Early-retirement wannabe

OffGridLiving

Just stumbled across this (mighty) thread and thought it was a great idea. I've reached the age where I'm approaching the 'final straight' (well, if I want to retire at age 60, not 67 like the government want) and I need to start planning ahead.

I'll plough through these posts and glean any inspiration I can from other contributors to help formulate a plan.

Marine_life

ermine wrote: »

However, I'd make an observation, which is probably coloured by the fact I am a Myers-Briggs INTJ, and I'd guess you aren't.

I've quoted just a small piece of your post but to be honest it was a great post (and I'm glad to see I was worthy or your blog - honestly I am!). I've been thinking about it for a couple of days now but have been so busy I just haven't had the chance to respond.

You might be surprised by my Myers-Briggs profile, actually my dominant profile is that of a thinker and I suspect that's what drives a lot of my posts on here. A need to analyse and plan and really map out as may "facts" as possible. Of course some of those "facts" are not real facts, they are other peoples experiences, but for me, hearing about other peoples experiences is either affirming or it enables me to tick off certain areas which are definitely not me. Other aspects of Myers-Briggs are less clear and in some cases a little schizophrenic in that actually I am quite introverted although most of the people I know or interact with would say exactly the opposite. But what you say is true, INTJ is not necessarily a profile for a successful business person - you need the "E".

Your remark about travel made me smile. I have been on so many planes you would not believe it. Between 2007 and 2008 I accumlated over 600,000 air miles, flying on average once a week and sometime more often. I had a Lufthansa black (Hon) card which means basically the airline does everything to keep you happy. There is no such thing as a waiting list. I can't say I enjoyed it and I still can't say I enjoy travel. To those who have not travelled it sounds glamerous but so often it just is not. In fact you could day that corporate travel is much the same as Macdonalds - i.e. when you fly business and stay in business hotels its utterly predictable and utterly dull. But I love to travel - especially to new places, the best travel I have done over the last few years is the road a little less travelled (!!), local tour guides and local boutique hotels.

So what about "living life to the full". Well looking back that was a completely throw away comment and probably also out of context. As I have sat back over the last few days what does living life to the full actually means? I actually agree with you on this one, for most peple it involves spending lots of money...but for me I actually just don't know. I've thought about it over and over the last few days and I know that I will NEVER spend (my own) money without any thought at all - that's not me. I always want the best deal possible, in fact I hate nothing more than the feeling of being ripped off or of spending more than I needed to. I was in India last year on vacation and I stayed in one of the most expensive hotels near the Taj Mahal and do you know what? I wish I had been in a more authentic local hotel. So what it "living life to the full"? I think in retirement it will involve doing different stuff, stuff that I have not done before (and that does not mean paying lots of cash).

So lets get back to the money thing - the €60k thing that I mentioned above. I am pretty convinced that in retirement we will spend less than that (over the long term) but there are two things that keep playing on my mind. Firstly, my "thinking" preference (the Myers-Briggs thing above) leads me to constantly over-analyse situations where someone of a more relaxed personality type might just jump in with both feet. Secondly, we are coming from a situation where we have for the last 10 years not had to think one-jot about money - its just there. I do not think we are extravagent but I know the world out there might think differently - we have a decent sized house and both have newish cars but outside of that what do we really spend money on? Nothing special but I do believe we spend money on things which other people would just avoid or do themselves.

But the real issue is what I am going to call the "golden-goose" scenario. And its this. My current job pays so much money that its so hard to walk away (effectively killing the golden goose) and once I walk away there is no way back and no other job out there that would pay me even one-third of what I earn today. So where does that leave me? It leaves me in the position that beofre I kill the golden goose I want to have such a significant buffer that the "not having to think about money" can continue. Does that make any sense at all?

