When Will or Did you Retire?

[graham bowers]

I had an aspiration of retiring at 60 but after checking the numbers, jacked in 22 months ago, aged 57. Best thing I ever did and am never bored. I volunteer for 2 (short) days a week and amuse myself for the rest of the time with cycling, other hobbies, keeping house and cooking. The missus still works, because she wants to !!
Graham

 

[Mrs M]

Why don't you try for a job on the railways, shift work, meet people and still time to build up a good company pension. Example, LU were recently recruiting new entrant Customer Service Assistants on 30k a cracking pension and ten weeks leave. You also get the chance to meet lots of new people.

I'd take that now, how do I apply?

 

[The Jogger]

I'd take that now, how do I apply?

Just keep checking TFL website, they only recently finished a campaign also they were looking for part time staff , some for night tube working Fri and Sat night 11 - 7 pro rata

 

[ColinJ]

Oh dear, is there not a happy medium like 58

And becoming unaccustomed to living in the style to which one has become accustomed ...?

I went from being able to walk into a bike shop in 1999 and decide on a whim to spend £2,000 on a bike, to the 2015 me who buys honey in jars to decant into squeezy bottles because it saves 50p a time over buying the stuff already in squeezy bottles!

 

[Dirk]

Reading through some of these posts, I have to say that I'm thankful that everything worked out well for me and the missus.
We both retired last year and took moderate pensions and large lump sums.
We don't owe a penny to anyone; all mortgages and loans paid off before we retired, so we don't actually need a large income.
Our standard of living and quality of life have both improved since we left work.
The state pension kicks in in 5 years time and that will just be an extra £13000 pocket money a year as far as we are concerned.
I really do feel sorry for some of the guys who can see no way out from the drudgery of the workplace.

 

[ColinJ]

Why decant it?

I find it quite handy being able to squeeze it into my porridge and I also put a little squirt of honey in my daily coffee.

I suppose if I worked out the time/effort spent on the decanting vs time/effort spent on hunting about for a clean teaspoon to get honey from the jar then there would not be much in it!

 

[jonny jeez]

I could retire when I am 48 but will likely take on a big enough pile of debt (Mortgage) before then that will require me to work until around 60. If I don't do it now, I shall be too old to be of appeal to lenders.

 

[Spinney]

55 - and I'll probably never retire completely until I loose my marbles. I'm a freelance, with as much work as I want most of the time, so I can just gradually accept less to wind things down. As others have said, I think I'd get bored with nothing to do. Although I do need to make an effort, once Mr Spinney has retired from his 'proper job', to get the pair of us away on more holidays together.

 

[Lonestar]

ASAP but would guess it would be between 7 and 15 years unless ill health beats me to it.

 

[vickster]

I'd take that now, how do I apply?

You might want to check the cost of living in London however, £30k a year doesn't go very far in reality

 

[vickster]

London's also a long way from Aberdeen...

That may not be a problem

 

[andytheflyer]

I have very recently decided - May 6th 2016, when HR have confirmed I'll have 25 years in with my current employer (so I get the badge!), plus a week extra to allow for for some spoilsport to decide that retiring on the 25th anniversary does not count - or some such nonsense. I'll be almost 62.

TBH, after spinal surgery 5 years ago, I can no longer hack the constant and often short notice travel (I once went to Saudi at the drop of a hat and only for a single meeting), and the "I need it yesterday, but but CoP today will be OK" demands. No longer have the energy. It's time to hang up the hard hat, the PPE and the salary.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

I am nearly 60 and am having to 'unretire'!

Strictly speaking, I haven't retired, rather I stopped work due to stress, but I have now run out of cash and I am still 7 years short of a state pension. A mere £550/year private pension that will be starting in the NY isn't going to go very far!

So ...I am working on a couple of ideas which I hope will come to fruition soon. If not, expect to find me stacking shelves in some West Yorkshire supermarket in the near future. (So much for my grammar school and university education, but I can't see any realistic chance of getting skilled employment again at my age, and even if I did, I would probably suffer from stress again. I got a thumping headache last night just trying to sort out a cock-up on eBay, and that was one which was in my favour! (A company sent me double what I ordered and then refunded the payment. ))

I actually like making myself useful ... organising bike rides on CycleChat, helping fix people's bikes, that sort of thing - I just don't make any money from it!

The stupid thing is that I only need to earn half what I was earning in 1993 to get by. Any more than that and I would be laughing!

Money is a funny thing - the more you have the more you spend that's how it was for us anyway.

My career peaked late 90's and Lovely Wife also had an ok income. Our income was very high and we had a ball.

We did lots of stuff (nice holidays etc) and bought stuff (fancy cars & watches & other expensive consumer items) but sadly we lost out on time together etc. I was earning very well, as I did almost from day one of my varied career, but by Christ I put the time in - which was fair enough really. But as 2000 approached it all wore a bit thin and we decided to call it a day and get a life.

We buried the mortgage and then, with considerable trepidation switched off the income flow - scary!

My calculations (I have a pretty complex spreadsheet that plots our various income/expenditure streams for several decades ahead) suggested we would be ok ad-infinitum.

Much to my surprise we live on considerably less than I had anticipated - the further we distanced ourselves from our high spending days the less we felt inclined to spend.

We now 'struggle' to spend £15k pa to run our lovely house, eat well, drink well and do the things we love, mainly walking in the beautiful part of the world we live in and chilling together - 15 years ago we brought home that amount in a very short space of time - not going to do the numbers here as it would come across as crass. Capital expenditure not included in that number but we don't have much of that either.

We have simply stripped back our life and started living a bit more - I accept that this is easy to do if you are ok financially but the point I am making is that you don't need a lot of income to live well if you have no mortgage/rent/debt.

We have run on a zero debt basis for well over a decade now and we occasionally reminisce about how we would not even have been able to countenance such a thing back in the 90's - as I said earlier, the more you earn the more you spend. Laughably there were times when we considered ourselves hard up - ridiculous!

On the education front (as you mentioned it) I never saw the lack of it as a limiting factor or the possession of it a major advantage. I'm moderately bright, not massively well educated, but when I toddled off to work I found it very easy to quickly move up the ranks, often by-passing much better educated people along the way. I just had a knack of getting things done and making money for my various employers. I ended up with various director roles and finally as MD - had my mum been alive she would've been proud that her boy from a shabby council estate & abusive (alcoholic father) teenage years had 'done good'! Maybe things have changed for youngsters these days but to me there's different types of smart - in business sometimes 'smart' is simply being able to see the bigger picture, join the dots quickly, innovate and inspire your team to come along with you. Worked for me and it can still work for others who don't come from the privileged side of the street.

Sorry for waffling!

 

[Hill Wimp]

I gather @Hill Wimp has decided never to retire.

Not in the next 154 weeks anyway

After that

 

[Hill Wimp]

....it's those 4.30am starts that @Hill Wimp loves

Only 1083 of those to go