Thoughts on life, death and when to retire...

fastonebaz

I'm looking forward to retirement.  All this work just gets in the way of what I really want to do.   Which i guess is lay around eating chocolate,  drinking wine,  playing guitar and fast tracking to the next life. 

octatonic

57Deluxe said:

My Mum has just had a stroke and is hospitalised... there are guys in the ward that are younger than me... S0 - Stop work, lose the stress and enjoy life cos you never know when it will all be taken away from you...

Oh and reduce your salt intake!

Same here- mum is in an oncology ward.
There is one guy in there who is the same age as me- stage IV lung cancer.
He is going outside for cigarettes every few hours.

Another bloke has just had his leg removed due to obesity and diabetes.

I don't think it is necessarily work and stress but just about making life choices that aren't stupid.
If you hate your job then find something else to do.
People tend to have employment inertia and don't want to break out of whatever they are doing, even if it makes them miserable, simply out of fear.

WiresDreamDisasters

octatonic said:

If you hate your job then find something else to do.
People tend to have employment inertia and don't want to break out of whatever they are doing, even if it makes them miserable, simply out of fear.

Yup. A thousand times this.

ESBlonde

I'm 60 and all the same questions have surrounded me for several years. My partner (a nurse) went part time last year but the stress has caused her to fully retire now. She has no mortgage on her house and a decent full NHS pension so is looking for a part time job to fill the time. I decided my Pot was about minimum size last summer but want to do some 'upgrades' to our home before I finally retire. So I will work on but have defined Christmas 2020 as my latest work if not before.

By then the house will be equiped to last us out and the funds in place to ensure we can be fully retired at leisure (but not luxury). The plan was to buy a new car and run it into the ground (told you I've thought about this), but current tech trends suggest a smelly diesel might not be best, so I will do a halfway purchase and then probably go fully electric 5 years later.

I have equiped a small woodworking shop for hobby use and might make odd bits on commission or garden ornements to sell at car boot sales.

The comments about taking care of your health are spot on, we have an allotment and grow out own organic veg as well as enjoy the exercise/experience.

We never know when the grim reaper is comming so I have contented myself with this plan and hope it works out well enough.

I plan to spoil the grand kids and maybe take them camping in the half terms a couple of times before it all gets too much. Making memories for them is important to us.

Barney

I'm 56 and been thinking the same things for a couple of years.....the house is paid for and no loans or anything...
The thing is I quite enjoy my job but don't really want to be there ...lots of other things I would like to do instead of having to go to work...like playing my guitar
I'm thinking in a couple of years using that drawdoan option thing on my pension that will give me money until retirement...I'm still not sure though cos it's a big step ..I really I would like to drop my hours to 2 or 3 days a week but I don't think that will be an option 

Blueingreen

There's no one-size-fits all solution, so much depends on who you are.

I had a friend who a few years ago was diagnosed with cancer and his life expectancy was obviously likely to be a few years max.  He'd built up a successful business.  Most of his actual job was routine/mundane stuff - he was the boss and responsible for strategy but strategic stuff in a medium sized company that's ticking over nicely often isn't time consuming.  Most of his day to day work was doing stuff a fairly junior member of staff could have done.  It would have been my idea of drudgery, but not his (incidentally he was a very, very bright outgoing guy, nobody's idea of a bore).

His business was worth £10M plus so pension planning was not an issue.  He could have sold up or even just left his employees to run the business while he travelled the world with his wife and enjoyed the fortune he'd saved.

He thought hard about that, consulted friends and familiy for advice, and decided to carry on with his routine.

It wouldn't have been the right decision for everybody, but I've no doubt it was the right decision for him.  He wanted familiarity, people round him that he knew, a sense of purpose.  Not everybody wants to lie on a beach or see the Taj Mahal.