So to answer your blog post "do extroverts need more to retire on than introverts?" I would say yes they do. But I'm not an extrovert - I'm like the bunjeee jumper who stands on the edge thinking about all of the things that could go wrong on the way down but wanting the rush of adrenaline which comes after the jump. So do I jump....?

ermine

Interesting that you call out Thinking as the primary function - my understanding of Myers-Briggs was that the orientation (internally as opposed to externally referenced) was primary, followed by the others. However, I do believe Jung was uncomfortable with the way people simplified extraversion and introversion so maybe I shouldn't perpetuate it

Your golden goose dilemma is a classic one, and I fought with the very same one, though under less positive circumstances. I discovered in 2009 that I had failed to keep my eye on the ball, and though I was happy with what I did the management structure became a travesty of its former self. This meant working, in particularly kowtowing to the performance management system was detracting from my quality of life. Presumably that is an additional disadvantage of being introverted - being self referenced I was unable to kowtow to something I despised. Although others didn't like the way things had turned it wasn't make or break, as one guy said, "what's the problem - if the john wants you to do new tricks, you just roll over for the payoff"

Having made the decision to go I carried on flying into the storm for three years to save enough money to be able to quit for good. Like you I suspect I'd seriously struggle to earn the same money, so even though it was a pretty rotten experience I continued until I had FI and then some. I overshot hugely, because in those three years I learned just how little of my spending gave me an enhanced quality of life after the inital sugar rush of novelty, and I feel a bit of a twit for not having identified this earlier, but letting it ride until a crisis.

In your position I'd do exactly what you are doing - stay working for a bit. You're never going to regret having a little bit more money in retirement. Yes, you are running out of time, and it's good to remember that every so often, but to be honest in your mid fifties it's hopefully not an immediate problem if you take another five years, though I must admit I did think of ERE Jacob's seminal post One More Year before Comfort on occasion in this thread. You can afford to take a little more time, and indeed this thread is testimony to the fact that your deliberations are helping others ask themselves some searching questions too. However, you will never save enough to address the unknown, because it is unknown. You can make it less unknown by picturing your life without work, but the search for security is illusory, and has probably wrecked many an early-retirement plan.

It's very hard to qualify your spending pattern when retired from when you are working, and it's easy to overestimate. I spend more on wine and cheese and good food. And bike parts and electronic components to tinker with. Eventually on machine tools and stuff. I spend much less on cars, commuting has disappeared. Travel - more frequent but smaller. I expected some of the changes, not others. My travel budget is less than half used. Indeed, after a year my budget overall is underused.

To some extent you're suffering from the tyranny of choice It was easier for me, I realised my values and those of work were out of sync, the challenge was making it happen ASAP. It's amazing what you can do when you don't have any other options.

One of the things that helped me was I lived the retirement budget while working as far as I could, to amplify my savings and see if it worked for me. At the moment you seem quite unclear on what your retirement spending pattern will be, and I'd agree that the safest and wisest thing to do is to continue working until you've got a better handle on that. However, your spending is in the end about values - what matters to you? Perhaps this is what you need to shake down a bit. It may be very different to what matters now. Picture it - what will your day look like? Your year? Do you have a bucket list? The picture from work will always be flawed, but it gives you a canvas to imagine on.

Far too many people look at retirement as an absence of working. Even in my lowest point I tried to look at it as a presence of something else that I positively wanted to do, and to paint this picture. It is always better to run towards the light than to run away from the darkness. As Steven Covey had in one of his seven habits of effective people, 'begin with the end in mind"

gadgetmind

Marine_life wrote: »

I have been on so many planes you would not believe it. Between 2007 and 2008 I accumlated over 600,000 air miles, flying on average once a week and sometime more often. I had a Lufthansa black (Hon) card which means basically the airline does everything to keep you happy.

I'm now "Gold" for life with American Airlines after clocking up 1.75m millions with them in just a few years. One year, I crossed the Atlantic 36 times and the Pacific a fair few too.

I've now reached a level where I can mostly bring people to me instead, which is nice.

As for Myers-Briggs, I produce profiles for characters in the book I'm working on as I find referring to the relevant wikipedia page can help me move them through certain situations in ways that differ from my deeply analytical approach. However, that I refer to MBTI as "The sixteen signs of the psycho-babble zodiac" in the very same book tells you a lot about how I regard its scientific rigour and real-world usefulness!

Marine_life

gadgetmind wrote: »

As for Myers-Briggs, I produce profiles for characters in the book I'm working on as I find referring to the relevant wikipedia page can help me move them through certain situations in ways that differ from my deeply analytical approach. However, that I refer to MBTI as "The sixteen signs of the psycho-babble zodiac" in the very same book tells you a lot about how I regard its scientific rigour and real-world usefulness!

