. Ya know? Right and, and we live in a small town, you know, you’re not supposed to over put your mail on hold for more than two weeks. But we just put it on hold and we go in and say hi to the postmaster and grab it rolling back through. Full time our viewers tend a lot of people, they have a Pio box. And then there are also services that you can use, where you send your mail to a Pio box and then you you say you get to Arizona for the winter, you or you get some heart they will send you your mail. Okay, now I am I have a good friend that lives here. She picks my mail up once a week takes a picture of it. And I said okay, open that one, open that one open that one. So I guess the biggest challenge when you go back and think about I tend to forget about it now that that it’s all over and done with but about a week and a half after I retired, we were already out in North Platte, Nebraska with my parents. And we were living. We lived there for three months right after I retired. But this friend of mine that gets my mail, she she sends it to us once a week. And she takes his picture and she says, Okay, I’m sending this to you right away. Well, it was from the IRS. And we got audited. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. You know, it was luck of the draw.
Peter Martin
Nice. Nice. Yeah. Last question, Carol route. And this is it’s not even meant to be philosophical. But I guess it’s not. But I was just thinking as you were talking about, you know, what you’ve learned relative to all of these places that exist around you that you can go to, that you just never really have the time to do so or you just don’t think about it. Because you’re, you know, you’re busy working? Have you? Have you learned anything? Like relative to you, I’m sure you’ve come across all different types of people to in your travels. Is there anything that that’s kind of stuck out to you as you’re meeting people from all walks of life and all different environments?
Carol McCormick
People are inherently good. Yeah, no, I mean, you go to a campground and, and the art, they call it the RV community, but you go to a campground and you know, yeah, you take your bikes out of the truck, and you take your canoes off the rack, and, and you pull your lawn chairs out and everything else. And you just leave it all sitting out for the week or two while you’re there. You know, you might might wrap the law, you might put a bit lock around the bikes around a tree while you’re gone. But generally speaking, that that kind of fear that you have, like you lock your house down when you’re gone and anything else, for some reason that’s kind of gone away. And I know that sounds very strange, but But you know, we’ve met some really, really fun people. You know, one of the things that we do, the first time we get somewhere, it’s we’ll go find a local cafe. And we’ll have breakfast and strike up conversations with whoever’s sitting in there. And you can find some really cool things to go do. That you probably aren’t going to find in some tourists. You know, so you got to talk to the locals to know where to go what to see in the number of weeks in Gothenburg, Nebraska, like I said, and that YMCA, both of us love to swim. So we went and we use their their pool every day. And we met a woman that came in there she was she was a Lutheran minister. So we went to her church one Sunday and then had lunch with her and you know, just didn’t she told us all about the area and what to do in the good restaurants to go see. Going back to answer your question is, you know, 99.9% of the population is is is good and trustworthy and and just fun to be around.
Peter Martin
Yeah, that’s, that’s good to hear you. I’ll tell you, you paint a very attractive picture of retiring last Word for view or, you know, for somebody who is considering retirement or somebody who’s kind of on that precipice, but maybe hold them back a little bit, what advice would you give them?
Carol McCormick
Don’t be afraid to go do it, you know, be be a good planner, you know, make sure that that, that financially can do it. Like, like I said, you know, we went earlier than I thought we were going to, so we had health care, we had to find health care, you know, you have to be able to afford that health care and, and whatnot. So you really got to kind of plan out do your research. But if, if, if, if you think you can do it, and you have plans, go have some fun, go have some fun, life is short, you’ve, you know, I always feel like I I, you know, gave gave healthcare facilities management, everything I could give them for a good long time. And, and so, so now I’m playing a little bit, I’m not gonna I’m not gonna say that I won’t get back to something someday. But at this point, Peter, I’m in no hurry to do that.
Awesome. Oh, Carol McCormick. Thank you for your thank you for your time today. And if you and your wife ever find yourself up here in New England, and you’re you know, we’re a small region out here. It’s not like out in the Midwest where you can drive five hours and you’re still in the same state. You drive five hours here, you’re up in Canada. So if you’re ever in the area, let me know. I’d love to meet you at our local cafe
Thank you all for joining us today. And I hope you learned something