Onwards to freedom!

SuperSecretSquirrel

I know what you mean SC, none of the individual milestones are a real "destination", so we keep on powering ahead. Sometimes you need to realise just how far you've come and give yourself a well deserved pat on the back though!

OH has received her pension transfer offer, and we both considered it to be rather generous! Paperwork signed and returned, and an 18k-ish DC pot will soon transform into an annual 1.6k-ish (index linked) from state pension age. OH isn't particularly interested in early retirement, so this suits her nicely. If she has a change of heart and decides to take the hit for drawing the DB early, it will still be a pretty sizeable win... If I calculate the DB as 25x the annual pension value, her pot has leapt up from 18k-ish to 40k-ish overnight! Nice 😁

My own plans currently involve burning down ISA pre-57, then burning down DC pre-67, then live on SP with any ISA/DC remainder a bonus. There's an expectation that I'll be doing some part time work once "retired" to keep myself occupied, earn a bit of pocket money, and eventually qualify for the full SP.

I think I may need to spend some time modelling a move to the public sector, transferring (some of) my DC to DB (presumably at a similar ratio to that offered to OH), and seeing where that leaves us. I always fancied myself as a road sweeper or crossing patrol or admin assistant or similar in my "pocket money job" stage post-FIRE - it seems a favourable pension transfer could make such a career change surprisingly lucrative! Food for thought...

As for the present (or immediate future...), we've all but finished our Christmas shopping, so I'm hoping for a fairly quiet coast through to Christmas and beyond now. We pretty much hunker down and barely leave the house in December and January (except usually for the the Christmas shopping). I have just a couple more weeks of work left this year, then a very nice long break, and very little in the way of commitments... Our festive drinks and snacks cupboard is very well socked, I have a small pile of books to read, a netflix subscription, and a couple of "new to me" video games to play. December is looking pretty good 😁 All I need now is a sizeable PB win and I'm happy as can be 😆

savingholmes

It's took me a while but just caught up on your journey. Rollercoaster ride particularly with 2 redundancies in the family but corner well and truly turned now. Will continue watching your progress

Karmacat

That's a great pension offer to your OH, SSS!  Excellent news.  Interesting that you might investigate your medium term future in the same way.  My Norfolk rellie was a high-flyer in America's computer world who did exactly that - after a life threatening acute illness at the age of 39, he became a postman, and worked on his photography skills via Flickr.  Still going on happily 35 years later  

Your Christmas sounds lovely!  My family is suddenly quite small nowadays, so I'm nearly there on Christmas shopping too, and I've bought nice cards that are a bit *too* minimal, so I'm looking at jazzing them up with a bit of ribbon etc.  We'll see - plans are one thing, doing is another.

Joining you on the thought of a good-sized PB win  

edinburgher

@SuperSecretSquirrel - I did similar with my first DC pension when I joined a central government department many moons ago. My modest (at the time) £10k transfer in + 18 months in the role and indexation since then now gets me in the region of £2,700/year from age 65. For context, it took me three and a bit years to get that from my current DB pension, despite the current job paying 60%+ more than the one I had at the time. A great deal and I think you're actually being conservative with the value as I'd be more inclined to treat DB pensions as having a practical value of something like 33x nowadays, 4% SWR probably no longer a thing (if it ever was for the UK).

SuperSecretSquirrel

Thanks for reading along @savingholmes It has been a bit of a roller coaster, I agree, but all that feels like a far distant past now - we're feeling quite happy and stable in our new circumstances

@Karmacat - yes, a far better pension offer than we were expecting! High flyer to postman sounds like a nice downshift - fresh air, low stress, that's what I consider career/life progression Unfortunately I won exactly zero pounds and zero pence in December's PB draw - here's hoping for the January draw

