If in retirement what do you wish you’d known before taking retirement

trevjl

I will third the dogs are expensive posts.
Looking at my spreadsheet for 2022 the costs were 
£1429 for anything Dog - excluding food, ie vets, kennels, coats this year, flea treatment etc
£918 for Dog Food 
£560 Insurance (no claims despite the vets bills as excess £160)
2 x 8 year old Spaniels
Now one has decided to damage a ligament which looks likely to cost £3700 !! only £2K will be covered by the insurance
Worth every penny as I seem to prefer dogs to people much of the time !!

Nebulous2

We've been extremely lucky with the cost of dogs to date. We've an elderly - though he doesn't know it - standard poodle and a 6 year old Cockapoo. 

We bought insurance for the poodle, as he was our first dog and we didn't know what to expect. He's had one serious illness, it cost nearly £3k to diagnose and then was fixed by about £50 worth of antibiotics. Insurance paid most of it. Insurance went up and so did the excess to the point that we pulled out. 

They both have an annual check-up and vaccination update. About £60 each. Worming and insecticide stuff is bought from pets at home. We walk some places where they are susceptible to ticks, so really need it. 

Grooming we do ourselves. Food is almost entirely dried food, working dog stuff, so no VAT, in 15kg bags.

All-in-all they've been worth every penny! 

fly-catchers

Had intended to enjoy my retirement from work with my lovely old cat. But it turned out he had liver disease so had to say goodbye to him last September. Still unsure whether to get another one because as people have said about dogs, vet bills can be big. And the current shortage of vets (in my area anyway) makes getting an appointment with one sometimes tricky. And a worry when out of hours if like me you don’t drive! I do lots of walking and amazed how every one else I meet has at least one dog! Don’t cat owners normally do walks!

Kim1965

MarkCarnage said:

If possible, try a gradual 'glidepath' to retirement. I started this at 55 and am still on it 7 years later! Moving from full on full time work to nothing can be a real shock for some people, and not a good one often. I am a Trustee of two large pension funds, chair a couple of sports related organisations (though giving at least one up now), have an allotment, help with local cricket club ground and do some schools coaching too. Pretty full on in the summer, winter a little quieter.....

Good advice. This is my intention starting this summer (i too tend cricket squares).
 Planning to go down zo 2 or 3 days a week at most. I would find stopping completely too abrupt. I have been self employed for 25 yrs, from the summer i will assist a couple of fellow plumbers with some of their larger jobs. No call outs, no phone calls, no being at the merchants for 7am. Our cricket square dhould be a major beneficiery of me having more time. 

barnstar2077

I am aware of the expense that dogs can bring.  The reason I am waiting so long to get one is because I take it very seriously and want to be in a position to give a dog the best life possible. 

Pat38493

Maybe not actually in retirement myself, but my wife retired recently.

One big missed opportunity for us as a couple was that we should have used my wife's NHS pension lump sum payment to cover both of our spending needs for a year or two, and put most of my salary into my pension scheme while I am still working.

Instead we choose to use most of it to pay off half the mortgage.

To generalize the point - if you are in the last couple of years before retirement, try to think creatively about how to stuff your pension to the max while you are still working - even if this means digging in to savings or whatever - after all once you are 55 you can take out tax free cash if needed to replenish savings.

As I've learned more and more about this, I was kicking myself realizing that we could have made an 20-40% return on about £100K over a couple of years (not counting investment growth), whereas by putting the money in the mortgage we made 3.5%.

Ouch.

I think this is partly an issue of the difficulty of trying to transition from managing finances mainly independently to jointly - my wife has always mainly managed her financial affairs and I managed mine, except when we were discussing major items like house purchases and so on.

I did actually float the idea of using her lump sum in this way at one point but as I remember her response was along the lines "no ****** way".  I wish I had taken some time to try to sell the idea a bit more, but even now when I pointed out that this was probably a mistake to do it this way, she looks at me rather strangely.  I think she half suspects that my new found interest in pension investment management is some kind of scam that I'm falling for

saucer

Pat38493 said:

Maybe not actually in retirement myself, but my wife retired recently.

As I've learned more and more about this, I was kicking myself realizing that we could have made an 20-40% return on about £100K over a couple of years (not counting investment growth), whereas by putting the money in the mortgage we made 3.5%.

Of course 75% of this would have been subject to income tax at your marginal rate. Leaving aside your tax allowance, and your 25 tax free portion, this equates to 15% tax below the HRT threshold . The money is better having gone into the pension but less so than you might originally think, unless I am mistaken (which I may well be).