54, had enough of the daily slog so I'm not going to do it anymore....

[erikbloodaxe]

Well I have plan at least.

1. Sell this house
2. Buy little house
3. Give notice at current job.
4. Find remote PT job
5. Earn enough to cover outgoings (no mortgage thankfully)
6. Spend my time doing what makes me happy.

I'm not spending what time I have left bloody working full time. The time between now and retirement will just be wasted years.

Wish me luck! Adventures here I come

Can I ask what your husband does? Very little responsibility at a six figure salary in the UK is rare.

is he just so good at his job that he doesn’t think of it as much responsibility?

asking for a friend😂

Good for you, I love your attitude 🙌🏻 good luck and enjoy!

@Stripedbag101 he works in IT in an investment bank. There are not many people in his particular area of IT with his breadth and length of experience as a lot of people left IT when the dot com bubble burst. He doesn't have a team to manage and has years of experience meaning he can do his job with his eyes closed. He's just left to get on with things and not micromanaged. He got lucky.

Neither am I. Why do many MNers not grasp the fact that not everyone is living the same life they are? I haven't had a man in my life for over 20 years, doesn't stop me working part-time or not at all.

But I wondered why you felt the urge to 'tell everyone' on a forum rather than just do it?

You don't quite understand the concept of a chat forum do you @DozyDelia ?

Inspiring thread. Netflix has two good "money" related programmes Get Smart with Money and How to get Rich which have good tips for living a more free life with your personal goals. Good luck all x

@Moonshine5 thanks for the tip will watch.

@Amboseli you're welcome. The variety of people that they cover and advisers who coach mean that you will absolutely relate to someone. It's been quite eye opening for me personally.

This was life changing for me. Now 52, I am going to work 4 more years then enjoy spending the lot and giving it all away. My parents died a couple of years after retirement and never had the health to enjoy any of it. Now I have their inheritance and not a penny before they died (no help to get on the property ladder) I intend on enjoying it and seeing it set up my children rather than them inherit it at 50.

Assuming most are women and again assuming most have had children .
Don't you expect your grown up children to look after you financially, physically and emotionally etc.

Goodness, no! I don't expect ever to be looking to my children for financial support. Other kinds of help, to some extent, maybe. And financially my husband and I are pretty well matched. We could both manage alone if need be.

Well done OP. Your only responsibility is to yourself. Why shouldn't you enjoy life with work as a lesser priority as early as you can do?

I've worked part time for years but still have a decent pension. I really enjoy my life. My husband is also going part time now. He didn't do it earlier as his job is commission based so he needed to get to a certain point in his career for it to be worth it.

I aim to retire at 58 and will take my works pension at this point plus the savings we're building up. My H does not have a long life expectancy due to his health but he knows we will be OK when he decides to retire or is forced to. It's what we've built our lives around with lower housing costs etc.

Article in the Mail (I know, I know) about over 50s women who retire early. The Mail has oh so wittily named them The Quitterati (geddit?).

All four of them returned to some kind of work because of finances, loneliness, aimlessness.

So at the time the government want over 50s to get back to work, they can only find 4 women who retired early and who all went back to work?

Subtle.

The Mail have been running propaganda stories on this for a while. Early retirement will give you dementia, lead to poverty, make you lonely and won't last anyway type strories. There's one every few weeks.

Yes, along with regular stories about how people who work from home are all lazy slackers and will be passed over for promotion! They come out as regular as clockwork.

The Mail hates women.

Although they do know what a woman is.

Yep like hiding them in a wardrobe or under a mattress only for someone to trick their way into their house and steal the lot

All four !

Kinda ironic they could only be bothered to find 4 in an article targeted at slackers.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/25/private-pensions-crisis-putting-economy-risk

I find articles like that in Torygraph so rich. MIL stopped working as soon as she had children , only did a little bit of fruit picking after that. She reads Telegraph & would lament all those "workshy" 50-somethings who leave workplace early, too. My guess is a lot of Telegraph/Mail readers are early retirees.

I expect so too. That said, just because the readership are disproportionately likely to have done something themselves, doesn't mean they aren't hypocrites. A 75 year old who took his pension early might still be very worried about 60 year olds now doing the same and want it to stop. The Telegraph do this a lot so they obviously think that's the slant their readers want.

There was an article in the Telegraph recently about how Gen Z are 'destroying the economy' (by refusing to work insane hours, do stupid expensive commutes and basically hand their lives over to corporations). It's so transparent, it's painful.

Inject it into my veins though!

Does anyone have a link to the telegraph account?

I think that a lot of people 55 plus are also coming into inheritances and are using this to give up work and I don't blame them .