@edinburgher - yes, there's definitely an opportunity for me in there somewhere, something to mull over slowly I think. I actually enjoy my current work, and the people I work with, and the salary is ok too. I'm not in a rush to make any changes, but a switch to the public sector in a few years time and transferring in a chunk of DC pension does seem quite attractive. I'm sure you're right about the 4% rule, but my historical records are all based on that, so for now I'll leave it at that to save distorting things too much. I'll get a grip one day and model things properly, for now I'll just keep on putting it off, as I have done for years

SuperSecretSquirrel

Happy New Year! Another year over, and a new one just begun

2021, although still a strange one, wasn't the worst year. The children's schooling was disrupted far less than it was in 2020, OH has settled in her new job (and prefers it to her previous role), and my work has remained satisfying. We got out and about for quite a few nice days out, and spruced the house up a little. Regrettably we didn't get away for a holiday (not even a UK holiday as we had hoped), but we did enjoy some genuine staycationing - lots of visitors come here for their holidays, so we did all the things they do, but used our own house as the hotel - an incredibly cheap holiday alternative

Our work hours have been low enough that we haven't needed any childcare provision this past year - the children have always had me, OH, or both of us, around when they've not been at school. We've all appreciated that, and we hope to do the same again this upcoming year.

We all caught the dreaded covid back in the autumn. No symptoms for the children, fairly mild ones for the adults. We were double jabbed which could well have helped us! I worked through it (from home), OH had an enforced 10 days off work at SSP - one of us needed to look after the children while off school anyway, so this worked out as well as we could have hoped.

We're hoping 2022 will be a little better again. I've booked us a UK holiday in the summer We're not confident enough to book a foreign trip yet, but hopefully the UK trip can go ahead as planned. If things improve beyond expectations in the summer a last minute foreign holiday could possibly be on the cards, but we don't want to get the children's hopes up with an advance booking.

I decided to repay my stooze in full a couple of days ago. I'll lose out on a small amount of interest, but I'm happy with that as it means simpler monthly cash flow, and a clearer view of what is spendable on "fun stuff" each month. My monthly budgeting is super simple now - a set amount automatically transferred to the S&S ISA, a set amount automatically transferred to the joint account (all regular bills paid automatically from there via DD), a set amount automatically transferred to the instant access savings account (annual spends e.g annual car stuff, christmas, birthdays, holidays), and whatever remains in my current account after all that is split between things like groceries/fuel and fun spends. My current account can be run down to zero before each payday if I want now, but it probably won't be...

Here are our end of year figures, along with previous years for context:

             01/01/2022  01/01/2021  01/01/2020  01/01/2019  01/01/2018  01/01/2017  01/01/2016  01/01/2015  01/01/2014
House         165000.00   125000.00   125000.00   125000.00   125000.00   125000.00   125000.00   125000.00   125000.00
Pensions      132122.78   111794.17   108995.12    81848.33    78458.66    61324.05    41170.41    31113.46    23737.91
S&S            77690.97    60168.60    56018.64    36823.05    26607.27    13313.37     6488.53     3052.50      510.96
Cash           58676.96    48913.53    26906.74    24858.94    39576.36    47225.02    49581.61    59482.43    44326.80
Cars           13172.50    12485.00    13137.50    17015.00    14715.00     8900.00    10700.00     9000.00    10000.00
SLC                0.00        0.00        0.00        0.00     -314.95    -2138.37    -3116.23    -6905.75    -7455.96
HMRC               0.00        0.00        0.00     -152.15     -513.23     -380.26    -2483.20   -14088.23    -6374.55
Mortgage           0.00        0.00        0.00        0.00   -14140.28   -25662.72   -37716.04   -50546.60   -63931.64
Total         446663.21   358361.30   330058.00   285393.17   269388.83   227581.09   189625.08   156107.81   125813.52

LiquidYears(Self)  14.7        11.7         8.8         6.4         4.3         3.8         3.0         2.7         1.9
LiquidYears(Team)   7.6         6.1         4.6         3.4         2.3         2.1         1.7         1.6         1.2

