Early-retirement wannabe

arthurdick

jamesd wrote: »

You're already very well qualified to comment since this is about aspiring to retire early and that takes lots of advance planning in most cases.

Cheers JD, yep, you are right, I am qualified as I am a retire early wannabe, it's just that it will be harder for me to do so as I missed out on pensions for over 30 years due to two very serious accidents that left me unfit for work for a long time. I did not even join a pension until I was 47, have a lot of catching up to do, plus I am on very low pay,less than £16000, but saying that, if I can boost my pension to around £8000 per year, plus the state pension, I will be better off than now, as the mortgage would be paid off by then....

My main stumbling block is not being able to save to fund the gap between retiring early and SPA. Hopefully something will change for the better in the next 10 years or so.
So for now, I am very much a retire early wannabe, just that I cannot think of how to make it happen....every other day I open my spreadsheet up and just see the large number of days until I retire, also I see my AVC savings going up little by little.. oh well, off to work now to earn some peanuts.....

arthurdick

Mrs_Z wrote: »

Same here, I've been reading this thread with great interest but not contributing as although I'm a definite Early Retirement Wanna-be - IF my current plan becomes reality, that's 2525 days to go, ie. just under 7 years and think it's a bit too far. Loads could happen in the meantime (including me winning the lottery :rotfl:) but I take solace in the fact that at least it's a single figure. That would take me to 55 and I'd have to fund a gap of 8 years before pension (currently 63yrs)....

Ha Ha, me too mrs z, I think about the lottery win every week, I don't want a big win, Just enough to have the work because I want to feeling, not because I have to.

bugslet

agent69 wrote: »

1. I quite like work in a funny sort of way
2. Having spent several years thinking about it, I still don't know how I would spend my time if I wasn't at work.
3. There's a big difference between saving £30k a year for the next 5 years and spending £20k of your savings each year.

I enjoy traveling, but you can't spend 52 weeks a year abroad or the novelty will soon wear off.

I work for myself in a very stressful business, but I like it. I do think in the next few years that I will change to do something else - that may be forced by loss of a key contract or it may be that I get to mid 50s and decide that I want to do something that doesn't occupy 60-70 hours of my life including commuting. I

If you enjoy it, why give up completely.

I do have hobbies and would like more time to spend on them, but not all week.

I've only every done some broad mental calculations, but if I lived on 20k a year, I could probably manage till my work pension kicks in at 60 ( state pension 67). But I don't want to:D.

Deleted_User wrote: »

I suggest that single people reaching their 50s or 60s are likely (generalisation, I know, but necessary to challenge your generalisation) to have nurtured more outside interests, friends, contacts and community links than the coupled.

I am single no dependents and that would hold true for me. Not for nothing am I known as the envelope sister, as in going to the opening of:o.

Deleted_User wrote: »

And single people have "family" with whom to spend more time with, too.

I don't have family of any sort and friends are there for going out and popping round to each others houses rather than just being there. The OP may be like me and that suit him/her, but it isn't for everyone.

atush

uk1 wrote: »

As far as I know ipads don't seem to like it, sorry. My PC seems fine with it for some reason.

Jeff

Well the link worked, but cant read the article. You have to be a paid member.

uk1

atush wrote: »

Well the link worked, but cant read the article. You have to be a paid member.

Yes, but it also allows you to share single articles .... which on this occaision it didn't allow you to for some reason. Sorry.

edinburgher

uk1 wrote: »

Yes, but it also allows you to share single articles .... which on this occaision it didn't allow you to for some reason. Sorry.

When I click it it just says that access has expired. Blimmin' paywalls, but I suppose they need to make money somehow.

gadgetmind

edinburgher wrote: »

Haha - golden handcuffs - where I work, everyone is hoping for the golden boot

Well, I'd settle for that too, given enough gold!

My handcuffs feature a decent bit of gold, but three years more to get it all. New contract too, with long notice period, but that's no big deal for me.

uk1

edinburgher wrote: »

When I click it it just says that access has expired. Blimmin' paywalls, but I suppose they need to make money somehow.

It's annoying because they use this as a marketing thing. They allow you specifically in the subscription to share pages with preset words in order to spread the word about The Times. This one showed as being shareable ... but hey ho.

As you are clearly desperate to read it I have manually copied and pasted the text below as best I can and avoiding all pictures etc. Although virtually unreadable I hope it helps.

