Retirement is something which happens far, far, into the future and then, suddenly, is closer than expected.
Twenty-five years ago I was working in financial services and had a clear strategy with regards to saving for retirement. In Britain you can save into a pension fund and receive a tax benefit for doing so. I was working for a company which provided a good pension, and matched any contribution I made up to about 15 percent of my total income. Too good an opportunity to pass up.
And then, I entered the ‘hassle gap’.
This is a period of life where you go about acquiring children and debt and the cost of living rarely falls below the income available. Added to this was years of a variable job market - including several redundancies - where there was always plenty of jam to arrive tomorrow, but often only the merest scraping of butter for today.
A good example of this is one company I left after they decided the main office would run our diaries. That would have been fine except the main office had no idea of the distances I traveled in my region - which was the whole of Scotland - or the time it would take to travel between towns and cities. One of the straws which overburdened the camel’s back was the time they scheduled me a 10 am meeting in Dundee, and then a 1 pm meeting in Ayr. That’s a distance of 120 miles and about two-and-a-half hours driving, which is fine, except each meeting would be about two hours long. So that’s a three hour window to complete a two hour meeting and then a two-and-a-half hour drive.
Such efficiency was reflected in the way the company dealt with finances. I had a very small basic salary, but most income was commission based. The commission levels were good. But they never payed on time.
When, mid-2007, I decided to leave and become self-employed they owed me about £5,000. Four months later they still owed me that. A letter from a solicitor chased about £3,000 of that out of them but when the company folded at the end of the year they still owed me the remainder. I was a lucky one. A couple of ex-colleagues were out by over £10,0000 each.
Still it’s indicative of time where I should have been steadily saving and couldn’t.
A few years later, following redundancy from another job with fantastic potential, but slimmer at the time rewards, my wife’s health collapsed and she ended up bed bound for two years, and in need of regular care there after. I became the family carer and, while in Britain there is a safety net for people in such circumstances, it is not something which allows for much by way of saving for the future.
So I find myself, at the age of fifty, with a few small pension pots and just over fifteen years to regular retirement age. It’s daunting looking ahead and trying to figure out how to forge a path which will allow me to build some form of cushion. The good thing is I have a decade-and-a-half, and the things I’m working on now are slowly building, without reliance on companies who may decide to leave the market at short notice, or defraud their employees.
The reality is, I wont have a traditional retirement, because I haven’t had a traditional career. But so long as I can pay necessary bills, and enjoy time with family and friends, that’s as good or better as many folks get.
Would I have considered sharing these thoughts without 
text by stuartcturnbull, picture by WFranz via Pixabay
