Interview: 6 Questions for Dave Hughes, Author and Founder of Retire Fabulously
By Mark McNease
I’m delighted to share a new interview with someone I consider a longtime friend, inspiration, and fellow go-getter. Dave Hughes started his website, RetireFabulously.com, ten years ago. We managed to connect, considering some shared demographics with LGBTSr.com. Since then we’ve had many communications and several interviews. I believe he offers some of the best advice on retiring and living in retirement, and he’s now a novelist as well. Can you say dynamo? Enjoy the latest ‘6 Questions’ interview with Dave, and hopefully he’ll inspire some readers to pursue their goals as well, whether you’re retired or not. – Mark
Congratulations on 10 years of Retire Fabulously! What’s the 411 on Dave Hughes for readers: who/what/where/why.
I enjoyed a reasonably successful career as a software engineer. That’s a broad job title, but at various times in my career, my responsibilities included writing code, customer support, training, and management. Overall, it was very enjoyable. It certainly paid better than being a jazz musician, which was my true passion (and still is). I spent the last 17½ years of my career at Intel Corporation where, in addition to my regular job, I was very active in their diversity and inclusion initiatives, primarily on behalf of LGBTQ employees.
I’m originally from Ohio. I lived in the Washington, DC suburbs for 11½ years before moving to warm, sunny Phoenix, Arizona in late 1995, at age 38. At the time, my motivations were to move to someplace where it doesn’t snow and freeze, and where the cost of living (especially real estate) was much less expensive. At the time, I wasn’t considering where I’d retire, but as it turns out, Phoenix is an excellent place to retire – at least for me.
I don’t mind the hot weather at all. And it really is a dry heat, as the cliché goes. I will choose it over cold, gray, snowy, icy weather any time! Ever since I was a child, I’ve dreamed of having a house with a swimming pool, and now I have one. Relaxing in the pool on a hot summer day with my husband and maybe a few friends, cocktails at hand, with soft jazz or Brazilian music emanating from the fake rock speakers is about as close to nirvana as I can imagine. Summer means I get to enjoy my pool. Fall, winter, and spring are very comfortable and beautiful here.
I play trombone and have throughout most of my life. I now play in four jazz ensembles. Four years ago, I decided to learn an entirely new instrument: the steelpan. I’ve loved steel band music for many years and often thought, “Someday I’d like to play that.” Finally, in June 2019, I decided to turn “someday” into “today.” I play in a steel band here in town now.
What inspired you to start RetireFabulously.com, and what’s it like seeing it last a decade?
As I was approaching my retirement, I searched for information about what it’s really like to be retired. I wanted tips for how to live my best life after I no longer had to go to work every day.
I found very little information. The internet was awash with articles about how much money you need to retire and how much you can withdraw from your savings without running out of money. But practically no one was writing about how to enjoy your retirement. The few retirement blogs I found were not all that great, and there was nothing aimed at the LGBTQ community. So I started Retire Fabulously! to fill that gap.
At the time, it was just something interesting to do; a hobby. My early posts were pretty amateurish, and they’re no longer on the website. I retired them because they weren’t fabulous.
What are some of the things you’ve learned from doing this, that you may not have thought you would? Any surprises about publishing a website on retiring? Have you made friends and influenced people?
I’ve learned a lot! I got better at writing, better at gearing my posts to serve my readers’ needs (as opposed to writing what I felt like writing about), and better at designing and formatting the website. I’ve been able to put my webmaster and website design skills to good use for my author website (AuthorDaveHughes.com), my wedding officiant website (I did that for five years), a website for my husband, and websites for two LGBTQ bands I founded and belong to.
Beyond the technical and stylistic skills, I’ve learned a lot about retirement – both through the research I’ve done for my articles and from my own personal experience. I have to admit, before I retired I had a more idealized notion of what retirement would be like. It’s not a permanent vacation. Just like during my working years, I have good days, bad days, and average days. I’ve changed my thinking about retiring overseas since learning more about it. We might still do it if the political and societal situation in the US continues to deteriorate.
So it’s been a valuable learning experience on many levels, in addition to something interesting to do with my time.
As for making friends and influencing people, the most notable friend I’ve made is you! Seriously! I’m not pandering here. We have yet to meet in person, but I feel I know you pretty well by now and I consider you a friend. There’s another reader named Paul Fox who lives in Pittsburgh. He’s involved with an association for retired teachers in Pennsylvania. He has his own website filled with retirement resources for that association, and he’s been a huge fan and promoter of my work. In 2019, he obtained sponsorship to bring me to Pittsburgh to deliver a workshop at their annual conference. He has also promoted my websites and my books.
Speaking of my books, I have written three retirement lifestyle books.
Design Your Dream Retirement shows you how to visualize your retirement in an optimistic, possibility-filled light, and provides you with the knowledge and tools to help you create a plan for achieving your retirement dreams.
Smooth Sailing into Retirement guides you from your last few months of work through your first year of retirement. It identifies the many ways your life will change and prepares you for the emotions you may experience along the way.