FI(WR4%-Self)    109.4%       89.0%       76.3%       56.4%       33.8%       25.0%       15.0%        8.9%        1.9%
FI(WR4%-Team)     59.7%       49.1%       42.6%       31.9%       18.0%       13.0%        6.9%        2.8%       -1.2%

A huge increase over last year! Nearly half of that increase is down to me updating the house value - the value obviously didn't sit still at 125k for eight years then suddenly jump up 40k this year, so that skews things quite a lot... Pensions and S&S performed very well, and we can congratulate ourselves for saving a good chunk of cash (~10k) and adding 7.5k of new money to the S&S. Pandemic weirdness has resulted in our cars both being a year older and increasing in value - not something you can expect to see happen too often! I keep expecting pensions and S&S to crash, but now inflation is well and truly with us, maybe that won't happen. Of course inflation brings its own problems!

Inflation hasn't really started to bite us yet, so I've left our estimated annual spends untouched. Assuming an annual household spend of 18k, we now have enough in accessible cash and S&S to last us 7.6 years without any household income. The total cash and S&S and pensions balance sees us at 59.7% FI using the 4% rule (excluding state pension).

I have a separate retirement spreadsheet that I update once a year, a very simplistic and pessimistic model that assumes zero inflation and zero growth. It's based on my figures alone as OH is far less interested in FIRE than I am. It's the only model I have that includes the state pension, and the pessimistic assumptions used should mean reality is rosier than it's projections. Feeding in today's cash, S&S, and pension values, my intended future S&S contributions, and my intended future pension contributions, it tells me that I could cover "my half" of the estimated 18k annual household outgoings for all eternity so long as things remain steady for the next three years then I earn just enough to qualify for the full SP the following ten years We don't really work things out as "my half" and "OHs half", but these simple models are nice yardsticks to measure progress over time

OH's pension is currently in the process of being transferred from DC to DB. I don't know what visibility we'll have of her DB yet. If we will have visibility of its estimated value, I'm happy to multiply the annual amount by 25 to get a rough and ready value that can be used in the table above. If we don't have any visibility, I'm going to have to rethink how I track things. Right now we're in limbo...

This limbo had me thinking it'll be tricky to draw up an MFiT plan for MFiT6, then I realised that even if we had full visibility, we are so heavily at the mercy of the markets that I can't really come up with a useful target anyway. It'll be strange dropping out, having been involved in MFiT for the past 9 years, but I think it might be time, and it feels strangely sad... The mortgage is gone, pensions are on autopilot, S&S on autopilot, and the intention is to keep cash savings steady... There are no real targets I can set for myself, and that feels strange, having been so target oriented for so long. Who knows, maybe inspiration will strike and I'll be able to join in afterall, but right now I think I'm going to try a year of bobbing along without any financial targets other than leaving the pension and S&S payments untouched.

Of course, I fully intend to win a million on the PBs/lottery in the next few days, so setting targets would be pointless anyway, I'm sure to surpass them when the inevitable win lands, right?

Wishing a happy 2022 to you all!

longway2go

Happy 2022, you have done incredible 

South_coast

Excellent work SSS 😀! Happy new year to you all

savingholmes

Happy New Year 🎉

Karmacat

SuperSecretSquirrel said:

Happy New Year! Another year over, and a new one just begun

I see what you did there!  I love it 💙

.....

The mortgage is gone, pensions are on autopilot, S&S on autopilot, and the intention is to keep cash savings steady... There are no real targets I can set for myself, and that feels strange, having been so target oriented for so long. Who knows, maybe inspiration will strike and I'll be able to join in afterall, but right now I think I'm going to try a year of bobbing along without any financial targets other than leaving the pension and S&S payments untouched.

Of course, I fully intend to win a million on the PBs/lottery in the next few days, so setting targets would be pointless anyway, I'm sure to surpass them when the inevitable win lands, right?

Wishing a happy 2022 to you all!

I've been bobbing along in exactly that target-less way for a few years, and I want a target back!  I like targets, and they'll help me with what remains of the pandemic.  Mind you, nothing wrong with the target of winning a million on the PBs