Top 10 Must Haves: To Make Retirement A Blast

Hey, we bought some cool things to

make

our

retirement

even better. Do you think we should share them with our audience, so keep it a secret? Oh, I think we should share them with everyone. Norm, then maybe you can take advantage of some of our great deals. Also just so you know we sold a house and moved into an apartment so we lost our home theater system which we love to watch movies and we also stream and with some of the streaming services one of the things that We miss it was a home theater. The most surprising thing is that we now have our own home theater.

We were able to purchase a portable home theater system, so tell everyone what it is, Tim. Well, basically we bought a huge screen and it's about a hundred, yes, about a hundred inches. one hundred inches diagonal, so it's a big TV, it's huge and we also bought a movie projector so we can sit in our own living room and pretend we're in the cinema, it's amazing and we get the great sound with the subwoofer and one of the best things we buy it's not so fast just so you know what it is it's a screen that retracts into its own case yeah it's that big at just over 100 inches long um and that. it lives behind our couch so no one can see it no we do it it's great we love it and the projector was from amazon we'll put links to all of these in the description but it's a projector now it has to be dark so it really We only put it on in the winter when it's harder to do in the summer, right?

Yeah, you can't button the daylight, it's not that good, it was relatively cheap and then our speakers we reused the speaker. that I had for my old PC, uh, computer, which was two little speakers connected to a subwoofer and we just plug them into the projector and we get amazing sound, it works very well, doesn't it? Know? We can

make

our neighbors jump out of their seats if there's an explosion, so one of the best things we've brought is a home theater system, yeah, and I would say, Norm, what's another wonderful thing we bought that really works very good with the home theater is our Prime membership, oh yeah, because not only do we get the wonderful movies that we can watch in our home theater, we actually decided to get rid of Netflix, we got rid of that, we went straight with Prime, but not only do we get the movies, we get all of our Amazon deliveries for free and it's perfect, right?

Thus, free delivery is basically paid for television. It's wonderful, isn't it? It really is and since we always order from Amazon, we have some favorite episodes that we are watching right now in the middle of summer. murders yeah, it's really good Mid-Summer Mysteries there's something like oh, it's a really good detective, UK detective, isn't it? It really is and the episodes are about an hour and 45 minutes long so it's really like watching a movie, it really is. Great and on the big screen, so we really like Amazon Prime. There are many other advantages to Amazon Prime's free photo storage in its cloud, for example for all your photographs.

Yes, it's a good idea. Free delivery. You get free audible. books also to download and yes it is a great service that costs around 79 a year. Excellent value for money, isn't it? Norm The other thing going on with Amazon Prime is our Amazon Fire Stick. Oh yeah, and we get an amazing deal when we buy that on Amazon, don't we? We didn't have the Black Friday offer. I think it only cost us about $30 or so, wasn't that a great deal? But these huge advantages with this say that Norm really is that we can. We actually take the fire stick to our trailer, yes, and we can also take it to Alabama and Florida and wherever we go, Portugal, we can take our fire stick with us, as long as there is Wi-Fi where we're staying and then the Another thing that comes with Amazon Prime is a VPN, so we can have a VPN that costs us about five dollars a month, yeah, it's not a lot of money and it overcomes geo-blocking, so if we are in Portugal we can check out our Fire Stick and watch our Canadian or American Amazon Prime channels.

Isn't that a greeting? It's really fantastic. We can simply enjoy the mobile. Everything everywhere we go is wonderful. In fact, we love it. We love the Fire Stick. It's very small, very portable and we carry it. taking it with us wherever we go is great, we love it now, sometimes we get hungry too, so what do we like to take with us? What is one of the best things we have bought? It has to be the fryer. Oh, absolutely wonderful. We just love it, in fact we are going to roast a chicken in it today and that is one of our favorites.

We love. You can put in about three pounds of chicken and it will be cooked in an hour. Perfection, we love it, so we're taking our air fryer everywhere in the US we'll be staying. It's wonderful, it's like having our own little mobile oven because sometimes you have those rooms like we had in Portugal, yeah, these, uh, Sol Aqua Luna, yeah, Luna's single queue, yeah, uh, that just had a microwave with cooktop, but it didn't have an oven, so that would have been useful, wouldn't it? It really would be and I think the place in Alabama doesn't have an oven or does it, so hey, we'll take it anyway because we like it fast, right?

