Talk me down, please!

[dealtn]

Ask what projects they have that would result in working yourself out of a job. Any large company has these sort of things that usually no one would go near because they result in career death. Indicate that you would be happy to take them on in return for an agreed package at the end.

Probably better put than how I could word it.

I was in denial, and could have "retired" sooner if I was brave enough. In the end I was made redundant by my boss's boss, who I now have more admiration towards than I did then (it was already high). It will depend on who employs you, and I may have been lucky to work for a company that was large and had promised "the City" it would be making savings etc, and reducing its workforce. In practice this meant managers across the business had targets for such reductions, and importantly "budgets" to make redundancies that were outwith the normal budgets for their businesses.

Nearly 4 years later no regrets, and the initial anger at being let go, when many of those that remained contributed less to the business than me, faded quickly.

You have the rest of your life to look forward to, and may in time find yourself working, or monetising a hobby, way past the few months you see now as your income generating years. (Mental) health trumps wealth anyway, but the latter you seem well covered for, it's the former you should be focussing on.

Good luck, and "enjoy" whatever you decide, but if you can engineer a smooth and early exit, with someone putting a cheque in your pocket too, you will be looking back and laughing. If that isn't possible, I think you will be making the right decision in focussing on your happiness rather than the pennies anyway.

[jonesa1]

Based on what you've told us, you already have enough wealth to stop work now, although your estimate for annual living expenses seems rather low, especially for someone on a £100k salary. Assuming the estimate is correct, then in your shoes I would be looking to reduce the stress levels - excess (i.e. more than you can comfortably tolerate) stress harms your health and regularly kills people. There are several ways to do that, a couple of approaches (already suggested above):

1. assuming you can actually pull this off (it's not as easy as people think!), simply stop trying, coast, do the minimum and bank your salary until such time as you're binned (hopefully with a pay off). In order to reduce stress with this approach, you really have to not care about how your colleagues and bosses perceive you, especially if the culture is very target driven. It helps if you don't like or respect your bosses and colleagues. Could be tricky if you're friends with colleagues and / or expect to have contact with them after leaving, unless you're very thick-skinned. If the self-induced part of the stress is because you don't like not achieving targets or doing a good job, then maybe you could change the game - i.e. the challenge is to see how long you can remain employed while doing the barest minimum, depending on the performance management processes at your place, this could be quite a long time, or hardly any time at all.

2. pack in the job (or engineer a situation where the job packs you in) and find something else that's low stress, probably low wage. Any money you earn will simply help to de-risk managing the gap until your pension becomes available. Depending on your line of work and skills, there may be opportunities to earn reasonable money in a lower stress environment

[Snakey]

Guys you're not talking me down!!

I just typed a massive reply and it logged me out when I pressed "submit" and I lost it, so please excuse relative brevity of this one or if I've ignored a question - I don't mean to be rude.

Some points:

1. £6.5-8k is my actual annual expenditure over the last few years. I spend the evenings getting over the day (or working late) and the weekends getting over the week (or working) and either get paid for annual leave not taken or spend it doing freelance, which gives few opportunities for spending. If I didn't work I'd have to heat the flat and buy my own milk/pens... and surely I'd want to do stuff that costs money, although I'm struggling to quantify this as I feel so out of touch with whoever I really am - will I feel rich on £12k? Constrained on £30k? I have no idea!

2. I messed up by putting loads into my pension at the expense of my ISA etc, so if I have to work for years only to be the richest person in the graveyard I only have myself to blame. I don't pay off the mortgage as I'd rather that came from my pension in due course than reduced my funds now.

3. GIA is indeed a stock market investment that isn't in a tax wrapper. Sorry about that. My then-IFA used the acronym as if it was standard and I just assumed.

4. Your collective points about how it hardly matters if I no longer do so much are well-taken. e.g. I have been in the habit of saying "yes" to things that aren't my responsibility simply because I don't know who else would do them if I said "no" - that level of team-playing/ownership is inappropriate if I've stopped moving up. Be professional, yeah (I am on six figures after all), but a lopsided deal where I make work my life while they see me as nobody special would be my own fault if I carry it on now that the penny's dropped.

5. I like the idea of secretly knowing I'm going, and seeing if that makes a difference to how I feel. I think an extra year could tip the balance financially, with the advantage of (hopefully) getting clarity on new pension access age by then too. And get fit, re-do the flat blah blah.

