Gary Harrison feels guilty when he takes his dog, Artie, for a walk each morning. “You see all these people in their vans, rushing to work, and you’re off to the woods with the dog,” he said. “I worked for fifty years before retiring last year. I still wake up at 6am — if I slept in until 7.30 I’d feel bad about that too.”
Harrison, 63, set up his electrical contracting company in 2000 and was used to working 70-hour weeks, including weekends, nights and taking calls on holiday. “As a small business owner you do everything — you’re never away from it,” he said.
Last year he decided it was finally time to shut up shop. Harrison, who lives in Calver, near Leeds, had planned long trips with his wife, Heather, to their apartment in Spain, but the arrival of grandchildren has changed all that.
He looks after two-year-old Carter twice a week, and spends time with newborn Maeve. Grandchild number three is on the way. “Maybe when they go to school we’ll do those long trips to Spain,” he said.
Have a plan for your money — and your free time
Many people save for retirement for decades, plan their bucket lists and worry about whether they will have enough money to live on — but often we forget to give any thought to the reality of stopping work.
The move to retirement does not just require financial planning, it needs emotional planning too. A survey of 2,138 over-50s by the life insurance company SunLife found that 34 per cent of people who are still working plan to retire before state pension age. Some 55 per cent said they wanted to stop work to spend more time on their hobbies.
Of those who had already retired, 54 per cent did so before state pension age, and 31 per cent before age 60.
Two thirds (66 per cent) of those who had retired said doing so had improved their long-term happiness, but almost 18 per cent feared they had retired too soon.
Helen Morrissey from the investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown said: “Having a plan is important. You may decide to travel, do more gardening, volunteer or even work part-time to keep motivated, active and social. You will also be getting used to drawing a retirement income and working out your living expenses, which will likely be different to when you were working.”
Make a realistic budget
Gary and Heather, 63 and 59, who have been married for 40 years, sold the second property they owned in Leeds for £280,000 and plan to live off the proceeds until they reach state pension age. Gary also inherited a house when his mother died last year, which he plans to sell, and has pension savings, which he will leave invested. “We are mortgage free and things will be fine, but we will always have to watch the pennies.”
He thinks that transitioning into retirement gradually, by winding his business down over a period of 18 months, has made the move easier. Heather continues to work one day a week in a local deli because she enjoys the social interaction.
Also known as a “staged retirement”, this is an increasingly common strategy, said Marcus Ellis, a financial planner at the advice firm Quilter. “Many people underestimate the impact of leaving the workforce and the need for a new sense of purpose. It’s why some people return to part-time work in a less stressful role, to ease into full retirement,” he said.
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He said the first step is to work out what level of income you can expect in retirement, based on your pensions, savings and investments, and to create a realistic budget. Next, think about all your outgoings, from basic necessities such as housing, utilities and food to spending on travel and hobbies.
“You never believe you’ll get to retirement, but suddenly it’s here,” Harrison said. “I feel excited. I just got my senior rail card, so we’ll be doing lots of train trips and taking the grandchildren out.”
Managing the transition
However, not everyone finds the switch out of work so easy. When Peter Hunter retired from his job as a priest in 2019, he realised how little information there was about making the shift into retirement. One of his biggest decisions was where to live, as his home had previously been attached to his job.
So when he started running a “Retiring Well” workshop from his front room, it was no surprise that 12 people from the local area immediately signed up.
“There is a lot of information on some of the big life transitions, like getting married or starting a family, but not as much for retiring,” said Hunter, 72, who lives in Thornbury, south Gloucestershire. “A lot of people worry about their self-worth or what they will do with their time — the course helps them realise they are not alone.”
Over eight sessions the group covered areas such as finances, volunteering and health, using materials created by the author Helen Caldwell.
Gianpaolo Mantini, from the advice firm Saltus, said that leaving the structure of a workplace can be difficult. “We talk to clients about how to manage that transition — there is a lot of time in the week to fill now.
“You finish work for good on a Friday, what happens the next day, week, month? There is a concern that people start to regret the decision to retire because they haven’t planned for it and so they get bored.”
Retirement also requires a mindset switch, he said. After a lifetime of saving money, people are now faced with the prospect of how best to spend it. “You don’t want to hoard your money, be bored and regret it when you’re older,” Mantini said.
At Hunter’s group there were discussions about the practicalities of filling time, about legacies and what people would be remembered for, relationships outside the workplace, making your money last, and the prospect of a partner dying first. The course was so well received that he ran it again the following year, and is hoping to do another next year.
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“We talked about giving yourself time to explore the possibilities and think about what you will do with this next phase of life. For couples, how they might suddenly be spending a lot more time together,” Hunter said. “It’s important to understand that retirement is not just an event, it’s a journey — things will change as you go through it and so will you.”
‘I chose health over wealth’
But after decades of the nine to five, not everyone has big plans for afterwards. When Sean Graham retired in December, the first thing he did was … nothing.
Graham, 56, had worked as a field sales rep for a meat company for 30 years, clocking up 30,000 miles a year driving across the country to meet his customers. It was hard work and stressful but he enjoyed it.
“But after the Covid pandemic, the job changed — everything was remote and I was working from the kitchen table. It brought forward my plans to retire by a couple of years,” said Graham, who lives in Chesterfield, Derbyshire.
But he has had to make some compromises as a result. Graham and his wife, Clare, 55, who still works as an office administrator, downsized their house to free up about £170,000, sold their second car and have scaled back holiday plans. Graham has about £250,000 of pension savings and both he and Clare will get the full state pension, although not for another ten years.
“The money is a bit of a worry and we can’t live the same lifestyle,” he said. “But in the end, I decided to put health before wealth.”
He is not alone. According to SunLife’s research, some 63 per cent of over-50s are concerned about the rising cost of living and 40 per cent worry about unexpected costs. Some 34 per cent fear they will run out of money during retirement.
A separate survey of 6,000 people by the wealth manager St James’s Place (SJP) found that 60 per cent were not confident they would have saved the estimated £500,000 needed for a moderate standard of living in retirement by the time they stopped working. Some 48 per cent of adults said they have less than £50,000 in pension savings.
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The Pension and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA), a trade body, estimates that a single person needs an annual income of £31,300 after tax for a moderate lifestyle in retirement, which includes a two-week holiday a year and eating out a few times a month. But just 28 per cent of those surveyed said they were on track to have saved enough for this.
For a comfortable lifestyle, a single person would need £43,100 a year, the PLSA said, equivalent to total pension savings of £790,000, according to SJP.
But Graham thinks cutting back is worth it. These days, he gets up at 5am so he and Clare can walk their two Bernese mountain dogs, Barli and Oakley, before she goes to work, and the rest of the day is his.
“Some people want to travel or play golf, but for now I’m just enjoying being as peaceful as possible,” he said. “I used to go on three or four holidays a year, but I don’t even want to book one now because I’m so happy being at home.”
Did you struggle to adapt to retirement? Let us know in the comments below
