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8 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

Yes, but I can't imagine doing a hobby all day, every day. It would suck all the fun out of it.

A friend of my dad's retired from the police and took on a full time job right away afterwards as he didn't want to stop working. I think I'm the same - not the job per se, but being part of a bigger community and being productive. When my dad retired, he said that his world shrank.

You’re inviting the Kenneth Williams meme idiots.

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26 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

Can't speak for @scottsdad but for many years, my hobby was also what I did for a living.

Lots of people love their jobs.

That's fair enough, if your job is your passion I understand the difficulty in walking away from it.

4 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

Yes, but I can't imagine doing a hobby all day, every day. It would suck all the fun out of it.

A friend of my dad's retired from the police and took on a full time job right away afterwards as he didn't want to stop working. I think I'm the same - not the job per se, but being part of a bigger community and being productive. When my dad retired, he said that his world shrank.

Fair enough, understand feeling like you want to be part of something productive. Plenty of things you can do to acheive that without a job though.  

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30 minutes ago, Melanius Mullarkay said:

To be honest, retirement scares me as it would probably mean having to speak to the wife in between her incessant relentless indefatigable fag smoking.

Shouldn't have to worry about that for too long then...

 

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Simple Path To Wealth is a fantastic book, genuinely a life changing read and would recommend to anyone. Also Choose FI podcast is a good listen although can get a bit repetitive with over 500 episodes now, early shows were great and the interviews with JL Collins (author of Simple Path to Wealth) are fantastic. 

The lifestyle itself is certainly not for everyone and consumerism will always be the route most people choose, which is understandable. However, with a few lifestyle tweaks here and there most working debt free people should be able to reach a savings rate of between 25% and 50%, and that should mean freedom to choose to work or not within 20 years of starting. 

The 4% rule is key, 5% if you're a bit more bold or 3% if you are a bit more conservative, but 4% is a good balance. As long as you can survive on 4% of your invested assets per year you are financially independent. If you can get by on £20k per annum you'll need investments of £500k, £40k you'll need £1m etc. 

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36 minutes ago, bobbykdy said:

Got made redundant at the age of 42 last summer, fortunately package was not too bad. At that point I hadn't been that great for a while health wise and work was becoming a bit of a struggle so decided to take three months out which has now become 9 and counting. Don't miss working in the slightest but at my age I know this is financially unsustainable and I need to get myself back out there, looking to do this in the next couple of months. To answer the question though if I had enough money I could happily do this for a good while yet, possibly indefinitely.

I would do it now. 

I was in a similar situation 4 years ago and took it easy for a few months.  When I started looking for work again, I was constantly getting asked about what I'd done with my time away from work ("nothing"), followed by them saying a gap in the CV is fine - as long as it doesn't last longer than 6 months.

Pickings were extremely slim and I had 3 interviews in about 4 months, then finally got offered a fixed term contract (I was looking for permanent) bang on 6 months after leaving my last role.  It wasn't ideal but I had to take it.

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2 hours ago, The Moonster said:

The idea of scrimping by until I'm 50 or 60 just so I can have 10 (maybe 20) years where I'm financially independent sounds an utterly hellish life. Carpe diem. 

 

2 hours ago, VincentGuerin said:

Depends what you mean by aggressively saving. To what extent would that needlessly limit your life?

More than one of my mates' dads have dropped dead within a few months of retirement. Live while you're here.

There are plenty of those in the FIRE community who advocate this, but you certainly don't have to.

I live a fairly profiligate lifestyle, I go to restaurants more than I cook and travel plenty - I would never not do something that I wanted to because of money. Where I do lean towards the minimalist side is on buying physical items - I try to avoid it where I can. Pretty much everyone I know (including me) has far too much stuff that you never use or need. And many people buy far too many clothes - this is what I try actively cut down on.

But rather than being an active decision for me I think I just kept my student lifestyle because I was happy with it. My spending didn't increase massively when I got a job and hasn't really increased that much since. If you can avoid lifestyle creep you're halfway there. When I travel I'm perfectly happy to stay in hostels / cheap hotels but when with someone else (let's be honest - a burd) I would happily shell out for a fancy hotel.

It's all about balance, to follow FIRE you don't have to eat pot noodles every day, find what works for you and invest whatever you save.

And health is wealth, there's no point cutting your expenditure by buying frozen food or not going to the gym.

On finding stuff to do, you can follow the FI part without the RE part. Or move to part time working, or invest your time in something you're passionate about. There's no chance I would retire I would sit around doing watching TV - I can barely manage an afternoon doing that without getting bored. If you have FI, you have choice - that's the intended outcome.

