I'm not a financial guru. I'm a 58-year-old who's just handed in his notice.
Follow along as I figure out what early retirement in the UK actually looks like from the inside.
My name is Tony. I'm 58 years old - 59 later this year. I've recently resigned from a management role running a small team after a long career and a good salary. My wife and I are mortgage free. I have a reasonable pension behind me. I've done the research, run the scenarios, and made the decision to step back from full-time work before the traditional retirement age.
That last sentence is the most important one on this page. Because if you're looking for someone who has all the answers, who can hand you a neat five-step plan and guarantee it works, well, I'm not that person. What I can offer is something different. Honest, carefully researched thinking from someone who is actually living this transition in real time. Not looking back on it from a position of perfect hindsight. Not presenting a highlight reel. Just what it's actually like, as it's happening.
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.
Your body keeps the old schedule long after your diary stops. A week and a bit in, I was still bracing for meetings that no longer exist. How long does that take to fade?
A late thought on what it feels like to film my final episodes of a show that’s no longer the one I joined.
At work events, when the room filled up and the noise climbed, I would find the door. A quiet word to the few people who mattered, then gone before anyone formed a circle for a speech. The Irish goodbye. The French call the same move filer à l'anglais, slipping off English-style. I've done it for most of my working life, and my last day was no different.
A few years back I sank hundreds of hours into Fallout 4. I built it up, finished it, and bought more of it when it ran out. Now I load the old save now and again and there's nothing left to do. I've been thinking about that more than I expected to, with my last working day nearly here.
On the long drive this week I worked out exactly how long I've spent employed. Thirty-six years, near enough thirteen thousand days on one payroll or another. I'd gone looking for proof that the time added up to something. The number couldn't give it to me.
We were having dinner last night, me, my wife and my son, and the joke going round was how I'd cope in retirement without anyone asking me things. With my last working day nearly here, people have started queuing up to get the last of what's in my head before it walks out the door, and I've been making a great show of being put upon about it.
The list has been building for years: an overgrown garden, guttering that's needed replacing for a while, rooms I keep meaning to redecorate and never get to. I've given myself a few weeks after 26 June to decompress, and the obvious move is to spend them clearing that backlog. I think that would be a quiet mistake.
A team dinner conversation led to a longer thought about Rush, retirement, and what their songs have been telling me all along.
On stepping away from work, the people you're leaving behind, and the strange grief of ending something you chose to end.
The big question : Should I use an independent financial adviser?
The final countdown is no longer abstract. It's a bank holiday, two trips to the office, a long weekend away, and then the date.
A 1960s TV series, a Welsh fantasy village I honeymooned in, and a question that still echoes through every workplace: why did you resign?
Eighteen months of planning answered the financial questions. The final weeks are asking different ones, in a register the spreadsheet can't answer.
Nobody hands you a guide to the emotional reality of the final stretch. So here's mine, a set of honest permissions for anyone counting down to the end of a long career
Stopping work at 58 felt different from retiring. For a while, saying it out loud felt like putting on someone else's clothes. I'm still not entirely sure they fit.
Already half gone and still officially here: the colleagues asking for input on projects you won't see through, and the ones already reorganising around your absence.
I’ve checked the spreadsheets. I’ve run my numbers through the AI tools. I’ve mapped out my bridge to the State Pension, and I finally did the scariest thing of all: I pushed "send" on my resignation email.
The spreadsheet works. The retirement plan is solid. The research is thorough. And the question still arrives at 3am. Here's what that's actually like - and what I've learned from sitting with it.
The question everyone asks when you retire early. And the answer most people are too embarrassed to give.
The gap between knowing your early retirement plan works and actually feeling ready to live it.
On the particular dynamic of stopping work when your partner hasn't. And won't. For a while.
I want to acknowledge something. I’m not the first person to make videos about early retirement.
The decision to leave didn't arrive in a single moment. It built over about eighteen months, fed by a confluence of things.