Jeff

Prosecco and room service: how to have a stylish old age

The poshest way to spend those golden years

In a large country manor in the Vale of Aylesbury, a Woosterish gentleman is striding around with his shoelaces undone. Under the steely gaze of his oil-painted ancestors, Harry Aubrey-Fletcher, 34, is helping to serve high tea to the upper-crust residents of Chilton House. “Scone with jam and cream?” he bellows at the man in the armchair on his left and receives the very slightest of nods. “Slice of lemon tart, Mrs Flint?” he shouts at the woman opposite, who looks completely startled. “Gosh, no!” she says, as though he’s asked if she’d care to be set alight.
The meeting of Mrs Flint and Aubrey-Fletcher in the hallway with a knife and fork might sound like something from a game of Cluedo, but it is in fact a window into possibly the swankiest care home in the country. Forget the Chiltern Firehouse: Chilton House has become the hottest ticket around. With a nightly rate of £265 — rooms cost up to a £1,600 a week — it’s more a hotel than a hospital.
Here residents can order fillet steak for supper and drink Bollinger for breakfast if they want to — they wear necklaces of bells and have only to exert the smallest of pressures to summon a member of staff and have their every whim and desire met. “It may take five minutes,” 86-year-old Mrs Clezy tells me, “but they’ll do anything you want.”
Chilton House, the family seat of the aristocratic Aubrey-Fletchers since the 17th century, stands at the neck of a gravel drive that is the shape of a string of pearls and lined with Land Rovers. Velvety green fields surround the property, which has its own church and former stables.
“How wonderful of you to visit us!” says Mrs Thannhauser, a Viennese 73-year-old in a red silk scarf, gripping my hands. She sweeps scone crumbs under claret-coloured sofas with her walking sticks and rushes to neaten Mr Partridge’s shirt collar.
“Please excuse me, Mr Partridge, but I’m going to have to touch you a bit,” she says with an air of intense apology. “He’s been waiting for someone to say that for years,” Mrs Flint remarks, wide-eyed. Mr Partridge, 90, laughs hoarsely.
Chilton House is the kind of place where sentences such as “They own Fortnum & Mason and Selfridges but they’re very unassuming about it” are uttered with complete sincerity and the residents need no excuse to drink bubbly. They were drinking prosecco “long before it was fashionable”, they say: Milan, 1943. “But the parties were lovelier in Greece,” Mrs Clezy tells me. The residents here have lived all over the world, own second homes in Chelsea and Notting Hill, and are flown to weddings on the French Riviera. “If you’re going to get married at Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, you want to do it in the gardens,” I’m told. “Then you can look down on the yachts.”
The Aubrey-Fletcher family turned Chilton House into a care home in 1987. Harry Aubrey-Fletcher is its director, and spends the day nipping around the house hollering at its hard-of-hearing residents. He says Chilton House is designed to have the feel of a “country house hotel” rather than that of a grim care home. There are 32 rooms, some of which open via French windows on to plush gardens. Most sport black and white photographs of weddings and angelic grandchildren as well as flowers, copies of Country Life and Tatler and a stash of wine, bubbly and brandy.
Most of the residents are in their nineties but there are many centenarians among them and fleets of Zimmer frames to support what Mr Partridge calls “the Chilton crawl”. Anyone in their seventies is deemed almost adolescent.
heard about it on Radio 4 and knew, ‘that’s where I want to be’Aubrey-Fletcher, whose dangling shoelaces have now been firmly retied, says it’s “a lot of fun” when a birthday card arrives from the Queen and they go to Raymond Blanc’s nearby Belmond Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons to celebrate. “We’ve had fascinating people live here: even an ex-prime minister. One resident quietly mentioned that he was selling his art collection and the next day we saw it splashed all over the front pages of the papers.”
When it comes to admissions, Harry’s mother, Lady Aubrey-Fletcher, whose first name is Sara but is known as Bertie, admits they have “long conversations with residents about whether Chilton House is right for them and they are right for us”. After considering why it is so popular she settles on “cheap” — at only £60,000 plus a year — and “horses for courses”, which she translates to mean: “You don’t feel like you’re about to be involved in too many Butlins Redcoats things.”
Mrs Clezy says that while she doesn’t want to live there at all (“I have a perfectly good house in Warwickshire”) she “always said that if I had to go to a nursing home, this is the only one I’d go to because it does feel more like a hotel than a hospital”.
Life at Chilton House is indeed far more leisurely than at Butlins. The residents are interested in three things, Aubrey-Fletcher says: puzzles, the papers and pre-lunch drinks. “I remember mucking about in the house when I was 14 and everyone drank sherry but it’s not so popular now,” he says. “People generally prefer a glass of wine. The people who come here to convalesce are the kind of people who were staying in Soho House ten years ago so they’re used to a different style.” The guest relations team operate like a concierge service — the former assistant to the chief executive of Harrods is among their staff.
In some ways you can’t escape the fact that this is a care home though. When Mr Partridge, dapper in red braces and green checked slippers, emerges from his room in the late afternoon he’s told by Mrs Henderson that he looks “a bit cross”. “I’m not cross, I’m blind,” he says matter-of-factly.
After their cream tea the residents are helped one by one from their chairs by nurses and deposited on their frames. “What did you come in?” the nurses ask, like valets who must retrieve Bentleys and Rolls-Royces for posh party guests. Mrs Flint explains that there is a hierarchy of vehicle. She has one of the superior models, she explains, flipping the seat of her frame open to reveal storage space crammed with Agatha Christie novels. “Much better than a handbag.”
By five o’clock the socialites have gathered in the hall to swap stories and wait for “plonk”. A fire rages in the corner of the room despite it being mid-April. Half an hour passes and no one appears. “Plonk!” Mr Partridge shouts. “Battery acid! Vin ordinaire!” Mrs Flint decides to take matters into her own hands, pushing her Agatha Christie-stuffed frame into the kitchen and returning with a glint in her eye.
“Was he willing?” Mrs Thannhauser asks.
“I only asked for wine!” Mrs Flint replies with a smile.