Teetonetal

I think that there is only 1 life, 1 chance. It helps me a lot to get the balance right. Do things today as one day there will not be a tomorrow.

as a consequence I made damn sure I lived a lot in my 20s. I’ve done most of the things I wanted to. Now it’s all about not getting needlessly stressed and giving the kids a good home.

boogieman

Kebabkid said:

I'm 55 and I'm currently up for redundancy, although negotiations continue. I've worked for the same company since 1984 but took a 1.5 year break (to do music professionally) and returned to them in 1991, so that's a fair old innings there. I love my job, what I do, my team etc and have it working for me e.g. 4 days working at home and one day in the office.

Yeah, the redundancy package is ok but that won't last more than 2 years if used to manage bills etc. Plus, at my age, I don't fancy going out into the job market as everything I've done has been around the music industry, which isn't particularly buoyant at the moment and where graduates who want to move on from job to job and are happy to start off on £22K are their preferred choice of employee.

There's nothing else I'm dying to do.  Do I take the package as it might not come around again for another 10 years, and this is a major reshuffle at work, or stick it out if I'm lucky enough to get a new role? If I was 59 or over 60, I'd just go for redundancy, retire, but at 55, I feel I'm on that last 10 year home run and had coordinated things to work out nicely for me and the family at 65.

A recent article said that in your 50s, you should only be working 3 days a week. I don't know about that.

We'd love to downsize, well, be mortgage free, and move out of London to somewhere like Suffolk, or maybe even abroad. Alas, I have an elderly parent close by who will not move with us and as an only child, I'm responsible for her, which is fair enough.

Brexit throws up it's own worries and I just feel you can't make future, well, long-term plans anymore. Add to that, I've lost people younger than me and I'm seeing quite a decline in mental health with colleagues, family and friends and you do start to wonder more about work/life balance and what direction to go in and how to make the best life for you and your family. With a teenage son still at school, you have to always have your responsible hat on, but I find things so uncertain in this day and age

I’m not convinced anyone should be doing a three day week at 50 but don’t expect to have the same energy levels at 65 as you do now. I used to do a quite physical job and was fairly fit. Now I’m 64 an afternoon working in the garden does me in. So it might be worth gradually winding down your job hours, if you can afford to. 

monquixote

I'm 39 so more involved with kids than thinking about this kind of stuff yet, but a few things occur to me.

My mother in law and aunt both died of cancer at around 50 which definitely underlines that there is no point hanging on for a future that may never come.

However as Jordan Peterson said sitting on a beach with a margarita is a postcard not a retirement plan.

I know people who have retired early, become alcoholic through boredom then gone back to work. My dad retired early and just started to disintegrate. Recently he's started running a cafe with his partner and is much more together as a result.

My point is you need to find something to do with yourself that you don't hate and challenges you regardless of how old you are retired or not.

strtdv

I'd try to keep my options open. I'll have a good work pension (NHS), but they changed the rules so you can't buy extra years (although I've a few years under the old system so think I can buy 2 years), and you lose 5% for every year you leave before your official retirement date. The upshot of this is that as it's now a career average pension rather than final salary there's nothing to stop you drastically reducing your hours in the last few years without penalising your pension. I've got a SIPP too.
I plan to retire when my total pension pot reaches a certain level, so when the combination of the work pension and SIPP hits that, I'm retiring regardless of age

tone1

monquixote said:

I'm 39 so more involved with kids than thinking about this kind of stuff yet, but a few things occur to me.

My mother in law and aunt both died of cancer at around 50 which definitely underlines that there is no point hanging on for a future that may never come.

However as Jordan Peterson said sitting on a beach with a margarita is a postcard not a retirement plan.

I know people who have retired early, become alcoholic through boredom then gone back to work. My dad retired early and just started to disintegrate. Recently he's started running a cafe with his partner and is much more together as a result.

My point is you need to find something to do with yourself that you don't hate and challenges you regardless of how old you are retired or not.

^...This.... My Dad retired at 51 & hasn’t done much since (now 75) If you ain’t busy living, you’re busy dying...

WiresDreamDisasters

My dad died when he was 38. Life is short and fucked up. Have fun.

