Retirement....is it all it's cracked up to be ?

Phil1 said:
It's great but I'm definitely eating too much and probably annoying my missus a bit by now.
Though she's got a bonus break from me as I'm stuck in Spain atm after a quick visit turned into a little bit longer due to unforeseen circumstances.
Looking at doing a world cruise for my 50th next year which is 90 odd days, always fancied it but didn't have the time.
Anyway, yeah, I'd rather not work than work :-)
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Wow good on you mate, what actual age did you retire if you don't mind me asking ?
 
pride in battle said:
Wow good on you mate, what actual age did you retire if you don't mind me asking ?
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Sold majority of my stakes in various things last year, including a couple of properties. Kept a base in Spain and one in Scotland and bought a place in Mexico which had been plan for a while.
I'm still not sure if I'm officially retired tbf as this last month has proved!!
 
cookster said:
I think alot depends on whether you like your job.
I'm lucky, not often do I wake up thinking I don't want to go into work.
I enjoy the challenge and have many friendships at work.
Ideally, I'll reduce to 2-3 days in the next couple of years to get a better work life balance.
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Thats a very sensible approach. I sympathise with those who hate going into work and there are some I know who were unhappy at work and then unhappy in retirement. Running down the time spent working before retirement is definitely the ideal way to do it.
I loved my job (most of the time) had a great team behind me, many friendships and a supportive board. Our foreign owners hit hard times and imposed some very tough changes - so I took the chance to engineer my own redundancy as part of delivering a package that hit their targets. I was 58 and had 42 years service so got a big redundancy package, final salary pension lump sum and an unexpected thank-you bonus when I left. It was a no-brainer. I would have happily worked on longer, but these 12 years in retirement have been the happiest of my life. I’m now 70 and my missus is 72.
This is a very interesting thread and everybody’s circumstances are different - definitely horses for courses. I’d advise anyone to set aside some funds if they can, we’ve just been hit with essential and urgent repairs to our 40 yr old property, cost us £33,000 and had we not had money set aside, we’d have been royally fucked. So it’s really important to be able to access money when your earning days are over !
Even if you’re unhappy working and desperate for retirement, I’d say always try to provide for unexpected.
 
M e and Mrs Tot just been to see a IFA today with the hope of me (wife already 3days)going 3 days a week. He’s basically did a financial & pension review of our wants & needs . He’s going to get intouch with all my wife’s pension providers and I’ve only got one . Then put a package together for us to peruse (40 pages) if we are happy off we go . Price £1795 which I think is very reasonable. ChatGPT said it would be in the region of £2k to £3k .
 
56 years old, no mortgage or debt snd dont lead a lavish lifestyle, my plan is to cut down to 3 days when i turn 60 and then play it by ear. Worked out that 3 days will give me pretty much what i hope my pension will be when i plan to fully retire at 64.
Bit of a trial run,
 
I’m 56 retired 3 years ago and it’s going well, do not miss work once and the way my body feels these days I’d be struggling if I’d had to stay on. If you can live within your means then go for it, yes some people have more money but I’m happy with what I’ve got, the wife is a lot younger and morbidly I’ll probably be gone by the time she can retire! We have a teenager daughter so that costs but we have enough to live comfortably although these price increases don’t help. You need to have hobbies to keep your mind and body going, I walk my dogs and just got a van to go further afield next year with them. I do t think I could go back to work again unless absolutely necessary, can’t be doing with the drama that comes with it.
 
Me and my missus both retired at the end of July, but we both feel in limbo at the moment.

We always intended moving to the Manchester area once we'd retired, so when we decided to do it, we put our flat up for sale in March, and we're still here in it. We have sold it (August), but the solicitors are dragging it out, we've bought in Longdendale, and theirs no chain either way, but the legal stuff means we'll still be here in 2026 now.

Though we've both retired, it still doesn't really feel like it, and I'm still having to travel 3 hours to every home game, which is very frustrating. There's also a load of things we want to do, but can't while stuck in this legal limbo.

Looking forward to the real retirement, and finally being mortgage free too.
 
abu13 said:
56 years old, no mortgage or debt snd dont lead a lavish lifestyle, my plan is to cut down to 3 days when i turn 60 and then play it by ear. Worked out that 3 days will give me pretty much what i hope my pension will be when i plan to fully retire at 64.
Bit of a trial run,
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Pretty much what I did, but a couple of years different, and now gone down the full route as above.
 
Millwallawayveteran1988 said:
Not sure what it will all look like in the future. AI is phenomenal in what it can do now. It will take so many jobs off people in the next 10 years or so.
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There’s a lot of hot air around AI at the moment but I haven’t seen anything that has convinced me it’s that capable of replacing people. It’s a powerful Google search engine that can come up with data that people have fed it over the years. But is there any evidence that it is truly artifial intelligence - i,e, figuring things out based on the data and coming up with its own new ideas based on that?

Maybe it will get there in 10 years, who knows. At the moment, it is just a self-fulfilling marketing machine.
 
RobMCFC said:
There’s a lot of hot air around AI at the moment but I haven’t seen anything that has convinced me it’s that capable of replacing people. It’s a powerful Google search engine that can come up with data that people have fed it over the years. But is there any evidence that it is truly artifial intelligence - i,e, figuring things out based on the data and coming up with its own new ideas based on that?

Maybe it will get there in 10 years, who knows. At the moment, it is just a self-fulfilling marketing machine.
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I am very sceptical in general about these things and a bit of a dinosaur with technology in general

However, I have recently been looking at something at my work and it absolutely blew my mind with its potential capabilities. It is a phenomenal piece of technology from what I can see and it’s in its infancy.

We certainly have a role at work that currently employs about 100/150 people across our group, maybe more. I think that could potentially be reduced to perhaps 20/30 who would just check what AI has done. That perhaps saves as much as £5m a year. Companies are going to be all over it with these kind of savings.

It is not imminent but it’s not that far away I don’t think.
 
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Millwallawayveteran1988 said:
I am very sceptical in general about these things and a bit of a dinosaur with technology in general

However, I have recently been looking at something at my work and it absolutely blew my mind with its potential capabilities. It is a phenomenal piece of technology from what I can see and it’s in its infancy.

We certainly have a role at work that currently employs about 100/150 people across our group, maybe more. I think that could potentially be reduced to perhaps 20/30 who would just check what AI has done. That perhaps save as much as £5m a year. Companies are going to be all over it with these kind of savings.

It is not imminent but it’s not that far away I don’t think.
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I guess we’ll all find out soon enough. All I’m saying is that the tech companies are mis-selling powerful search engines as AI.
 
Millwallawayveteran1988 said:
Not sure what it will all look like in the future. AI is phenomenal in what it can do now. It will take so many jobs off people in the next 10 years or so.
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We'll see; predictions are hard, especially those about the future.

From what I see, there are some very useful applications, but the most talked about, LLMs, seem to be untrustworthy sycophantic bullshit generators. Kind of "Boris ex machina".
 
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