And the quality, yes, of the food that comes out is better than a large one. The regular oven and chicken is one of our favorite things to make in it, yes, it's wonderful, isn't it? It really is. Do you have anything else that's absolutely amazing that we bought when we retired? Well, I would have to say that Norm is one of The things have to be the trailer that we got a lot, so we had a lot of fun buying a trailer that was second hand but it was new to us, didn't it? Yes, and now it has opened many more travel tours. in a different part of the countryside far from where we live, yeah you just can't believe, no, the covid-19 relief we got during the two years we had this trailer to be able to get away from the wonderful feeling of being at home in the apartment . and being in the countryside, yeah, it's been an absolute lifesaver for us, plus, Norm not just when we're there, but the drive there is wonderful too, isn't it?

It really is and it's definitely part of making great memories. a lifesaver and the good thing about the trailer is that it is okay, we like to travel in the winter to escape the cold, but in the summer it is perfect because we can go there, it is like our own cabin. to explore an area of ​​Ontario that we are not familiar with, we are becoming more familiar with it at the time, yes, we are doing better now, right?, we are learning and Tina buys her strawberry ice cream at the store. nearby, yes, the Mennonite store is wonderful, isn't it?

We really have Wi-Fi there and air conditioning too, so we're just like at home, aren't we? It's wonderful and now we are making great friends up there too. what goes along with the trailer, how about a car, has to be the way to get there and I would say it's probably not only one of the best, but one of the smartest things we did, Norm, because we literally bought the car just before covid hit. and we had no idea kovid was coming no, but two months before covid hit we bought an ax rental car for cash, weren't we two? and it's a Hyundai Elantra GT.

It's been wonderful, we have a hatchback, yes, five doors, so we can pack. With things for all the places we are going to stay, we will be able to put our air fryer in it. It was a great investment, right? And you know, Norm, we're not going to go broke because we don't have a car payment. We paid cash for it and you know, that's one of the things they say, don't retire with debt, so we're very aware of that, so we bought it and it had about 50,000 miles on it. It cost 17 grand, included. taxes, it was a big deal, wasn't it?

We've only had oil changes, we haven't had a repair yet, that's over two and a half years, it's been really good hasn't it? It's fun to take us, oh, it's pretty lively, yeah, and we'll drive to Alabama. We can't wait, hey, not at all, but that actually brings up another rule about safety and security, something that we have. I bought it recently and we'll be able to use it in Alabama, um, and that's safety when you travel, right? So we have our yubiki 5 that has NFC near field communication, this is for two-step verification, which is becoming more and more and we got caught I think we've told you before, yeah, when we were in Frankenmuth, YouTube got us blocked access to our channel because they wanted two-step verification because we were abroad and on a different internet service, yes.

So until then we didn't have this ubiky. We don't have a cell phone that works in the US because on our cell phone we just pay as we go with 711, the Speak Out service that doesn't have roaming. It's good for Canada, it doesn't have data either, so we couldn't get the security code from Google and the security codes we downloaded at this event accepted it, but then they wanted to verify the US with an additional SMS text verification. which we couldn't get, that led us to do a lot of research on the Internet, we came across Yubiki Five, which has a USB connector so we can access our laptop that we carry when we travel, but with NFC.

Near field communication means that the iPhone our son gave us, oh yeah, we can just tap the back if they ask for verification on Google or any other banking service and there are no codes involved, so it's a higher level of service, so yes. That's great, right? And now banks want this all the time, don't they like to just go ahead and pay bills or check their balances? So it is the highest level of security that we can get as retirees and we highly recommend that you take a look at it because SMS codes are those questions that you need to answer, yes they can all be hacked yes, but it is much more difficult to hack one of these physical two-step verification keys that you keep.

You all the time, don't you? In fact, I do, which is wonderful, so I think another thing, Norm, that although we're not using right now, we've certainly used when we've been traveling, is that we bought a lightweight bag. Regarding suitcases, people often say how we travel for a long period of time. When we were flying and going to Portugal, we discovered that weight was very important, so the carry-on suitcases we carried weighed about 12 pounds themselves, which was not very good, so we threw them out and bought special lightweight ones. They only weigh about four pounds so we can have plenty of extra weight for our carry-on bag and we find them absolutely wonderful for any of our new ones. viewers who haven't really seen some of our older YouTube videos on packing for Portugal, what we're talking about is that we only take carry-on luggage when we travel, we got rid of the whole checked luggage thing years ago and only travel with Moving on and what we found was that our old empty carry-on was too heavy, yeah, which meant we were going to have 50 less belongings in it, so we went out and investigated again, yeah, and we found these lightweight carry-ons that are certificates. for the airlines and like Tina said they had four pounds empty so we can fill them with a lot more stuff which makes it even easier to go on an extended stay with carry on so yeah that was a genius of the petters do that for us.

