To those who retired early, what made you take the plunge (and any regrets?)

coyrls

Retired at 59, 6 years ago.  No regrets.  No money problems but money/investment managment takes up more time than I had expected (I have no DB pensions).

bostonerimus

I retired at age 52. I'd had a long term plan to generate income and save and invest enough to retire early and when I stopped enjoying my job I decided to take the leap. I took my work pension at age 55 and combining that with income from a rental property, I can easily cover my expenses. I did a few "bucket list" things like riding my bike across the USA and after 4 years of not working at all I was contacted by an old colleague and started working part time for him. It works out to about 15 hrs a week and is very low stress. Most of the wages from that part time job get saved to a personal pension. I'm glad that I arranged things so that I don't have to use my savings or investments for income as I don't have to worry about them and I can leave them aggressively invested. But as my portfolio grows I'm now worrying about inheritance issues and estate taxes, so there's always something.

JGB1955

I retired just before my 59th birthday.  I never intended to work beyond 60 as I could then claim both my Civil Service and LGPS pensions.  I had reduced my working hours/days over the previous few years in anticipation of retirement and knew I could 'live' on my pension.    I worked in a school.  I soon knew I couldn't work with the newly appointed Headteacher (she was a 30+ year old bully) so, having handed in my notice,  my last 4 months/term were spent watching the morale of all the other staff plummet whilst I had my get-out card.  I have no regrets.  I had saved enough to see me through to 60 (and beyond to SPA) and it was the best decision I could have made.  
7 years on, I'm getting my state pension.  I haven't felt so 'well off' in ages.  My pension income has doubled and I'm struggling to spend it!

Terron

I had hoped to retired at 60, but when I was made redundant at 54 I worked out that I had enough to live on moderately comfortably (£20kpa) until I was 60 and lost interest in looking for a new job. However I then decided to put my money to work and to try to live off the income rather than the capital so I went into property. Now at 61 I am a pensioner, am self-employed through income from properties in my own name, and an employee as director of my own company. I use a letting agency so I do less than a hours work most weeks.

I still don't have enough time to do all the reading I would like to do.

green_man

Plunge: Voluntary redundancy offered
Regrets : Nope.

From in my early thirties I always thought it would be nice to be able to retire at 55, and so around then I started paying significant AVCs into my works (DC) pension. In my late thirties I also started some none pension stocks/Shares ISA investments. By my mid forties my ISA investments got me thinking if I could retire at 50?   Then a few years before I was 50 I got offered voluntary redundancy, the redundancy payment being more than sufficient to bridge to gap to 50, so I retired at 47. I’m now 55 and have started drawing down my main SIPP.  

So I guess there was an element of luck w.r.t how the Redundancy panned out, but putting myself in the financial position to be able to take advantage of that was not luck,  I was never on a large enough salary such that saving what I did didn’t involve sacrifices elsewhere. 

Nebulous2

I had been thinking about a retirement plan, but quite liked most aspects of my job, and it was a part of who I was. The pandemic meant working from home, and although not much of it was front line I spent a lot of time on the phone or in teams meetings with people who were on the front line or directly impacted by covid. In a lot of ways that was purposeful, with a sense of doing something of value. 

Then some organisational things got in the way, including a deletion of my post. Although I would have had protected pay - I did my sums and decided it was time to go. At 59 - I've been stopped for 3 weeks, with this being my last day in employment. 

While I've never been a big earner, we aren't big spenders and I appreciate having a reasonable DB pension puts us in an enviable position. I'm hoping to work part-time for a year or so, but as a stepping stone, rather than because we need the money. 

saver_ali

cfw1994 said:

saver_ali said:

His company are a large corporation and they offer employees a free 2 day retirement workshop. It covered not just the financial side but all the other aspects of retirement and how to cope with it. It really helped my husband. He has now been retired for two years, and we’re very happy with the way things have worked out. 

Sounds like things are working out well for you: well done!
I do wish more companies offered some such workshops.   Any good bullet points he took away from it you could share (I've *not* been on one - no options where I am!).   
Always keen to learn!   

There was nothing ground breaking for those that are regulars on this forum, but helpful for my husband who didn’t have much of a clue. Probably the best thing was making us take the time to think about our retirement in a structured way, which we wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise.

We made individual lists of what we liked and disliked about working, and thought of ways to compensate for the things we would miss, e.g. mental stimulation, self-fulfilment, social aspects.

On the financial side, they went through all the things you would expect, e.g. different types of pensions, pros/cons etc. 

We worked through some examples to show that a drop of say x% gross income doesn’t mean you’re x% worse off in net terms, because you’ll pay less tax. It looks even better if you are a couple drawing pensions and can get the first £25k free of tax (two personal allowances).
You would also have more time to save money by shopping around and haggling on things like utilities bills. 

We all wanted to be there, so it was very interactive. It was interesting to hear other people’s plans and perspectives, and maybe get some other ideas. Some of us wanted to be very hands-on with the finances, whereas one chap just wanted to set up a regular monthly payment and then forget about it for the rest of his life,

No-one tried to sell us financial services (probably because there was a fee for the course). And yes, we had very nice lunches!

Toucan13

It's looking like a big thumbs up all round to life after work then - really interesting to read about your experiences.  Did any of you find (pre Covid) that you needed less income than you'd planned for?

coyrls said:

Retired at 59, 6 years ago.  No regrets.  No money problems but money/investment managment takes up more time than I had expected (I have no DB pensions).

I wondered about this too - the closer I get the more time I seem to spend checking up on my pot (I'm also DC only) - albeit I rarely make any changes, it's more of an interest in what sort of fluctuations I might see (last March being quite the test!)

I'm hoping that freelancing as I do now allows me to have more of a wind down rather than a cliff edge plus I'm doing some things outside my original industry which is a bit of a novelty (and gives my pot a bit longer to grow).  Can see how easy it would be to fill my time if I didn't work though.

Lincoln_Imp

Retired in 2017 at 56 
Decision was made for me as the place i worked at gave us all the option to transfer our pension out with an extra 15% on top 
After a while number crunching i snapped their hand off and got 490k and paid of my mortgage and gave the kids a lump sum and currently drawing down monthly enough to live off ..My wife is still working part time for probably another year or so then i will draw down more to cover her wages and nearly 4 years on my pension is only a couple of grand down on when i started so that`s a bonus  

Best decision i ever made as was working 10 hours a day 5/6 days a week on shifts in a job i hated ..Well the job was ok just the managers that had no clue what the were doing etc and treated the workforce very badly ..Was there nearly 40 years 

I had every intention of getting a part time job just to keep me ticking over and not getting bored but don`t have time for one to be honest as busy catching up with everything i never had the time to do when i was working 
The only downside is 4 years on and i am still waking up at silly o clock 

shinytop

I was in a well-paid, often stressful job with a long commute, that I had been doing for a long time.  I was bored with it.  I had enough money to stop, so I did.  18 months on, I have no regrets.