6. In the meantime, I have made several new year resolutions along the lines of taking a full lunch hour, not working late, not checking e-mail at weekends, so let's see how that goes to start with... the nature of the job means this may be easier said than done, but it might be that I don't need to change too much in order to reduce the stress level to something I can manage.

7. No chance of being paid off or "officially" sidelined, nobody else does what I do and it does need doing. I expect guilt trips if I ease off on the extra hours, for the same reason. Whether they'd be able to turn it in to a disciplinary/capability issue and apply pressure that way remains to be seen. This circles back to the above points though - I do feel I need to prioritise my mental and physical health now, and if this job isn't compatible with that then I'm lucky that I can walk away, albeit at some cost to my Grant Plan.

8. Could probably keep the freelance up (say circa £10k a year) for a couple of years until my technical knowledge got too out of date, so there's always that to cushion any blow.

Thank you all so much for your thoughts, whether I've specifically replied to them or not - it's all been so useful to get my head in the right place for tomorrow morning (and the year to come).

[stressor]

I can help you out with a quick back of the envelope calculation. Lets say you continue to save in your ISA from 47 to 57 at around 3.5% with no taxes or fees and you pay in 20k max allowance in capital and starting at 215k. At 57 your ISA would be worth 538k; manage to save another 10 years until you are 67 and the ISA on its own will be worth almost exactly 1million. Lets say interest on the ISA was only 2% and not 3.5%, then at yr 10 you would still have 481k and at year 20 807k.

That seems a pretty nonsensical calculation. The OP has at most 2.5 years left to work, and is considering giving up even earlier than that. So the prospect of being able to put £20k per year for 10 years into an ISA is zero.

Scott.

I sincerely apologise for trying to help. I foolishly assumed that the OP would continue to earn thru consultancy or other opportunities or another alternative job (or even this 100k job for 2.5years) enough the save 20k a year in the future after all expenses. Clearly you know the OP future circumstances better than me, therefore I wasted everyones time including my own.

[TUK020]

4. Your collective points about how it hardly matters if I no longer do so much are well-taken. e.g. I have been in the habit of saying "yes" to things that aren't my responsibility simply because I don't know who else would do them if I said "no" - that level of team-playing/ownership is inappropriate if I've stopped moving up. Be professional, yeah (I am on six figures after all), but a lopsided deal where I make work my life while they see me as nobody special would be my own fault if I carry it on now that the penny's dropped.

6. In the meantime, I have made several new year resolutions along the lines of taking a full lunch hour, not working late, not checking e-mail at weekends, so let's see how that goes to start with... the nature of the job means this may be easier said than done, but it might be that I don't need to change too much in order to reduce the stress level to something I can manage.

Snakey,
I have both been in your position, and have managed individuals who are demonstrating burn out through trying to "get it all done".

If I may offer some advice on managing stress from overwork:
You have to change mindset from "Get it all done", to "Prioritise what you can do in the time/effort available".

Example system of managing overload:

Whiteboard with a bunch of post it notes, each representing a task.
Line drawn across the middle.
Above this - being worked on. 5 post it notes max at any one time.
Below this, everything else. Tasks acknowledged but queued. No forecast delivery date.

You only move a post it note up to the active section, when you have completed one of your "worked on" notes.
Management can re-prioritise a note up, but then something has to come down.

The reason why a whiteboard - this process has to be visible to your bosses and internal customers. Once they get used to the idea, your internal customers argue with your boss about your priorities, rather than just putting more pressure on you to get their task done as well.
If your boss is unable to make any sensible prioritisation decisions, make them for him/her, and use this system of communicating the decisions to all. You will be amazed at how much people get the idea (they are usually struggling with the same thing).
It also then often promotes a discussion about how to help you increase your capacity to 'get through more post it notes' , by support/productivity tools, offloading less important work etc.