The Quest for Retirement Utopia helps you find the retirement spot that’s right for you. It helps you evaluate each place realistically and will hopefully prevent you from making a poor choice. And it provides the resources you need to properly evaluate the places you are thinking about retiring so you can make the most informed choice.
I have received a lot of feedback from readers that let me know I’ve made a difference in people’s lives. That’s incredibly rewarding.
You’re a fiction author now, too! Awesome. Tell us all about your novels.
This is, perhaps, the most surprising and unanticipated thing I’ve undertaken since I retired. That, and being a wedding officiant for five years. At the time I retired, I never would have imagined either of those things. But after self-publishing my three retirement lifestyle books, I felt I had acquired the skills to do this. I was inspired to write gay-themed fiction by a friend of mine, Bill Konigsberg, who has written seven Young Adult books. I loved his books and felt I had stories that I needed to tell. And I was inspired by you as a self-published author. You’ve given me some good advice along the way, which I truly appreciate.
I’ve published three novels and a short story so far, and I have three more novels in various stages of development. They are all part of a series. Each book can stand on its own, but they are best enjoyed in sequence, as a series.
The books chronicle the lives of a group of characters from high school through their early thirties. The main character is Bryan Bauer, who changes his name to Ryan Robertson when he turns 18, for reasons you’ll discover near the end of the first book. Other characters come and go throughout the series, and some of them reappear at later points. Here’s a very brief description of each.
Maybe Next Year: At Kansas’ largest mega-church, the pastor’s son, Bryan, is falling in love with his best friend. What could possibly go wrong?
Instant Adult: Suddenly, Bryan’s not in Kansas anymore. His journey into adulthood is sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, but always compelling.
Open Books, Closed Sets: Ryan learns it’s difficult to be a normal college student when he works in the adult entertainment industry to support himself.
Cruise Virgins is a 30-minute short story I offer for free as an incentive to subscribe to my newsletter. In this story, Ryan and one of his best friends experience their first gay cruise. This story introduces several characters from my upcoming novels and serves as a bridge between my third and fourth books.
Besides telling a good, entertaining story, I have a secondary purpose for each of my novels. I do my best to incorporate what’s going on in our society with regard to LGBTQ issues at the time the story takes place. I think it’s important not to lose sight of our history and our struggles from just ten to fifteen years ago. For example, Maybe Next Year takes place in 2007. At that time, ex-gay organizations were thriving, and gay conversion therapy was being practiced more widely. That’s part of the story because I believe we mustn’t lose sight of that.
You’re returning to doing some columns and articles for Retire Fabulously. How will you balance that with your fiction writing?
I plan to remain primarily focused on writing fiction. I set aside two hours every day for that. I’ll probably release one new or updated article for Retire Fabulously! per month. I have a few ideas for new articles, but there are also some older ones that need to be updated and refreshed. For example, we just spent two weeks in Portugal. I’m going to update my article about retiring to Portugal now that I have a much more informed view of the country.
Highs/lows, pros/cons of each. I maintain LGBTSr.com AND write fiction as well. What are some of the things you most enjoy, and some you find challenging, for each of them?
I reach far more people with Retire Fabulously! I have about 2,000 subscribers, and I continue to gain subscribers each month – even in recent years when I haven’t been writing anything new, which amazes me. Several of my articles still rank high on certain Google searches, which continues to draw people to my website.
I also enjoy maintaining my websites, designing covers, and doing speaking gigs when I can get them. When I started RF in 2013, my goal was to present live workshops on retirement lifestyle planning to corporations and organizations. I wrote the articles, and later the books, to build exposure and credibility so I’d get hired to present the workshops. Finally, in 2019, I was hired twice. As it turns out, my books have been far more successful than my workshops in terms of reaching people.
I enjoyed writing retirement articles for many years. I spent a lot of time researching and learning about how to live a fulfilling retirement. I read hundreds of other articles, blogs, research papers, etc. so I could build knowledge and credibility in this field. After about seven years, I realized I had exhausted this topic (and myself). I was ready to move on.
I love writing fiction now. While I was still formulating the series and writing bits and pieces of my first book, I didn’t write every day. Some days I felt motivated and some days I did not. I read somewhere that you know you’re a writer when writing becomes something you can’t not do. I know, that seems like a confusing double-negative, but I think you get the meaning. At some point during my first book, the switch flipped. I wanted to write every day. I had to write every day. Now I can say I am a writer. In my mind, I live the lives of my characters.
It should surprise no one that more people are interested in retirement lifestyle information than gay fiction. Also, I built the RF audience over a ten-year period. Authors need a platform, that is, an audience of people who are interested in their writing and willing to buy their books. My retirement books continue to sell, thanks to my platform and the steady trickle of new subscribers. I’m nowhere near that size of a platform for my fiction, and my book sales reflect that. I’m still pondering how I can build a platform for my fiction that people will be interested in joining.
Writing books is not a struggle. Marketing and building an audience is a huge struggle.
Copyright MadeMark Publishing
Know someone who’d make a good ‘6 questions’ interviewee? Email me at: Editor @ LGBTSR. com