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11 minutes ago, SweeperDee said:

I’m literally planning on dying with loads of unsecured debt, no point hoarding money; can’t be the richest person in the graveyard.

100% agreed.

Although I think for people of my generation you will basically be able to stay alive for as long as you have money.

Ideally in some San Junipero type virtual reality, paying for the odd lab grown heart when required.

But if that's not on the cards then yeah I will blowing it all and becoming a burden of the state when I'm too infirm to do anything fun anyway.

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My old boy retired at 62, died before he reached 65. Detail not required here but I put it down largely to a man who had worked all his life and then suddenly found the self enforced idleness not to his liking.

In other news, I met a 70-or-so year old client a couple of years ago and he turned up in a spanking new Porsche 911. '"WTF did you buy that for, you daft auld coot?" says I. He says "Well, I'll be off this earth somewhere in the near to medium future and my boy will likely end up buying one with my money once I'm gone. Doing it this way round at least I'm getting a shot of it first". I couldnt argue with his logic.

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The missus is looking at going back to work full time in a year or two, as soon as the boy is full time at nursery/school. We have survived well enough on my wage alone, without having to eat into our savings, other than what we put towards the house we bought. When she is back full time I am hopeful we will continue to survive on one wage and will save the second one as close to in entirety as we can. You are fucked if I want to be sitting in an office, wasting work time on some football messageboard in 25 years time.

As for the "What would you do with all your spare time". I can think of plenty of things I want to do more of but simply don't have the time to do now. I don't see the world changing that much by the time I decide I can chuck the whole working for a living thing.

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The best financial advice I can give my kids is to 

- avoid consumer debt

- spend less than you earn

- invest the difference.

The power of compound interest has huge impact on young people who squirrel away money into LISAs and SIPPS rather than buy the latest smart phones, flash cars and expensive clothes. Even a relatively small amount every month will pay massive dividends later on in life.

Too many people are too busy buying things trying to impress people they don’t even like anyway!

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Some content I enjoy.

https://www.madfientist.com Excellent podcast. Guy lives in Edinburgh now but is mainly US material.
 

https://meaningfulmoney.tv Excellent podcast by a financial planner. He also has a subscription academy offering. I bought into the retirement planning as a founder mainly to access the VoyantGo software which is an excellent tool.

https://theescapeartist.me/about/ Worth reading back some of his work. Subscribe to his email list.

https://monevator.com What helped me understand low fees and DIY passive investing. Again really worth subscribing to regular emails.

 

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This morning on campus I met a guy I do a lot of work with and have published with a lot over the last 10 years or so. We had a coffee, spent a bit of time in the lab and chatted about our work plans for the summer. He will be 80 in August. The only thing limiting him now is his health, but he said he still feels like he has the head of a young man. I think he and I are similar. Though, he said, "I don't play long records any more".

What he likes is the puzzle. I gather data and between us we analyse it - and he likes trying to figure it out, what it means. 

In my own family, I had an uncle that retired at 60, and died at 61. My dad retired in 2004 for health reasons, so he has had 18 years off work. I guess you really cannot tell how long your retirement will be. 

 

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There have been some really good resources posted already but I'll throw in a recommendation for a book - Smarter Investing by Tim Hale.  It's pretty much the bible for passive investing in the UK and it really laid everything out for me that I couldn't quite get my head around.  Other than that, a few other random thoughts:

State pension access age being 65/67/68 is one thing, and that'll be the "retirement age" that the employees amongst us will most likely get on our pension projection, but the earliest access age for your workplace and/or personal pension will most likely be 55 rising to 57 in 2028.  You can still have a fairly decent couple of decades after you get into that pension money, and something like 90-95% of us will reach that age.  The tax benefits of paying into a pension are pretty good as well - being an overpaid oil dick I sacrifice a decent percentage of my salary into my pension pre-tax/NI every month, and still live a comfortable life on the remainder (albeit I don't have a family to support!).   Scare stories from the bloke down the pub about Robert Maxwell or the gubmint stealing folks' pensions can be safely filed in the bin - that's really not how pensions work nowadays.  

It's easy to get caught up in the doom-mongering stuff about armageddon / total financial collapse / the world burning up, but ultimately humanity tends to find a solution to stuff.  And even if we do only have 30 years left on the earth as a species, surely that's even more of a reason to put something in place so that you don't have to work for all of these 30 years?  

 

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