How much in savings would you need to give up working at 60 years old?

[AbbyGal]

Assuming you'd paid off your mortgage and had adult, financially self-sufficient children.

I'm thinking £500,000 - even if you don't earn any interest on it, that's £25,000 a year for the next 20 years. If you did live longer, then you could sell your home to pay for care fees etc.

Although I am nearly 60 I don't, sadly, have a spare half a million, but a girl can dream!!

Yes, I'm lucky that I'm a natural born saver, but I'm only just getting into the smart investment and management of it.

You might struggle doing this with 90 days out of 180 . . .

I retired at 54 from teaching and I had nowhere near £500k in my pot. I'm now 61 so drawing occupational pension £8,900 pa. I get £31k allowance as a foster carer but all expenses for foster son come out of that. DH still works and earns £58k pa. I get a passive income from btl properties of approximately £28k after tax. I will get a full state pension at 67 and I still have a secondary pension pot I still pay into and that's around £45k but following tax changes I will be adding £8k pa. I'll only draw it if I need it. DH will retire early in 2 years but his pension is far better than mine £16k at 60 and £64 lump sum then another £7.5k, and still adding to it for 2 more years, when 67 plus full state pension. He also has about £25k sitting in an additional pension pot and will add to it once retired to try to keep his tax loser. We worked hard to stagger our incomings from various income streams. You have to start as soon as you get your first job and we both took out additional pensions as well as our occupational pensions.

Lol!

Yes i worked with a guy who sold his business to do exactly this, even bought a very expensive camper van... both voted Brexit, now very angry with the EU, talk about not taking responsibility for ones actions.

Great fun winding them up about this.

Agreed. This question is equvalent to 'how long is a piece of string'?

Surely your assets add up to significantly more than £500k even if they are not in a 'pot'? Nearly £9k a year from 61, with inflation protection and joint lives would be in the region of £300k if you were buying an annuity. Add to that your £45k. I assume that the btl properties are worth much more than £150k to pay you a £28k profit after tax each year.

I am not sure that many people with public sector pensions realise how valuable they are.

@Mia85, yes btl properties worth a lot more than that and I suppose I could sell one if I needed money but CGT is very high as I've had the properties for between 3 and 17 years so the 3 oldest ones have almost doubled in value. I know how lucky both myself from teaching, and DH as a civil servant were having final salary pensions, although DH pension now moved to average salary hence one part can be drawn at 60 and the rest at 67. We were so lucky to have 10 years of such low mortgages that allowed us to pay our mortgage off and use some profits to reinvest in more btl houses. I know we will be comfortable in retirement and so I do gifting to my 3 DC and we have a holiday home in France I could let out but don't instead I let wider family and friends use it as it's not good to keep it empty and I like to share. When my children were younger I really struggled for years to keep paying additional pension. When I married DH we became better off as a couple. He transferred his house into both our names and we let it out. I paid deposit on our joint house to equal value of equity in his house. I had a lump sum from sale of my house with first h and invested in a btl. Over the years we bought more btl. For many years the interest could be deducted against tax. Now we have restructured to a Ltd company where we can again deduct interest and expenses against tax on newer buys but not financially viable to put older houses into Ltd company as would pay 40 percent CGT.

An impossible question to answer, because it depends on your levels of income AND expenditure!

We retired at 58 with DB pensions of approx £3k net a month plus £250k of investments. No mortgage. State pensions kick in for both of us at 66 giving us a further £2k a month but one of the DB pensions reduces so net income of £4500. All depends on your lifestyle as to how much you need.

@PrincessofWellies we fully intend popping back to the UK and the person renting our home at a reduced rate will be our son.

Well the problem is that you don't know how long you will live for and if you will be in good health. If you own your own home though, that is your safety net. Only you will know how much you woul need delening on what your lifestyle is. You could probably easily figure this our looking at past bank statements and also account for inflation

@JandalsAlways that is the reason we are planning on retiring earlier. Between DH and I us four of our friends have not made 55. It’s not as if any of them had terrible lifestyles of were in an at risk demographic.

You realise you have to be out of the EU for 90 days? It's not really a case of "popping back"!

A full state pension is about 10k per year

Can you live on 10k savings or personal pension until 67 ?