Retiring early
Jenny’s story
I was 59 and thinking of retiring when I looked for a financial adviser online. I’d had one before, but Jon is a financial planner, which means he focuses less on the products and more on your lifestyle. He’s interested in us as people and about what we want to do in life.
We had an initial meeting, which was free, which enabled us to find out about each other and discuss our financial situation.
We felt Jon was very approachable and pragmatic. My background is in accountancy so I’m comfortable with spreadsheets, but Jon wasn’t patronising or arrogant.
LOOKING AT THE FUTURE
Once we decided to go ahead, Jon set about collecting our existing pension information from all of our various pension pots in order to assess our current financial situation. The alternative would have been to look into this all myself, but I knew that it would take me a lot of time and that I’m not up to date with all the legislation changes, so it was worth paying someone to do that for us and look at the whole situation, and that’s what Jon did.
He created a projection showing our total pension income and what might happen over the next 40 years. He asked: ‘How would you feel if I said you could stop work tomorrow?’ This was fantastic! It made us feel very secure to think we could stop there and then. However, we weren’t really ready to do that straight away.
Retiring is a big change because so much of your identity is bound up with your role and you don’t just want to suddenly give that up. However, knowing that we were financially secure really helped us think what we were going to do.
COMFORTABLE RETIREMENT
I worked for a year part time but retired after that. Knowing we were financially able to do that brought a real a mindset shift.
Now we spend our time volunteering, which is something I’ve always wanted to do, and spending more time doing things like going to the theatre.
I feel like I did when I first graduated at age 21 when I felt as if the world was my oyster. It can be quite scary when you’re in early 60s and your horizons suddenly start opening up, but we didn’t want to wait until we were in our 90s to have lots of money because we wanted to be able to enjoy it.
A PERSONAL SERVICE
Jon is approachable, pragmatic and friendly. He helps you to be objective when you’re thinking about what you want to do in retirement.
Our previous adviser had been very good, but it became very transactional – you would pay your money and that was it. This is about making sure you have enough to do the things you really want to do, in a way that suits you. It’s completely tailored to your needs.