I’m Tony. I’m 58 years old and I recently resigned from work.
I created this site to document an unfiltered view of what early retirement really looks like in the UK, from the planning
and researching available options, through to the uncertainty, the numbers and the day-to-day reality.
I write about my personal journey to early retirement.
I am not a financial adviser.
All content reflects my own experience and research and should be taken as a starting point for your own thinking, not as professional advice.
Not the numbers. The other stuff. The questions I had to answer before I could actually hand in my notice.
Nobody warned me I'd still be waking up at 6am. Or that the hardest questions wouldn't be financial. Follow along as I figure out what early retirement in the UK actually looks like from the inside.
Most early retirement content is polished, commercial and built around someone else's perfect circumstances. This isn't. I do not hold any financial services qualifications. I am not a pensions adviser, an investment adviser, a tax adviser, an accountant, a solicitor, or any other regulated professional. This is my unfiltered account of figuring it out in real time.
I’m digging into the stuff no one tells you about - from the 'Oh no' moments with the budget to the weirdness of having a free Tuesday morning.
The practical side of retiring early in the UK - pensions, ISAs, tax, drawdown, the State Pension and benefits. Plain English, UK-specific and built around real decisions rather than generic advice. Start with the Master Checklist.
The questions I asked myself before I stopped. The doubts, the fears, the "what ifs", and how I worked through them. Use these to work through yours.
I used these guides and trackers (yes, there's a spreadsheet!) to keep myself from panicking about my bank balance. They helped me; hopefully, they’ll help you too.
Different people, different situations, same principles. See how early retirement planning might look for people starting from very different places.
The topics I've had to get my head around, grouped so you can find the one you need.
How tax works once the salary stops, building an income from your different pots, and planning your spending around the life you want to live.
NI credits and gaps, state pensions forecasts, the workplace pension rules, and where all of it sits in the bigger picture.
The years between stopping work and the pensions kicking in. How to fund them with ISAs and cash, and whether easing off slowly beats stopping dead.
Everything a spreadsheet can't tell you. Who you are once the job title's gone, and whether you trust yourself with a diary full of empty days.
What changes when you stop and your partner carries on working. Age gaps, caring for parents, and the conversations those bring.
The spreadsheets and checklists I built to stop myself spiralling about money. Borrow them, they did the job for me.
I'm the sort of person who counts things. A while ago I counted my working life in days. More recently I sat down and reconstructed every gig I could remember going to, 137 of them since 1983. I didn't expect a spreadsheet of concerts to tell me the story of my life, but the shape of it does.
I was three screens into HMRC's higher-rate pension relief claim before I worked out I didn't have a claim to make.
The money question gets all the attention, and it's the easier one. The harder question is how you know you're actually done, and it rarely arrives as a single moment. The awkward part is that the signs telling you to go look almost identical to the signs telling you that you just need a change.
Check your State Pension forecast and there's a fair chance you'll hit a line that says you were "contracted out" of part of the State Pension, alongside something called a COPE deduction. It sounds like you've been short-changed. For most people, mine included, it works out to nothing lost, and here's why.
The headlines this week say the State Pension is on course to rise by around £500 next April, and that pensioners have been promised they won't be taxed on it. Both are broadly true. But the promise is far narrower than the coverage suggests, and for anyone with a private pension or savings, which is most people planning a retirement, it doesn't apply at all.
Most retirement planning maps your income and your spending. Almost none of it warns you about the one cost that can dwarf both: care in later life. And most people carry a comforting assumption about it that simply isn't true, that the NHS will pick up the bill.
The average UK pension pot looks alarmingly small, and the sum the industry says you need for a "comfortable" retirement looks impossibly large. Put the two side by side and you're meant to feel behind. But the numbers come from different places, measuring different things, and even at face value they leave out most of what actually pays for a retirement.
Six weeks in, and it still feels like a holiday rather than a life. I've just come back from an actual one, a week in Cornwall, and for the first time it had nothing waiting on the other side of it. Which is roughly when I worked out what a holiday was really made of, and why this doesn't feel like one.
For years, part of my job was working with specialist companies to build models that proved whether our marketing had actually worked. It's the multi-million-dollar question every Finance Director asks, and the one very few of them believe the answer to. I've realised my retirement plan is the same kind of model, with the same blind spots. And the thing it's worst at measuring is the thing that matters most.
The headlines this week warned anyone in their fifties about a state pension "bombshell" and told them to find an extra £74 a month. Underneath is a nine-year-old policy intention restated in a forecast, no change to the law, and a review that hasn't reported. Here's what was actually said, and what it means if you're planning to stop work early.
I deliberately built no structure into these first weeks. I wanted to decompress, not swap one diary for another. What I hadn't reckoned on was where empty time actually goes when you don't fill it, which turns out to be straight into my phone.
A few weeks into retirement I woke up half-convinced I'd forgotten to tell someone official that I'd stopped. It turns out there's almost no one to tell. Here's who genuinely needs to know, including the insurers most people forget, and why the list is shorter and stranger than you'd expect.