Happy New Year. Welcome to the first edition of The Sunday Spark for 2024. Are you excited for the coming year? For the first time ever, I’ve chosen a personal theme for the year—I’m calling 2024 Michelle’s Year of Reinvention. Read on to learn more about my plans and how you can help!

I’m making a small change to The Sunday Spark for 2024. You’ll still see weekly thoughts and highlights, along with interesting things I learned during the week. But I’ve replaced the weekly sustainable living tip with a weekly decluttering challenge. If you’re looking for ideas to live a greener life in 2024, check out A year of weekly sustainable living goals for tips and a checklist you can print to stay on track.

Are you ready for a year of reinvention? Let’s go!

On my mind this week: A year of reinvention

If you’ve been following my 60 before 60 progress, you may recall that two of the items on the list were to update my retirement plan and to pick a retirement date. Well, in December I ticked both of those off the list! I’m not ready to share the date publicly yet, but it’s getting closer.

When I visited my sister in England last year, she told me her late husband always said, “When you’re retired, you can be anything you want to be!” I love that. That statement aligns perfectly with my view of what I prefer to call my Second Life.

I’ve spent my career helping people save for retirement and improve their financial wellbeing. Yet, I believe the view of retirement that the world clings to is outdated. With people living longer and healthier lives, 20 or possibly 30, years of nothing but leisure sounds like a recipe for disaster. Don’t get me wrong—I’m looking forward to a more relaxed pace of life after I leave my career behind, but you won’t find me sitting on the porch watching the world go by.

That’s where the year of reinvention comes in! I need to find ways to remain relevant and useful.

Let’s create our Second Life Vision together

In 2022, I completed the Certified Professional Retirement Coach course. A retirement lifestyle coach helps people plan for the non-financial aspects of retirement. (Read more about why that’s as important as having enough money in Retire retirement! Plan your best years now!) To complete the certification, I need practice coaching hours. I haven’t been able to complete that, but I plan to get it done in the coming months. (That’s also on my 60 before 60 list!)

My mission for my “Second Life” is to help others make the most of theirs! With that in mind, I’m putting together a Second Life Vision workshop and I’m offering BoomerEcoCrusader readers the opportunity to participate in the pilot at no charge.

I’m still working out the details, but the pilot will run virtually on Wednesday evenings in April from 8:00 to 9:30 Eastern Time.

If you’d like to be part of the pilot, please get in touch for more information. In exchange for a few hours of your time and your willingness to provide written feedback, you may just find ways to reinvent yourself! Workshop size is limited to 8 people, so don’t delay. Grab your virtual seat now.

Let’s keep in touch! Join my mailing list and I’ll email you when I add a new post.

Three highlights of the week

It’s important to celebrate big milestones and simple pleasures in life. Keeping the trend going, here are three highlights and simple pleasures of the week gone by:

• It was a quiet week at work because a lot of people were still on vacation. I was able to catch up a few things and get a head start on the year.
• I was able to get outside for a walk most days this week. That’s definitely a habit I need to get back into in 2024.
• On Friday evening, I went out with a group of friends from work. This “girl gang” has been getting together regularly over the last couple of years and there’s always lots of laughter when we see each other.

Things I learned this week

Life is all about learning. Here are three things I learned this week:

The gap between the haves and the have-nots

A report this week showed Canada’s highest-paid CEOs earned 246 times more than the average worker in 2022. And, while I’m sure inflation hasn’t affected their lavish lifestyles, these CEOs gave themselves bigger salary increases than they gave their workers. (Source: The Monitor)

And then they wonder why there is labour unrest and workers are no longer willing to sell their souls for their companies.

Older generations more likely to recycle

A recent study shows less than half (44%) of Gen Z always, or even often, recycle. The study showed recycling habits increase with age, with 50% of millennials, 59% of Gen X and 67% of boomers indicating they always, or often recycle. (Source: Earth911)

Some BC forest fires still burning

We usually think of forest fires as a summer thing but, as the calendar turned to 2024, over 100 wildfires are still burning in northern British Columbia. These fires are a holdover from 2023, which was the worst ever wildfire season in Canada. Across Canada 18 million hectares burned in 2023. That’s more than double the previous record from 1995, and six times the average of the past ten years. (Source: CBC News)

This week’s decluttering challenge – Under the kitchen sink

In 2024, I’m revisiting the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge I completed in 2021. This week’s task was decluttering under the kitchen sink. This isn’t a big problem area, so I only decluttered one item. You can find the details here, along with my tips and Easy Decluttering Checklist.

Despite my lack of progress with under the kitchen sink clutter, the new year brought new motivation and I did squeeze in some bonus decluttering. My weekly grand total was 11 items.

I’d love to hear what you think about any of this week’s topics. Drop me a comment below and let me know your thoughts and ideas.