Downton Abbey or the eco-village, which is for you?
By Carol Midgley

Nursing home: ugh. There are two words guaranteed to strike dread in the heart of anyone over 40 who will picture dead-eyed residents, over-boiled cabbage, commodes and a permanently blaring TV set. Who would want to spend their twilight years like this?
Which is why the upper end of the retirement market is changing to suit a generation that won’t tolerate indignity in a wipe-down chair, and demands to retire in style with intelligent company, independence, music, Zumba classes, good food and wine. Janet Street-Porter has said that care homes should be as desirable as hip hotels because “the generation that gave the world Philippe Starck, Ikea and Habitat will settle for nothing less”. This shift is coming to pass — at least for the better off. Glass of wine served every day before lunch, madam? I don’t mind if I do.
Sandy Copland’s two-bedroom penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Battersea Park is a classic example of this retirement revolution. It is part of a new luxury retirement village — the first in London — that is run on the basis of a five-star hotel but with care discreetly on hand. He moved to Battersea Place six weeks ago after selling his homes in Cheyne Walk and Hampshire, although he hasn’t yet completely fathomed the hi-tech kitchen with its induction hob and digital microwave.
Copland, a retired chartered surveyor, chose the apartment with his wife when the complex was being built and the couple had decided to retire in London. “One wants to keep active and involved with the things that keep you busy,” he says. Copland’s wife died before the flats were completed, but he decided to go ahead with it on his own. His daughters live near by.
So far he has made use of the library where all the day’s newspapers are available and plans to use the spa pool very soon. He has access to a concierge and 24-hour medical staff, chauffeur-driven cars, a private cinema, billiard room, lounge bar, dining room, a chef with Michelin experience and a pool of BMWs and Audis. He already knows one of the other residents, a friend from his RAF club. There has been a wine-tasting evening. “It’s 18 months since my wife died. Now I’m here it feels like a springboard to the next chapter in life,” he says. “The staff are brilliant; nothing is too much trouble.” This style of living comes at a hefty price, of course: apartments range from £535,000 to £2.9 million and there is a service charge of about £1,100 a month. There’s also a deferred membership fee.
For the well-heeled who prefer views of the countryside, Chilton House, an elegant stately home in Buckinghamshire, is exactly the sort of place where one can live out one’s days in style. True it’s a nursing home, but one that offers a Downton Abbey vibe. Another such example is Amesbury Abbey, a Palladian mansion set in 35 acres with fishing rights on the Avon. Care is offered in the form of sheltered living or a nursing home and prices for the latter start at £850 a week for a single room. There are currently 20 people on the waiting list for sheltered housing.
Another increasingly popular option follows the American trend for “community-led later-life living” in landscaped retirement villages. Aged 69 and 70, Sheila and Mike Lock decided to swap their five-bedroom house for a two-bedroom cottage in Durrants Village in West Sussex. Run by Renaissance Villages, it features cottages and apartments arranged around a clubhouse, within 30 acres of parkland.
“We made the decision in our mid-sixties that we’d make the move now while we still have the energy,” says Sheila, a former primary school teacher, whose children and grandchildren live near by. They reserved the cottage in 2013 after seeing the plans and thinking, “What a lovely way of life.”
“It has turned out that way,” says Sheila. “We have made lots of new friends, all of a similar age.” They socialise at the clubhouse, where residents help to run the bar. They pay an annual service charge, which includes landscaping, window cleaning, a weekly cleaner and laundry service. There is also a medical centre and visiting GP. Properties range in price from £200,000 to £500,000.
The film Quartet told the story of a group of former musicians and opera singers living out their retirement in a stately home. Near Colchester, a group including teachers, architects and accountants have come up with a more modern, eco-friendly take on the idea. They are in the middle of developing the Cannock Mill Project — a community of over-55s centred on a 19th-century mill in Old Heath. They bought the land for £1.2 million then sought planning permission to build 17 houses and six flats.
Lesley Scordellis, a 64-year-old divorced former charity fundraiser who lives alone in Guildford, heard about the project on Radio 4, and immediately thought, “That’s where I want to live.” She got in touch, met the group and has now reserved a two-bedroom house at the site. “We all have this ghastly image of being in a home. It doesn’t matter what age you are, the closer you get to it the more ghastly it becomes,” she says.
The mill house will provide guest accommodation and a dining room where residents will eat together a few times a week, plus a communal sitting room with a wood-burning stove. There will be allotments for keen gardeners and the pond will be converted into a natural swimming pool. The focus will be on mutual support and “active ageing”. As Scordellis puts it: “No one will ever have to go to the shops or the doctors on their own when they get a bit doddery.” Seventeen of the 23 properties starting at about £200,000 are now spoken for.
The author Diana Athill, now 98, has written about how much she is enjoying her retirement home, the Mary Feilding Guild in north London. It was originally set up to help the educated “genteel poor” and has been described as being “more like being back at university” with residents including educationalists and political activists. Staff are hired only if they have a genuine liking for old people, Athill has said. Once, she remarked to a carer how surprised she was to discover how interesting was a very old resident whom she’d assumed was almost beyond communication. The carer replied that everyone there was interesting if you took the trouble to get to know them. “I have now been here five years without ever coming across any exception to this pleasing attitude; and on the few occasions when I have been less than well, the comfort of being kindly looked after was inexpressible.”
For those who don’t wish to retire on terra firma there is always the mega-cruise ship The World, which claims to be the only ship on which individuals can buy a permanent home. You need about £1 million upfront — £10 million for a penthouse — and about £120,000 a year in service charges and spending money. The 43,000-tonne vessel is effectively owned by its passengers, who decide its route by committee. Leonard Berney, one of the first British officers to liberate prisoners from Bergen-Belsen at the end of the Second World War, spent the last six years of his life as a permanent passenger on The World. “I miss virtually nothing about living in a normal house,” said Berney. “Everything I want is right here.” He joined it in 2009 aged 89 and died in the Caribbean earlier this year aged 95.
As with most things in life, a good retirement is easier the more money you have, but at least the market is responding to move away from the stuff of all our nightmares. The revolution has begun.