It is not like this? And we don't lose our luggage because that's a big advantage, isn't it? We are traveling these days. Hey, because you hear horror stories, another of the smartest decisions we make when buying smart watches. Get it, oh smart decisions, smart watches, yes, these make us so much smarter, honestly, we didn't even have to go to college, oh, they're wonderful, aren't they? Standards that we have and as we have said in the past, using them reminds us about our physical state, yes, we do not have them for emails or phone calls, we have them exclusively for our blood pressure, yes, 8,000 steps a day, rate monitors cardiac, yes, it also measures CO2, which was pretty important in case we caught covid 19.

It would have told us what the oxygen level was in our blood, so they have been really valuable and they are so cheap that we got them from Amazon , we'll link them again and we only need to charge them maybe once a week, right, six or seven days, the charges last a long time, so it's a really easy thing to have and we love to personalize them, you can put a photo of yourself as a dial. If you want you can have different colored screens and stuff like that but I definitely ordered an extra strap from a different company just to have something different than black and I have a pink strap that I love which is great so we highly recommend it . a smart watch because it will simply insist that you go for a walkin the morning because you'll look at the clock and think, "Oh, I haven't gotten my steps in," and actually, speaking of hiking, we did a wonderful hour. a walk and a half this morning was beautiful, we have gorgeous weather at the moment and we actually saw two herons, it was absolutely beautiful, so we are heading out and we have the four colors at the moment, it is probably already past its peak in our area, but it's still beautiful to come out through the trees and see all these glorious colors of gold and red, they are absolutely beautiful, because there are many people in the world, Norm, who don't get the wonderful change of colors that we are coming to Canada.

We're very lucky.lucky we are, in fact we are, it's a computer like one more smart thing we bought when we retired and we did it specifically for traveling so why don't you tell everyone what that smart thing we bought is ? will be our new Nexus card, now we have had the previous Nexus card, but ours ran out, so we just renewed our Nexus card, which lasts us five years and only costs fifty US dollars each, yes, and particularly for the fact that, um, we. When we are planning our trips to the US, this will be a very good way to enter and exit the US in a faster way by passing through customs.

It's basically a VIP card, so when everyone is lining up to try to cross the Ambassador Bridge. or the Blue Water Bridge in Ontario and there's an hour long line of cars, yeah there's a center lane that's empty, it says we can drive there to Nexus, they say here we are, yeah, and a lot of times there's not even an agent customs there, we just wait. our cards go up, the barrier goes up and we leave, we did it specifically when we were flying because the Toronto airport is famous, you take your flight back to Toronto and there are most likely eight or ten other flights that end up on of thousands of people landing and We're all shoved into this arrivals hall depending on which terminal they're in, but we've spent hours waiting to get through customs and you're exhausted coming back from Europe, yeah, so we've got these Nexus cards and a Again there's a Nexus area that you walk to and there's no crowds, no, so we get through the Nexus machines a lot quicker, right? because they already scanned your eyes and fingerprints and everything is much faster whether you come fly or drive a traveler program, so you have to be interviewed, you have to be interrogated, have your fingerprints taken, yes, take your picture and going to meet the customs agents at your interview, but we think it's worth doing, yes, because it makes traveling much easier and faster for us and we just received our new cards, didn't we a week?

So we're ready for overseas, which will be wonderful, it'll be really wonderful, and speaking of which, we're really looking forward to coming back. We're going to Alabama, right? Yes, ma'am, yes, we'll be with everyone else now. We just told you 10 wonderful things we've bought that have really helped us in our

retirement

. It was a pleasure that we felt that there were great investments. I'll offer you one more and what we did was we bought a very small battery that runs on its own built-in battery and it's a multi-color light so you can set it to any light. temperature and we are using it as a travel lamp because we have stayed in many Airbnbs and hotel rooms.

Hotel apartments do not have lamps, so there is no ambient lighting at night, or it is a ceiling. lamp or just horrible lighting, so we bought this on Amazon, it was very affordable and far exceeded our expectations. It gives us that wonderful ambient lighting, doesn't it? We take it to the trailer, turn off all the lights at night and just turn this on. one on and it lights it up enough to feel homey and it's warm lighting. We almost said it too and we carry it in our carry-on, the four-pound Caravan luggage, so we take it around the world with us, yeah, and we're going to take it with us, so if it could be 10, 11 or 12 best things we're talking about, we highly recommend that if you're going to live in self-catering accommodation, on Airbnb, on VRBO, maybe think about bringing a little lamb with you to make it more cozy and homey for you in the evenings, yeah , anyway Tim, that's the ten plus one of the best things we've bought during our retirement, wonderful and we hope everyone stays safe and well until next time, bye. bye