Early-retirement wannabe

Thrugelmir

OldBeanz wrote: »

My memories of the 80's were people complaining about what Mrs Thatcher was doing to pensions. Hence my puzzlement for anyone who has not saved towards their pension years knowing things were unlikely to significantly improve.

That was Brown in 1997. The result now is quite decisive. With many in the public sector accruing a pension those in the private sector can only ever dream of. Then there was Equitable Life which hit a large slice of the middle class who were self funding as well.

Nor has the increased rate of NI from next year dawned on many. GO pulled that trick straight out of Brown's book of illusions.

atush

LottieJ wrote: »

Hello early retirement wannabes. I would also like to retire early. I am 37 and am hoping to retire at 57 - or at least work part-time from that time onwards.

I have two key hurdles to this plan - one is that I would like my daughter (now aged 2) to be in fee paying education from at least secondary school onwards and the other is that we are not living in our 'forever home' and I would hope to move to a bigger property in the next 5 years or so.

I earn circa. £50,000 before tax at the moment. Self-employed. Hopefully that will go up over time but nothing is certain. I've had some recent health difficulties that have impacted upon my earnings but am hopefully getting back on course.

Up until now, my earnings have gone on clearing debts, funding my education, funding maternity leave and a house move but it is now time to start some serious planning for retirement.

I have just engaged an IFA to help me sort out a pension.

I would be incredibly grateful if someone could point me in the direction of some retirement planning tools that would help me to plan how I can meet my goals.

Best wishes,
Lottie

You have 2 obvious pths to take here.

One is pension. AS a higher rate taxpayer, every 100 you put into a pension will only cost you 60. So get started. Is this your first pension? If so, you really should be putting 19% of your salary in the pension.

Do you have a limited company?

And as for school fees, you really need to fill your S&S isa allowance each year, as should the child'd other parent.

Marine_life

I read an interesting article the other day:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/you-really-dont-need-to-work-so-much

The line that really struck me was "in white-collar jobs, the amount of work can expand infinitely through the generation of false necessities".

Brilliant.

Around the same time i was watching an episode of "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" on TV and more precisely his office. No computer screen. No mobile phone.

I know when I started work back in the 80's and it made me wonder. What did we do in those days to waste time at work?

But a serious point. Computer and mobile technology have become so pervasive that actually, not only has technology provided us with many means to invent "false necessities" it has also meant that we spend more and more time out of the office working. The point being that rather than technology result in increased leisure its actually resulted in more work being crammed into a working life - especially for white collar workers.

Do we crave early retirement because work has deprived us of our free time? If we still had our weekends, evening and holidays work free zones would we feel that our lives were in balance? Or have we come to the stage where we live in fear that if we switch of our email out of work hours that we will be under threat from someone who IS prepared to leave their phone on?

I can't speculate as I need to go to bed to get up early for an 8:00 am meeting ;-)

Nationwide8

kangoora wrote: »

I'm in a strange position now.

I could conceivably take a package now at getting on for 54, and according to my calculations, retire on about 50% of current household income. The trouble is, each year I put off retiring, increases the annual pension income by around 6-7%.

I've decided to put it off to 56, another 12-15% p.a. spending money (ish) for the rest of my life for 2 and 1/2 more years of what is becoming a minor hell in work seems an acceptable price to pay.

On the plus side, if I do get pushed out as they've now started a purge (disguised as job capability assessments), at least I now know I can either take a part-time job stacking shelves, van driving, hunt beating, etc. for a couple of years or contract for a much higher wage for a year - or just quit work anyway and accept a lower income.

It's a nice feeling knowing I don't actually 'need' to work so that makes it a bit more bearable for me.

This was me,all I can say is that if time becomes more important than money then you will go.It didn't make any difference to me that if I'd stayed longer my monthly income would be higher for life.I'd reached the point where I could live off my pension so it seemed a no brainer to put myself through more misery ( or in your case minor hell ) for something I didn't really need.
But as so many have said taking early retirement is such an individual decision and people require such differing amounts of money to do it or more importantly feel comfortable doing it.

If you get pushed out is there the chance of a pay off ? because again it might be worth hanging around for that,I hung around for 1-2yrs longer than I wanted in hopes of a payoff,it didn't work in my favour and I'd reached the point enough was enough.

Have just completed my first month of living off my pension which is about half of what my take home pay was,as I was putting half of my salary away anyway at the end to retire early it's not been a big adjustment and even though I consider myself very "good" with money I've lived on less than I thought I would.....more time to look for bargains or reduced items definitely comes into it.

Thanks to whoever mentioned TCB,can't believe I've missed that *goestolook

alexmi

Well, I am one of the few that has NOT given up his evenings and weekends and holidays to being a slave of checking work emails etc, but I STILL want to retire as soon as possible.

Thrugelmir

Marine_life wrote: »

I know when I started work back in the 80's and it made me wonder. What did we do in those days to waste time at work?

More productive I would say. As we didn't have to read endless junk emails nor answer calls from people saying have you seen the email I just sent.

wotsthat

Thrugelmir wrote: »

More productive I would say. As we didn't have to read endless junk emails nor answer calls from people saying have you seen the email I just sent.

I used to work in a place where products needed to be tested. One of us read out the product names and another wrote them down in a hard backed book. The results were then written by hand into the hard backed book and sent to the typing pool where reports were generated, sent to a QA department, sent back to a manager, signed and posted.

The only person left now is the one doing the testing, a bit of QA and a bit of IT.

Barcodes are scanned to book in samples, results go straight into the PC, QA'ed and emailed out.

Companies didn't computerise to become less productive.

greenglide

Companies didn't computerise to become less productive.

Quite true but, in many cases, IT and general changes in the way we do business has tended to mean that a lot more is done basically "because we can".

In the case of product testing many, many things are now tested and records kept for many years which just didnt happen in a bygone age. Look at pharmaceuticals, 40 years ago there were far less products (most of the drugs didnt exist) and they were much less complex to produce so the testing would have been much less complex. Nowadays the same plant will produce the same dug for multiple markets each of which has its own testing requirements. A huge amount of very efficient testing and recording of results goes on so that productivity is high but much more total effort is required than before.

Marine_life

wotsthat wrote: »

Companies didn't computerise to become less productive.

In general that is true - when it comes to the elimination of repetitive and manual tasks.

The problem I believe is that, in my line of work every day there is more and more information being produced by consultants which another bunch of consultants simply analyses, summarises and comes up with their view on. Which is then challenged by the first group of consultants. In a similar vein, the requirement of organizations for reports has increased exponentially. If you look at a bond document (typically issued for debt purposes) it is generally around 500 pages long and I guarantee you NOBODY ever reads it.

So, companies do not computerize to become less productive, they become less productive because the productive people are buried in analyzing and reporting on data which is supposed to make us more efficient.

Marine_life

Thrugelmir wrote: »

More productive I would say. As we didn't have to read endless junk emails nor answer calls from people saying have you seen the email I just sent.

I get endless complaints from people working for me that nobody answers their emails. When I tell them to pick up the phone they look at me like I just asked them to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together ;-)