Early-retirement wannabe

Marine_life

Gatser wrote: »

One may say... you SADDO! counting the days of your life away....BUT.... my count is 621 WORK DAYS to go!!!

I think once you get a taste of "retirement", like I did following redundancy.... I just cannot wait until it happens for real :T

Time is so precious when you are fit, healthy and "not THAT old!"

Good luck with the countdown clocks

Well today it is just 1377 days to go but you have put an interesting thought into my head - is your work days calculation excluding weekends and public holidays?

Not sure I can calculate that accurately!

But lets see:

1. 52 weekends a year means 104 days
2. 6 weeks annual leave is 30 days
3. Public holidays - say 13 days

That's 147 days

Which means my days calculation includes around 560 no work days. Which means ONLY 817 work days!

I am not wishing my life away but we all need those anchors which give us something to work towards. My immediate anchors are a. ski holiday in February b. Beach holiday in Turkey in July. I may be looking forward to early retirement but I will be enjoying myself along the way!

Gatser

Marine_life wrote: »

.......which means my days calculation includes around 560 no work days. Which means ONLY 817 work days!

I am not wishing my life away but we all need those anchors which give us something to work towards. My immediate anchors are a. ski holiday in February b. Beach holiday in Turkey in July. I may be looking forward to early retirement but I will be enjoying myself along the way!

Marine Life, you have made me happier knowing I am not alone!!

I have done a similar calculation to give me work days because:
(a) I rather enjoy holidays/weekends
(b) It makes the target number smaller!

AND

Like you I break up my 621 days, knowing that I only have 20 days before I am on a walking break to Madeira... and the possiblity of a restful Turkish break (no kidding) about 100 days after that = July!
(So my balance will only be 500 work days left)
If I hear someone discussing "...workday balance...blah blah....pensions....blah blah...." on the adjacent sunbed, I'll introduce myself! :rotfl:

No...this is not sad.... whilst we are still having fun along the way...and just think of all the fun to be had when fulltime work doesn't get in the way!!

tanith

Just wanted to add my twopennyworth to an excellent thread. I really had done no retirement planning apart from paying into my Occupational Pension and saving what I could in ISA's. I had lots of complications in my life from age 40ish eventually divorcing and then remarrying 3 children coming and going at various times and grandchildren being born so tended to ignore things till I was around 57 , then realised I was never going to make 60 for retirement and had to take ill-health retirement at 58 luckily my OH is still working and I was able to take my NHS pension early and even more luckily my State Pension was still paid at 60 . So having done no planning as such and then the shock of having to go early I am doing ok , we are still paying our Mortgage till OH retires in 4yrs then with both our occupational pensions and state pensions , no mortgage and some savings we will do ok . I never for a minute thought ill-health would promt early retirement and that came as a big shock to me and took me a year to come to terms with as I was intending to carry on past 60 , you never know when your body will let you down something you just can't take into account when doing all that complicated planning...

By the way I love being retired (have the odd day of wondering what to do) and not being a slave to the clock is one of the joys...

pension-newbie

Gatser wrote: »

One may say... you SADDO! counting the days of your life away....BUT.... my count is 621 WORK DAYS to go!!!

I think once you get a taste of "retirement", like I did following redundancy.... I just cannot wait until it happens for real :T

Time is so precious when you are fit, healthy and "not THAT old!"

Good luck with the countdown clocks

I had a wake up call like this - my old colleague, boss and mentor phoned me and said if I wanted to buy him a farewell coffee then I had 21 hours (3 days) to do it in as he was retiring.

At that point I realised I had 21 years (3 decades) to go to retirement - my target is to bring that down, but I am just reading and consulting and working out whats what with my various arrangements

Can I ask a really loaded question - how much advice did you guys take from IFA/Financial planning consultants - and was it worth it ?

Marine_life

Of course its time to say 1376 days to go but you knew that didn't you?

A couple of thoughts from the posts today.

Tanith - I think health (or lack of it) is a particularly big potential issue - and I know since turning 40 I have been backwards and forwards to the doctor a number of times. so far - touch wood - no serious problems - but you're right, you just never know. Financially I would be ok as I currently have some very generous life insurance through my employer but my main hobbies involve sport (running, cycling, skiing) etc. so if I can't do those things in retirement then it will seriously detract from my enjoyment. Which of course is part of the reason for wanting to retire earlier but also means I am paying a lot more attention to health issues (to try and keep everything together!). I have some more thoughts about health and particularly stress but I'll keep that for another post.

pension- newbie: Personally I have not had much independent financial advice. However, i do work in the finance industry so have a reasonably good base knowledge.

Gatser - do you have all your financials in place or how are you progressing?

Marine_life

Todays thoughts with 1375 days to go

I have been playing around with my spreadsheets over the weekend (doesn't everyone?) and in particular I have made them more accurate (I have now moved everything to monthly rather than annual. This gives me a much beeter feeling as I can actually see how my retirement savings are being built up from what I know is going out of my bank account now.

What is has done has helped me narrow down a number of things - even if those things are narrowing down the uncertainty!

1. Clearly there is a natural uncertainty around job, health etc. Worst case scenario would be that I could be made redundant but I have a contractual notice period of 6 months and realistically could expect a years pay off.

2. We have a fixed rate on our mortgage which runs until December 2013, at that point we will paid off the outstanding balance.

3. Part of my earnings is bonus and part is fixed, the level of bonuses could make a big difference to my cash pool on retirement.

4. Interest rates and invstment growth also need to be factored in. At the moment I have that at 3%.

Where this is all leading (and ultimately will determine whether I can retire at 50) is the size of the cash pot I will have then as I will need to live off this for 10 years until my pensions kick in. At the moment it looks like that cash pot will amount to around 900,000 (assuming my assumptions work!) with additional assets (2 properties). I am assuming that I will sell the properties, thereby releasing some cash (i.e. after I have bought our retirement home) and (I expect around 200-300,000) which would give me a cash pot of just over 1 million to last us 10 years.

I think that's enough?

Rob_192

Marine_life wrote: »

I think that's enough?

Well, I reckon I could just scrape by on that:D

Gatser

GATSER: now 618 days to go!!

Marine_life wrote: »

I have been playing around with my spreadsheets over the
weekend (doesn't everyone?)

and Monday-Friday!!!

Marine_life wrote: »

4. Interest rates and invstment growth also need to be factored in. At the moment I have that at 3%.

Me too!
Better to plan modestly, aim higher...

Marine_life wrote: »

..... which would give me a cash pot of just over 1 million to last us 10 years.

I think that's enough?

Unless you are REALLY extravagant, I'd say that's "very
comfortable" for the 50-60 era...

You have things well on course...

Marine_life

I missed a day yesterday - which means......

1373 days to go

bondy01

Some years ago I took voluntary redundancy but had so much work on I had to stay for 3 months. On my desk sat a small clock which had a no. of days to go countdown timer on it , I think some of you perhaps need to buy one! Paul - 51 with liveable pension and retired early btw.