RandallFlagg

Well one thing is for sure, my life view changed when I got past 50, things feel different on the way down from the summit

McSwaggerty

I thought I had it all sorted.
Work, retirement age and pension plan.
Then I took seriously ill and spent a while in Hospital and all that goes quickly out the window.

Someone said to me once - 'You have 2 lifes, your second life begins when you realise you only have one  !

MrBump

My inlaws both retired at around 55, shortly after I met my wife, and a little before we were married.  Both middling professionals, she was a nurse, he was a site manager for Wimpy.

They were desperate to retire.  Always lived a modest, unadventurous life.  Now they've been retired for about 20 years, and they've done virtually nothing; mother in law is great, busies herself with the house, the church.  Father in law just sits at his table drinking tea and getting angry at Daily Mail articles about immigration and youth.

I'm 48 this year.  The London commute I've done for the past 20 years is hard sometimes, but I'm wary of retiring too young.  I still enjoy what I do.  Will I feel the same at 58..?  Not sure.  Luckily I look at least 58, so that gives me some insight into the future...

As with others, the idea of a soft retirement makes some sense.  If I could reduce my hours; I've always wanted to teach martial arts, so having time to do that would be nice, as I reduce my London wage.  More about keeping busy and engaged than about an income though.

Musicwolf

As retirement before the end of the year looks to be a distinct possibility I've started to think about what I actually want to do rather than not do (i.e. go to work).  Working from home the odd day, as I'm doing today, isn't quite the same.  I can pick up my guitar during a break, and I've been out for a 45 min walk at lunchtime, but I still have to work (even when it's quiet as it is today) so I can't get my teeth into anything else.

Projects are the key for me as I'm very results driven.  I just need to make sure that at least some of them are projects that I want to do (i.e. music related) and not all dictated by Domestic Management.

boogieman

Musicwolf said:

As retirement before the end of the year looks to be a distinct possibility I've started to think about what I actually want to do rather than not do (i.e. go to work).  Working from home the odd day, as I'm doing today, isn't quite the same.  I can pick up my guitar during a break, and I've been out for a 45 min walk at lunchtime, but I still have to work (even when it's quiet as it is today) so I can't get my teeth into anything else.

Projects are the key for me as I'm very results driven.  I just need to make sure that at least some of them are projects that I want to do (i.e. music related) and not all dictated by Domestic Management.

Best advice I was given about retirement was to treat it like another job. You definitely need things to fill your time or it’s all too easy to end up watching re-runs of Bargain Hunt and Cadfael all day. Projects are a good idea.

Personally I resurrected some old hobbies, started some new ones and also do volunteer work a couple of times a week. The thing I really missed though was the social contact of work. It’s important to keep that going somehow. 

RandallFlagg

I plan to make a list of things to do in retirement.

Map out towns and places in the UK we can drive or catch the train to and stay over night cheaply and do these as often as we fancy. Just go to a town or village, research it's history and have a potter around looking at things, buildings, markets, coffee shops, take some photos and see some stuff.

Also, list all the birds I want to see in their natural habitat and set goals for find reserves or lakes or areas where they are and set off with my binoculars and flask (hip flask).

List out the books I want to read, the films I want to watch, music I want to listen to.

check out what I can do to help the local area's wildlife. There's a duck pond up the road and a few years ago some local pensioners all clubbed together to tidy it up. add a foot path and bench and made it a really nice spot to go a feed the ducks. I would love to do that.

Join a local working mens/conservative type club and go for a pint with the old dudes there.

Grow my own veg, cook more, make homemade beer, wine, Cornish pasties, cakes, whatever...

There's so many things and it doesn't need to cost the earth.

RandallFlagg

Chill out dude, it's just a mark on a web page, whoever did it doesn't know you personally, your father, your circumstances or your feelings. There's no need to be so sensitive - just ignore it, and there's no need to mods to get all excited and PC about it.

I for one wish the whole frets thing would be removed.

Musicwolf

whilst the internet has brought many benefits unfortunately the apparent anonymity which affords does seem to encourage some rather antisocial behavior - and often from people old enough to know better.