We used to use Myers-Briggs but we have moved on and we now use Tracom Social Styles. Its a similar concept but it focuses more heavily on the differences between how the individual see themselves and how they are perceived by others. In addition, it teaches how to recognize other social styles and how to behave with those people. However, whilst a lot of it is as you say "psycho-babble" being aware of how you need to behave in certain situations is important, after all, to quote the well know phrase "all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players".

gadgetmind

Marine_life wrote: »

However, whilst a lot of it is as you say "psycho-babble" being aware of how you need to behave in certain situations is important

You're saying this to a life-long uber-INTJ who recently compared his now-knighted CEO to an elephant seal. I must have got the context right as he smiled, but I have been known the get this very wrong at times.

I'm also been known to disastrously misread facial expressions and body language!

BeatTheSystem

For a laugh, I went to humanmetrics DOT com and this is what I got:


INFJ
Introvert(22%) iNtuitive(50%) Feeling(25%) Judging(11%)

• You have slight preference of Introversion over Extraversion (22%)
• You have moderate preference of Intuition over Sensing (50%)
• You have moderate preference of Feeling over Thinking (25%)
• You have slight preference of Judging over Perceiving (11%)

The F result surprised me as I had myself down as a bit of a thinker.

Funny thing is several years ago I think I was ENTJ, cant quite remember, I think it is all designed to box people off. Extraverts in sales, introverts back office. The E's seem to do better when it comes to bonus's as they are not shy about coming forward.

The last few posts have been very thought provoking.

elantan

BeatTheSystem wrote: »

For a laugh, I went to humanmetrics DOT com and this is what I got:


INFJ
Introvert(22%) iNtuitive(50%) Feeling(25%) Judging(11%)

• You have slight preference of Introversion over Extraversion (22%)
• You have moderate preference of Intuition over Sensing (50%)
• You have moderate preference of Feeling over Thinking (25%)
• You have slight preference of Judging over Perceiving (11%)

The F result surprised me as I had myself down as a bit of a thinker.

Funny thing is several years ago I think I was ENTJ, cant quite remember, I think it is all designed to box people off. Extraverts in sales, introverts back office. The E's seem to do better when it comes to bonus's as they are not shy about coming forward.

The last few posts have been very thought provoking.

I'm an INFJ myself... Apparently we are the rarest of them all and often very misunderstood lol

Niltava

Hello everybody,

This is a really inspiring thread!

Last week I got a letter from my employers saying that my contract had been renewed (YAY!) but also stated that the terms of employment had changed and normal retirement age is now just a month before my 68th birthday. My heart sank upon reading this - I have recently turned 40, and whilst I love my job, the idea of working for another 28 years is less than attractive :eek:

Having found this thread, and having already built up about GBP 70,000 in pension contributions I am now feeling inspired to aim to retire at 60. I have the fortunate position of having a small mortgage which I can pay off in the next 4-8 years, whilst still contributing to my personal pension (mixed portfolio) and my employer's final salary scheme. I live outside the EU working in a diplomatic role which means I pay no income tax, allowing me to maximise my modest basic salary. Once the mortgage is paid off I'll be focusing on contributions to my pensions and an offshore deposit account.

So there it is - I have 19.5 years to go and this thread is an absolute gem in helping me plan!

Thanks,

Niltava

OffGridLiving

Niltava wrote: »

Once the mortgage is paid off I'll be focusing on contributions to my pensions and an offshore deposit account.

Just a thought on this, if you're gearing your finances for early retirement (rather than for a scenario where your reducing your income - i.e. going part time, lower paid but less stressful job, etc.) then wouldn't it be better to just let your mortgage run as normal and concentrate instead on your pensions and savings? As long as you have a repayment mortgage, this will take care of itself.

I read that a mortgage should be timed to end the day before you retire. I guess the thinking behind this is to maximise your investment return and tax free allowances in a pension or ISA in the time you have left before retirement. This mitigates the risk that you take 6 years paying down the mortgage and lose 6 years worth of tax rebates, 6 years of investment returns and then just as you start to concentrate on your pension you lose your job or get ill and can't put money onto the pension.