You might actually find that you start enjoying work again
tuk020

[Gan020]

It is my view from your posts you are suffering from stress. Caused by overwork, not taking sufficient annual leave and feeling unappreciated for the work you do. The stress is amplified because it seems from your expenditure you work is your life and there is nothing else. Your work life balance requires change.
As the first stage you have recognised this but your response is to look at giving up work. Regrettably though people under stress do not make good decisions. Rather than putting my conclusion at the end of the post I’ll post my recommendation here, which is you should consider taking a 2 week holiday. The purpose of the two weeks is to allow you to not only relax but get bored. After two weeks the world is going to look very different and the boredom will give your brain plenty of time to work out multiple options. I suggest your spending plans of £12k a year are going to look too low.
My suggestion is that you continue to work towards your goal of retiring at 50, but recognise in the next three years you need to scale back your commitment to work and scale up your hobbies. I would also suggest that working less and becoming a happier person may make you more effective at work and improve your sense of self-worth. Your managers and peer group will recognise this too further improving your work life balance.


Now, on to the numbers. You have £1.1m in your pension you can’t access to age 55, which is 8 years away. You have £320k of assets outside of a pension, but also £100k pension liability and £75k you want to spend improving your home. Let’s say you pay off your mortgage and do the work around the house (Ok, you don’t have to do these things but delaying paying off the mortgage will cost you money and you might as well do the improvements now and get the benefit rather than wait 8 years until your pension arrives). This leaves £175k plus a bit of interest to cover 8 years. Call it £22k a year.
Now you say your actual expenditure is £6.5k-£8k over the last few years. Which means after Council tax, heating, mobile phone and eating you must never go out, not own a car, never have a holiday and never spend any money on your flat. (which comes back to the work life balance thing). I suggest you should go through this again in your two week holiday and consider what you will need to keep you healthy and also consider what happens if a Mrs. Snakey comes along (I assume you are not married) and what life you might want to enjoy with her. £22k per annum is sufficient for some hobbies but you might be surprised how much you spend when you aren’t in work 5 days a week.
So, you arrive at 55, with let’s call it £1.3m. At 3.5% interest that gives you £45k a year without eating in your capital and then you’ll get part of the government pension at 67 as well. You’ll have to pay tax at 20% on some of it and over time inflation will erode you pot but it’s enough. If the stock market falls 30% in the first three years after you reach 55 it looks a lot tighter.
The numbers suggest you can retire now if you are sure you won’t spend more than £22k per annum.

I became fed up with work 2½ years ago at 50 and retired with insufficient hobbies. In the last couple of years I worked I took the opportunity to ensure I left feeling good about the work I did, rather than “sticking it to the man”. It felt like I completed that part of my life on a high and was ready to move on. I’ve still found it difficult to adapt. I spend too much time sitting at my desk working on my share portfolio and not enough time broadening my horizons or contributing something to society. I am pleased to say I’m now getting to a much better place with my “retirement life balance”, but my expenditure is going up with it!

[MaraMan]

You have had lots of advice from fools wiser and more lucid that me but here's what I found. I retired unexpectedly a couple of years ago at 56, I was suffering from stress and got signed off after a falling out with my boss. That was a tough time, I had a good job which gave me an income significantly over £100K, but personal pension was a little less than yours due to an expensive failed first marriage. I got a pay off of about a year's salary which cushioned the blow. Since then I have pursued hobbies, travelled far and wide and trained as a Samaritan. The latter being the most rewarding thing I have ever done.
But putting all that aside I would say go for it, life is too short to do a job you don't want or need to do, I don't think you will regret it, I didn't. Our expediture (me and the misses) is a bit more than expected, but then we don't scrimp. Our total invested assets though have overall increased over the two and a bit years since I stopped work, despite putting the SIPP into drawdown (4%) and taking the natural income out of our HYP ISA.
All the best with it
MM

[moorfield]

Is this normal? Who's felt like this and what did you do? How can I get myself through the next 30 months?

As I see it you are clearly temperamentally and financially ready for a change, but what I don’t see is an answer to the obvious question - what next? You could consider taking a sabbatical year out to do a MA/MSc in a field that interests you? Now is the time to apply in time for the start of next academic year in September.

Aim to leave your current employer on good terms, and don’t ignore the possibility you may well need to find new employment (contract or permanent) in the future due to unforeseen or circumstances beyond your control. The last person a next provisional employer is going to hire is a clearly half-a***d 50+ year old with an unglowing reference.

[Howard]

Is this normal? Who's felt like this and what did you do? How can I get myself through the next 30 months?