Eight poshest retirement homes


Amesbury Abbey, Amesbury
Majestic mansion with a William Kent fireplace, sweeping staircase, its own fishing rights and a touch of Brideshead about it. Pets actively encouraged. So smart that Nigel Havers’s parents chose to come here. Weekly charges from £850-£1,250.
Battersea Place, Battersea, south London
Run by LifeCare like a five-star hotel. Residents have their own coffee barista, chef and chauffeur-driven car service. Homes range from £535,000 to £2.9 million plus service charge. There is also a deferred membership fee when the property is sold. Expect celebrities and minor royalty.
Mary Feilding Guild, Highgate, northwest London
Set up originally to help the “genteel poor”, a not-for-profit charitable organisation anyone can apply to but the interview process is said to be like that of an Oxford college. Activities include art classes and Shakespeare and poetry groups. Standard fee with supper is £3,037 a month.
Pickering House, Dorking
A charitable care home for journalists founded by Charles Dickens in which inquisitive minds are kept active with reading and quizzes. Keith Waterhouse donated his library and Sir Ray Tindle paid for the bar which, unsurprisingly, is often buzzing. Fees: according to your means.
Chartwell House, west London
A Bupa-run townhouse in Ladbroke Terrace said to attract west London politicos. Spacious rooms, sensory gardens, a well-stocked library and in-house chefs. Tony Benn lived here. From about £1,500 a week.
Cannock Mill Cohousing, near Colchester
One for eco and community-minded retirees who fancy the good life growing their own fruit and veg, swimming in a natural outdoor pool and helping each other out. Properties start from £200,000.
St Elphin’s Park, Derbyshire
A retirement village based around a former 19th-century spa, now the club house. It includes apartments and mews cottages. There are Zumba classes and beauty treatments. Properties from £270,000 to £525,000.
The World ship, no fixed address
A floating retirement community that has 106 apartments, 19 studio apartments, and 40 studios, all owned by the ship’s residents. Prices are provided at the time of inquiry. Amenities include a golf simulator, movie theatre and six restaurants.

gadgetmind

arthurdick wrote: »

I think about the lottery win every week,

I've never done it.

If you want to dream, dream of starting a successful business, writing a best selling book, inventing some amazing new gizmo, or pretty much anything that gets you thinking of a route to success other than dumb luck.

edinburgher

As you are clearly desperate to read it I have manually copied and pasted the text below as best I can and avoiding all pictures etc. Although virtually unreadable I hope it helps.

Jeff

Much appreciated - although just about all of those options sound like hell! :rotfl: