We are Mike and Karen. A friend told us he was planning to take 25% of his pension at 55 and retire. We looked at each other and asked: when can we retire?
That simple question exposed an awkward fact: we did not even know what pensions we had. So we started digging — and then kept challenging every answer we found.
“When can we retire?”
That made us ask the obvious question: when can we retire?
CVs, payslips, old addresses, providers, tracing requests and unanswered questions.
The numbers existed. The joined-up answer did not.
Mortgage, ISAs, tax, annuity, drawdown, State Pensions and the life we wanted.
Not certainty. A plan we can explain, challenge and update.
Each page follows one question: what we thought, what we tested, what we chose, and what changed afterwards.
Before we could plan retirement, we had to work out what pensions we actually had. That meant rebuilding decades of employment history.
Read more →Calculators could give us numbers. We needed something we could change, rerun and use to test our own assumptions.
Read more →We had discovered that this was really complicated, and wanted someone to validate our decisions. Spoiler: we failed to find the right fit for what we wanted.
Read more →We tried this one a lot of different ways. The maths preferred one answer; we preferred another.
Read more →Extra pension contributions looked better on tax. We still chose access and flexibility for the years before retirement.
Read more →The breakthrough was realising one pot did not have to do every job. Different money could fund different stages of retirement.
Read more →The earliest date one of us could stop was not the point. We wanted to know when retirement worked for both of us.
Read more →I thought my 50s would be a fairly straight run towards retirement. Instead, the final working years started asking completely different questions.
Months at risk, one horrible job, two senior offers and an unexpected discovery about challenge, pressure and getting older.
Read the story →Real decision stories about work and the parts of life that changed the decisions. No generic career advice. No lifestyle-blog filler.
Explore The Final Working Years →The plan keeps moving. These are the bits that happened after the original pages were written — including the ideas that worked, the ones that didn’t, and the evidence that changed our view.
We’ve moved from asking how much we might have to whether we’d prefer to stop earlier—with smaller pots and more time together. The date is still optional.
Read the update →We revisited pensions versus ISAs, tested uncomfortable scenarios and started acting on the plan: a £230 budget surplus and our first ISA investment.
Read the update →For a while, guaranteed income looked like the obvious answer. Then we modelled not buying the annuity — and the extra flexibility started to look better.
Read the update →Last updated September 2026
We are sharing the decisions, mistakes and trade-offs because real journeys are more useful than another list of generic retirement tips. Rules change. Our plan will change too.
If our story helps you, saves you some time, or even just gives you a laugh at some of our stumbles, you can buy us a coffee below as a little thank you.
Because apparently, it’s our turn.