Retirement

My stay with APS lasted a bit less than 3 years.
The only good thing about working at APS was that it was putting money in our pocket. Other than that, it was a boring, tedious job. A job I hated going to every day. APS or American Payment Systems as its name indicated was a sort of banking system that provided a bill paying service for people who preferred to pay their utility bills at a local outlet; drug store, grocery store, gas station, whatever. The money was deposited to the APS banking service which would then transfer it to the Electric, Phone, etc companies after taking the service fee.
When I first got there, the company seemed to be doing very well. The company was making a lot of money, it was buying up other companies with a similar need to have an in-house banking facility such as pre-paid cash cards, pre-paid phone cards, etc.

APS was situated in a 6 story office building in the center of Hamden, CT.

View of Hamden from 6th floor terrace of APS
It occupied the 4th and 6th floors of the building and straining at the seams for space. These new acquisitions required more help, more space and more computer capacity. In January of 2003 the company moved to a new facility in Wallingford. The floor space was completely renovated with new cubicles. The computer room was completely furnished with new computers and communications. This move probably nearly emptied the bank. In addition, our department which initially had but three people and three computers was expanded into a work area with at least a dozen differently formatted computers, but we still had only three workers doing QA work.

In July of 2003 Bobbie and I took a trip to Montreal for a Barbershoppers International convention. This was a vacation of sorts. Although we attended the competions, we

Roger, Betty, Joe, Pat, Allen and Bobbie in Quebec City
were not involved as participants, so we were able to call our own shots. We took a side trip to Quebec City with Joe and Betty Ciriello and Allen and Pat Coffey. We had a great time in Canada, enjoying the sights and going to great restaurants. We stayed there a week and returned home that weekend. The following Monday as I got ready to go to work, I received a phone call from my fellow worker informing me that we no longer had a job. Our QA department among others, had ceased to exist. I drove up later and confirmed that indeed I was out of a job. At that moment, I knew that we could no longer afford to live in CT. So plans were immediately put in play for retirement.

As a side note, in 2004 we took a trip to CT. We drove to the APS facility in Wallingford and found a completely different company occupying the facility. I guess they should have stuck with what they did well, that is bill payments, instead of branching out as they were doing. The overhead was apparantly too much. I also believe the move was crippling to the bottom line.

Getting back to the retirement plan, we had just finished having our house painted, so it really looked good. Some repairs were taken care of. We fixed up and repainted the white fence in our back yard.

Prepared for foundation pouring
Michele flew up from Texas to help. I listed our home on the internet with a Sell It Yourself outfit. We had a few lookers but just one offer which we eventually had to accept. In the meantime we drove to Texas and stayed with Michele for a few days while we shopped around for a new home for ourselves. We finally decided on a home in the Fort Worth - Keller area. We put a deposit on the home ( actually just a plot of ground at the time) returned home and waited for approval, which we eventually got. In September we closed on our house in Hamden and made the trip back to Fort Worth. We had previously arranged for a storage area for our furniture not far from the new home.

Our new house would not be ready until December, so we checked into a live-in suite at the Budget Suites Hotel. We had two rooms; a bedroom and a kitchen-living room. Some ten years earlier we had a similar situation in El Paso, so we knew the drill. We watched TV a lot, went for frequent rides, checked on the progress of our house (seemed to take forever). But on the plus side, our rent was just $600.00 a month including utilities, so we were saving some money.

Finally, on December 15th we had our closing. The next day we had movers take our furniture out of storage, just up the street, and we moved in. At the time, we were one of a few homes

Finished
in our development, which is now completely filled. Our neighborhood, called the ALLIANCE GATEWAY, was mostly open fields, very country like. Today, 4 years later, we feel like we're in a city; new homes everywhere you look, new roads, new shopping areas, sprouting seemingly overnight. As we moved in, the Alliance area already included the Fort Worth Alliance Airport, a FEDEX hub; The Texas Motor Speedway and many warehouses and now many commercial retailers and shopping centers are being built. This is a growing area.

We had given thought to going back to El Paso, but the isolation from all family members made us rethink that plan. Michele has lived in this area for over 10 years. It would be nice to be close to her as well as giving us a closer access to CT. For Bobbie, more opportunity to travel to CA to visit her family. All things considered, it wasn't a bad choice.