Recent content by BritChap

Well, it happened: FIREd at 54. Not exactly how I planned it, but in hindsight I was prevarocating so the fact that it was somewhat taken out of my control was perhaps not a bad thing! In short, company restructure = "do you want us to look for a new role for you or take a settlement?". I...

Thanks and fully agree - best to consider all of the angles but not to let that make you lose sight of the goal! I'm sticking with one more year as I have a kid at university and one at private school. Another year of earning / saving will eat into the costs of that quite a bit. Also, you are...

All fair points but the counter-factual is, for example, what if your health takes a turn for the worse and you find that the long enjoyable retirement you were planning may, in fact, be neither? That is a real bummer. For me anyway the answer is to realise that even if you have enough you can...

This is probably stupidly simplistic, and not being American I have no idea what 'Roths' and so on are so I may be missing a trick there, but I have always taken the view that loans are sort of the inverse of fixed income investments. So paying down a loan that is at X% interest is like...

Hold on there! Scotland is a country, Wales is not...being a Principality within the United Kingdom, of which Gibraltar is an Overseas Territory. As you can see, we like to keep things simple around here....

21% including cash value of pension: London property isn't cheap, but you can downsize (or even 'upsize') about an hour's journey away for a lot less....which is the plan once I'm FIRED. Or I could buy a castle in Scotland....:)

I'm following a similar strategy - put aside any very definite commitments to others and don't include them in your calcs for your own retirement spend. If you still have enough to enjoy life, then you're done. In fact, in the UK (where I live) it is possible to pay private school fees in...

You are right. I will confess that part of my issue is I don't want to let anyone down at work. However, at the end of the day, if I give them enough notice of my intentions I'm hardly being unreasonable and, as you point out, what's the worse that could happen? I just have to pick my moment....!

Thanks Alan. Your Googling skills are clearly better than mine because you have given me two new websites to look at that I hadn't spotted before! The Fidelity one in the UK has some parameters that are capped in places that aren't applicable to me (it doesn't allow retirement savings of more...

Hi there. I’ve been lurking for a little but thought it best I stop and actually introduce myself. As you might guess from the name I am British and now UK-based, but I worked overseas for over 20 years and was lucky enough to benefit from good expat packages and generally lower tax rates than...