As I see it you are clearly temperamentally and financially ready for a change, but what I don’t see is an answer to the obvious question - what next? You could consider taking a sabbatical year out to do a MA/MSc in a field that interests you? Now is the time to apply in time for the start of next academic year in September.

Aim to leave your current employer on good terms, and don’t ignore the possibility you may well need to find new employment (contract or permanent) in the future due to unforeseen or circumstances beyond your control. The last person a next provisional employer is going to hire is a clearly half-a***d 50+ year old with an unglowing reference.

I heartily agree! Having been in a similar position before retiring years ago at around 55, I am so glad I left on good terms. Over the years since it has been a pleasant experience to meet ex colleagues and ex-CEO and to find that we have all forgotten the stressful times, or can laugh at them. If one is lucky, one finds that they have remembered your good points and forgotten your faults and that can be very rewarding ten+ years later.

regards

Howard

[Pheidippides]

The workplace is feudal, it is just a big triangle and nearly everybody runs out of road. Be thankful you didn't run out in the twenty thousands like most do.
Having got your head straight over that, keep turning up knowing that you don't have to go and you will find that the stress isn't real either.
Spend the very large amount that you get for turning up (that is what it becomes) on either yourself or people you like.
If you are really worth the 6 figure salary, doing nothing, or next to it, at your age is criminal.

Wuffle.

I have recently given up a six-figure salary and FIRE'd at 54 (55 yesterday)

There are a lot of people in the city who get paid a huge amount of money for just "turning up". The jobs need doing and you need skilled people to do them well, but most jobs are overpaid compared to real people in more, erm, "worthy" occupations. (I firmly include myself in the former camp)

However, the sheer stress of dealing with overpaid, intelligent prima-donna's can be overwhelming. Stress does make you physically unwell - my blood pressure is 20 points lower since I stopped working.

You are correct that being a "short-timer" is very empowering. There comes a point where your personal well-being trumps your utility to your employer at any price. When i asked for voluntary redundancy, I knew that it was a year ahead of my plan and I was leaving some of my team in a sub-optimal place, but I had done "my bit" and I was personally satisfied with engineering my departure to my fiscal benefit.

For the OP - You look in a very good financial place. Only you know if now is the right time and it does take some getting used to, but the sheer pleasure that comes from not having to commute and being able to spend you time your way is almost indescribable.

Regards

Pheid

[Snakey]

Thanks once again to everyone who's taken the time to reply. Lots of food for thought here, in particular on the non-financial side re: stress, which I hadn't even considered might be a) in any way optional or b) impacting my ability to make good decisions.

So for now I'm going to reduce both the time I spend at work/thinking about work and the extent to which I feel responsible for not doing more, see what the consequences are (wouldn't it be easy if it turns out there are none and it was all in my head!), and look at things again in a year's time.

[Chrysalis]

Thanks once again to everyone who's taken the time to reply. Lots of food for thought here, in particular on the non-financial side re: stress, which I hadn't even considered might be a) in any way optional or b) impacting my ability to make good decisions.

So for now I'm going to reduce both the time I spend at work/thinking about work and the extent to which I feel responsible for not doing more, see what the consequences are (wouldn't it be easy if it turns out there are none and it was all in my head!), and look at things again in a year's time.

I spent a lot of time trying to decide whether to give up work/reduce hours. In the end I had a lightbulb moment when I realised that I didn’t actually need to stop work to start trying out other activities - it wasn’t a black and white issue. I suggest that you think about the things you might want to do when you stop work, and start doing some of those things now. That will be helpful for reducing stress and gaining perspective on your decision making. You can’t simply ‘do less work/thinking about work’ without actually replacing that with something - adding new activities comes first imo.

[Snakey]

Hi all - just wanted to say thanks again for all the replies to my original cry for help!

I now work from home two days a week which, although it hasn't yet translated into any kind of life per se, has reduced the extra hours I do and the amount of stress I'm under. It's amazing to see how all these things that, if I'd been at my desk, my bosses would have demanded I stop what I was doing to discuss/deal with right away, can apparently wait until the next day if I'm not there. Meaning I can get at least some things done without interruption.

In "other news", my lifetime allowance problem appears to have gone away...

[SoBo65]

My LTA problem has also gone away, assuming my second SIPP provider gets its act together before some massive market rally........