Not for tech millionaires. Not for people who inherited fortunes. For people like you and me — with a salary, a mortgage, a family and a life. Here's the honest answer.
Let me start with the image most people carry when they hear the phrase "early retirement."
Someone on a yacht. A tech founder who sold a startup at 38. A couple who moved to Portugal and live on dividends. Someone, somewhere, who is definitely not you — not because you couldn't aspire to it, but because the starting conditions bear no resemblance to your actual life.
I understand why that image persists. A significant proportion of early retirement content is built around extraordinary starting points. The person who saved 70% of a six-figure salary from their mid-twenties. The couple who lived on one income and invested the other for fifteen years. The individual who happened to join a tech company at the right moment and now has stock options that changed everything.
Those stories are real. They're also not representative. And their dominance in the early retirement conversation does a specific kind of damage — it convinces ordinary people that the whole thing is someone else's game.
I want to push back on that. Hard. But honestly.
Because the honest version of the answer is more nuanced than either "of course it's possible, anyone can do it" or "realistically it's only for the wealthy." The honest version depends on what you mean by early retirement, what you're starting from, and what you're willing to think differently about.
First — what does early retirement actually mean?
The definition matters more than people realise. Because a lot of the "I could never do that" response is actually a response to a specific version of early retirement — the version where you stop working entirely at 40, never earn another pound, and live off a massive investment pot for fifty years.
That version is real. It's achievable for some people. But it's not the only version. And it's not the one most people I know who've done this are actually living.
What most people who retire early are really doing is something more modest and more achievable. They're reaching a point where work becomes optional. Where the financial foundation is solid enough that they could keep working - but they don't have to. Where the choice about how to spend their time is genuinely theirs.
That might mean stopping entirely. It might mean doing two days a week of something enjoyable rather than five days of something necessary. It might mean taking a couple of years out, reassessing, and then choosing whether to return to some form of work on your own terms. It might mean leaving full-time employment at 58 rather than 67 - nine years earlier, not thirty years earlier.
All of these are forms of early retirement. And the financial requirement for most of them is significantly lower than the headline numbers that dominate the conversation.
The people doing this aren't extraordinary
I've been thinking about this a lot since I started this channel. About who actually manages to step back from work early. And what I've found - both in the research and in the conversations I've had — is that the common thread is rarely exceptional income or exceptional luck.
It's exceptional intentionality.
People who retire early tend to have made deliberate decisions, over a long period, about what they wanted and what they were willing to trade for it. They asked the questions that most people defer indefinitely. They worked out what they actually needed rather than assuming they needed whatever they were spending. They built a plan - imperfect, revised many times - and followed it with enough consistency that it eventually worked.
They include teachers. Nurses. Council workers. Electricians. People who never earned six figures and never expected to. People who had career gaps, who started late, who made wrong turns along the way.
What they generally have in common is not wealth. It's clarity. About what matters to them. About what a good life actually costs. About what they're prepared to do differently from the people around them who are just running out the clock to 67.
That clarity is available to anyone. It doesn't require a particular starting salary or a particular family background. It requires the willingness to actually look at the question rather than assuming the answer.
What makes it harder — and who faces the biggest obstacles
I want to be honest about this. Because "anyone can do it if they just try hard enough" is both unhelpful and untrue.
There are people for whom early retirement — even the modest, work-becomes-optional version — is genuinely much harder than it is for others. Acknowledging that isn't defeatist. It's the beginning of a realistic plan.
1. People with significant debt.
If you're carrying substantial consumer debt — credit cards, personal loans, outstanding finance — the interest you're paying is eroding your ability to build any kind of financial foundation. This doesn't make early retirement impossible. But it means there's a prerequisite step — clearing the debt — before the retirement planning can begin in earnest. The sequencing matters.
2. People who started late.
If you're in your fifties and genuinely haven't been saving meaningfully, the gap is real and narrowing it quickly requires either a significant income, a significant change in spending, or some combination of both. The options are not infinite. But they're also not zero. Semi-retirement — stepping back to part-time rather than stopping entirely — becomes a much more practical goal than a full stop. And even retiring at 62 rather than 67 is five years of freedom that a different approach might make possible.
3. People on lower incomes.
The maths is harder when the income is lower. Saving 15% of £25,000 a year is a different challenge from saving 15% of £80,000 a year. The proportional discipline required is the same. The absolute numbers are different. I want to be direct about this — I was a higher earner for most of my career, and pretending that made no difference would be dishonest. It made a significant difference.
