Free stuff!

Who doesn’t like free?  This post should help you on the Creativity-Social area of the Retirement Activity Compass.  You will probably want to update your personal Retirement Activity Plan (RAP) when you’re done reading!

Remember back to the “Pre-retirement or retired, why not RAP?” post?  We focused on ‘creativity’ to help keep our retired minds sharp and ‘social’ to help keep us connected to each other and the community.   One way to get a toofer on that is to learn something new by taking a class – a free class.

Free #1

Mrs. NoSurprisesRetirement has completed a number of classes on various aspects of the history of the United Kingdom from her favorite free e-learning site, Futurelearn.  A couple her favourites (British spelling of favourites, get it?  Ha!)  were ‘A History of Royal Food and Feasting’ and ‘England in the Time of King Richard III’.   I looked at Futurelearn today and they have pretty much everything from anatomy to writing fiction.  Classes are available both anytime (Beginning Dutch, anyone?) and scheduled. Mrs. NoSurprisesRetirement likes the scheduled courses because of the interaction available when you comment on the content or questions.  Futurelearn is Mrs. NoSurprisesRetirement’s favorite e-learning site because of the diversity in class formats and the international audience. People in her Richard III class lived within a few miles of the key historical sites and provided really interesting comments.

Free #2

If you’re like us here in the frozen northland Minnesota and you are 62 or over, you can audit (sit in on the class for no grade, but it’s OK this time) classes at the U of M and MNSCU’s universities, colleges and technical colleges.  If you’re someplace warmer else your state likely has something similar to the Minnnesota benefit and you can find out here at A SENIOR CITIZEN GUIDE FOR COLLEGE. This is a really good way to learn those things you always wanted to but did not have the time/money before now.

But wait, there’s more!

You can go to Harvard, MIT, or the Sorbonne with edX  This is Mrs. NoSurprisesRetirement’s other favorite e-learning site and, similar to Futurelearn, edX has a wide span of classes. Introduction to German Opera from Dartmouth, The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact on Pop Culture from the Smithsonian, and Urban Design for the Public Good: Dutch Urbanism from TU Delft are just some examples.

Don’t stop there – check the library

My local public library provides two different language learning programs, one of which is from Rosetta Stone.  They also provide Lynda (now from Linkedin) which has classes on just about everything, including Microsoft Office for that new computer you’ll get for Christmas and photography for that DSLR you got last year.

Sample Retirement Activity Plan template – free!

I put a RAP template out on Google Drive for you to download and modify to personalize as needed.  It’s in Word format, but let me know if you need one in Google Sheets format. Copy and paste this link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13rGYZR8yl5IwXciqzp7WuUOGNWX8_auP?usp=sharing

into your browser (I primarily use Chrome) and you should be able to see them and download.  Let me know at nosurprisesretirement@gmail.com if you have a problem.

Actions you can take include:

-Develop and/or update your RAP.

-Don’t forget about the social aspects of retirement – reach out to a friend and re-connect, especially now in the holiday season.

And if you have not seen the “Why you should read this blog…WIIFY” post, it’s here https://nosurprisesretirement.com/2017/07/09/first-blog-post/

Questions, comments, or suggestions for retirement surprise areas you want to know more about?
-Leave a comment
-Use ‘Contact’, above, to send an email.