tjh290633 wrote:
One thing that has not been mentioned is the possibility of working part time after official retirement, in the case where someone enjoys the work that they do.
Thanks Terry - that's a very good point, and one that I really should have covered in my opening post, because it is something that I've been considering as an option too..
The main driver for thinking about an 'interim period' of part-time working between being full-time and actual retirement comes down, for me, to these key points -
1. In my current position, which I imagine might be quite common towards the latter years of many people's working lives, a relatively smaller and smaller chunk of my monthly wages are actually required for 'normal living expenses', with a relatively large and growing section being regularly allocated for 'investment or buffer-building purposes' at this stage.
2. If I get somewhere near where I want to be in relation to my 'investment pot and buffers', then full-on retirement will of course remove that source of working-income that's needed for my 'normal expenses', also remove that source of 'additional investment or buffer capital', and crucially, *at the same time* it would start to eat into my existing 'retirement pot' to then begin subsidising that complete removal of working-wage income...
3. The option of part-time working would, for me, potentially allow my ongoing 'normal expenses' to still be paid from a 'still-working-but-much-less-hours' working wage, where the part-time hours would be planned to deliver the monthly capital required to cover those 'normal living expenses', but
completely disregarding the working-hours needing to cover any additional 'investment capital' that used to be delivered by my previous full-time role.
4. Part-time working would also, crucially, remove the requirement for any 'existing retirement pot' having to be drawn down at that stage - and that 'existing retirement pot' could continue in it's 'level position' (in terms of getting no further wage-based additional monthly capital), but still be allowed to continue 'internally snowballing' in terms of any internal-investment-income getting slowly and broadly raised (hopefully...), and also being allowed to
re-invest any investment-delivered income that occurred during that part-time-working period...
For me, the above benefits do seem like a good 'half-way-house' step into the retirement phase, and, perhaps crucially, might also maintain an *option* to return to full-time-working
during that period, as an insurance against 'bloody-hell-my-calcs-are-wrong' errors, and perhaps also any 'critical market issue' events, that might alter a given position on the subject of complete-retirement during that part-time-working phase....
Thanks again for raising this very important point, which has allowed me to flesh out my own thoughts on the subject and present some personal reasons why such an option remains an attractive card that's very much still on the pre-retirement table...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess