The Retirement Newsletter: Making plans….

Issue Number: -133

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash.

Welcome

Welcome to week -133 — yep, still counting down*. 

And a big welcome to the first subscriber to this newsletter. Thank you for subscribing, and please tell your friends about the newsletter.

This week, I will say a little more about planning and how you might want to set up your plans for tracking your journey towards retirement.

Planning

A busy old week in the day job. And that is always the problem. The day job getting in the way of planning for retirement.

So, how did I go about making my plans?

Well, I like lists. I like ticking things off lists. So, for me, it was natural to create a series of lists, but for a thing as big as retirement, you need many lists. I needed lists of lists.

First, as discussed in the last newsletter, I needed a date to retire — something for which to aim. And for me, a significant deciding factor, besides wanting a change of career, was money — my pension pot. 

Now, thanks to one of my earlier retirement plans — the one that had failed — I had discovered, through playing around with the 'pension pot prediction tool' on my pension provider's website, that if I retired after my 60th birthday, I got quite a bump in my annual pension. A significant bump. A bump that made it worth hanging on to my day job. 

So, check your pension. Do you get a 'bump' in income at certain points?  If you do, then it may be worth considering using one of those dates as your retirement date.

Anyway, back to the plan - I had a date for my retirement. So, I could start to plan. 

Making plans

As I said above, I like lists. And I like ticking things off lists, and my favourite tool for making lists and ticking things off is Evernote (not an affiliate link).

I have used Evernote for over ten years, and I have used it for things such as planning trips, organising blog posts, keeping records, and organising my life. It was in Evernote that I decided to draw up my retirement plan. (Evernote is a great tool, and you really should check it out. And the best thing is, they have a free plan that lets you try out the program.)

However, before we start to plan, we need to analyse the situation/problem, and that is where SWOT comes in…..

And I will be saying more about SWOT in the next newsletter.

The Future - what are you going to do?

OK, so enough about planning to retire, what will you do once you have retired?

What are your plans?

It is all well and good planning to retire, but you also need to start thinking about the next step.

Money

As I said above, and this is something to watch out for, depending on your retirement plan or package, there may be certain advantages and disadvantages in tapping into your pension pot at certain ages. Check with your provider. Do that now.

I will say more about this in a later newsletter.

In the news

Renewing your licence in the UK? Looks like there are problems at the DVLA - DVLA delays: call for licence extensions as complaints flood in - also if you are in the UK, watch out for some scams doing the rounds where companies charge you a fee for doing something that is free on the DVLA website.

Tips and tricks

Do you have any tips and tricks you would like to share for planning for your retirement?

Next week

OK, so that is it for this week.

Next week I will explain how I went about analysing the problem of getting to my retirement - the SWOT analysis.

Thanks

Thanks for taking the time to read this newsletter, and please don't hesitate to share it with your friends or on social media using the buttons below.

If you would like to say' thanks' for the letter and not a subscriber, why not buy me a cup of tea?

Until next time,

Nick

PS, If you have something you would like to contribute to the newsletter - a story, advice, anything - please get in touch.

 * I am counting down the number of weeks until I retire.