4. People with caring responsibilities.
Career gaps for childcare, caring for elderly parents, or supporting a family member with health challenges create gaps in pension records, gaps in savings accumulation, and often a compressed window in which to build the foundation. These gaps are real and they disproportionately affect women. Acknowledging them honestly is important.
None of these obstacles are arguments against trying. They're arguments for being clear-eyed about where you're starting from — and building a plan that's calibrated to your actual situation rather than someone else's.
What genuinely changes the picture
Here's what I've found consistently - from my own experience and from the conversations I've had - makes early retirement meaningfully more achievable for ordinary people.
1. Being mortgage free, or close to it.
The single biggest change to the income you need in retirement is removing the mortgage payment. For most households this is the largest monthly outgoing. Remove it - and the amount you need to draw from your pension and savings drops significantly. The entire calculation shifts. This is why I talk about mortgage payoff as a priority for people approaching early retirement. Not because it's always mathematically optimal - it often isn't - but because it changes the financial floor in a way that makes everything else more achievable. Read my thought on investing vs clearing the mortgage here.
2. Understanding what you actually spend.
Most people have only a vague sense of what their life costs. When they sit down and actually look - three months of statements, every line categorised honestly - they find two things. First, that a large proportion of their current spending is work-related and disappears when they stop. Second, that the remaining spending is often significantly lower than they assumed. The number that felt impossibly large turns out, on examination, to be considerably more manageable than it appeared. Read my thoughts on the understanding your "enough" number.
3. Not waiting for certainty.
One of the most common patterns I've observed is people who are broadly in a position to consider early retirement - the numbers are roughly there, the plan is roughly solid - but who keep finding reasons to wait. One more year. Until the pension is a bit bigger. Until the market recovers. Until the children are through university. Until. This is the one more year trap and it is real. The certainty that feels like a prerequisite for action is actually a feeling that never quite arrives, because life doesn't become certain. You make the decision with the information you have, in the circumstances you're in, with an honest assessment of the risk. That's all anyone can do. Read my own experience - I've Done Everything Right. So Why Am I Still Scared?
4. Having a partner still working — if that's your situation.
I want to name this because it's my reality. My wife continues to work. Her income covers a meaningful share of our household costs. That changes the calculation significantly. One income covering shared costs means the retirement pot I need is smaller. The bridge I need to build is shorter. If you're in a similar situation - one of you stepping back while the other continues — the financial picture is different from two people both stopping at the same time. Different in your favour, generally. Worth planning around explicitly rather than treating it as a complication.
My own situation — and what it means for yours
I retired early. I'm 58. I'd had a good career with a reasonable salary. My wife and I are mortgage free. I have a decent pension. And I inherited a legacy from my parents that gave us a financial cushion I'm aware not everyone has.
I've said this throughout the series and I'll say it again here - I'm not doing this from a standing start. Those advantages are real and I'm not going to pretend they aren't.
But here's what I also know from eighteen months of thinking carefully about this and talking to a wide range of people who've done it. The fundamentals - the framework, the thinking, the questions you need to ask - apply regardless of where you're starting from. The specific answers will be different. The path will be different. The timeline will be different.
The question of whether it's possible for you specifically - on your salary, with your pension, with your mortgage situation, with your family circumstances - is a question you cannot answer without actually looking at the numbers. Properly. In detail. Without the assumption that the answer is no before you've started.
Most people never do that. They carry the vague sense that it isn't for them and never examine whether the sense is accurate. Which means many of them are wrong — and spending years longer in a situation they could have changed sooner if they'd actually looked.
What "normal" actually looks like
Let me close with a re-frame.
The early retirement stories that dominate the internet are skewed towards the exceptional - the extreme savers, the high earners, the lucky timing. They dominate because they're remarkable. Remarkable things get shared.
The normal version - the teacher who paid off her mortgage in her early fifties and stepped back to three days a week at 59, not because she'd done anything extraordinary but because she'd been deliberate for twenty years - doesn't get shared as widely. It doesn't have the headline numbers. It doesn't make a good thumbnail.
But it's happening. Quietly, constantly, among ordinary people making ordinary incomes who decided at some point to take the question seriously.
Early retirement - in the full, stop-completely, never-work-again version - is probably not achievable for everyone. That would be dishonest to claim.
But a version of it - work becoming optional before 67, more time and more freedom and more choice about how you spend your days - is within reach for far more people than the current conversation suggests.
You won't know if you're one of them until you look.
So look.
Tony writes about his personal journey to early retirement at freebefore65.co.uk. He is not a financial adviser. All content reflects his own experience and research and should be taken as a starting point for your own thinking, not as professional advice.
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