Retirement is billed as something to look forward to – a time to relax, travel and do as you please after years of working hard. For many, especially homeowners with generous private pensions, it is just that, but with nearly two million pensioners living in relative poverty, it is far from a universal experience.
Rising life expectancy, increased care costs and shifting government policies – including speculation that the triple lock state pension is now unaffordable and that the pension age will rise to 70 – are forcing people to work longer.
So is Britain’s retirement dream over? Nigel Kendall, Callum Mason and Hamish McRae offer their perspective.
Almost 10 years ago, I walked out of my job in London that paid more than £3,500 per month after tax, and drove off to a new life in rural France.
I wasn’t ready to retire completely but I wanted to go half-way in a bid to enjoy life before I was too old. I planned to try working remotely for anyone who would pay me, but if that didn’t work out, I knew I’d need to survive on what I had.
It sounds dramatic, but a whole lot of planning and cautious lifestyle choices lay behind this leap of faith. I’m not a financial expert or exceptionally well off. My wife and I have always been careful with our money, and we’ve been lucky. The only story I’m competent to tell is our own. This is how we made the break with £20,000 in savings.
If you’re where I was 10 years ago, hitting your fifties and dreaming of escaping before you become too old, too frail, or too apathetic to enjoy a new life, I hope some of this might work for you, too.
I’d known for a long time that I wanted to retire in the countryside, to go for long walks, leave the front door unlocked, play music loudly, or drive around aimlessly without spending most of the day in traffic. The British countryside, though beautiful, was too expensive to consider, too frequently cold and wet, and too familiar. So for my semi-retired dream to become a reality I looked across the Channel.
During my lifetime, also, I’ve found Britain has become a less pleasant place to live, its citizens increasingly viewed as a source of profit to be mined for fines and fees to boost the private companies that run the place. France has its problems, but here all citizens are raised to believe that the country belongs to them – it’s why people are so quick to demonstrate when things don’t go their way.
In 2005, thanks to a compensation windfall from a mis-sold 80s mortgage on our London home, my wife and I had been able to buy a tiny house in an unfashionable but beautiful part of France, in cash, for around £55,000. We’d spend every holiday and as many weekends as we could manage there, decompressing.
It was magical, and we both wanted as much time there as we could. Gradually, it dawned on us that by moving here we could live off the rent on the London flat we had worked so hard to buy. Having splashed out on the France house, though, we were skint. We needed a savings pot, on top of the rental income, to make this a reality.
So, we stopped buying luxuries, cut down on eating out, changed our energy suppliers and insurers every year, and eventually squirrelled a few thousand pounds away.
When the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016, the clock started ticking. We spent a lot of 2016 driving to and from France with a car full of belongings. We decided to move in January 2017.
But could we really afford it? We worked hard over many years to buy our flat in south London, and the mortgage was paid off. We never wanted children, never played the housing ladder game, and never spent serious money on cars, running a 1993 Nissan Micra until the moment we left for France.
We are both risk-averse, so we decided to rent out our London flat, rather than sell it. That way, we could come back if we needed to. We’d average around £1,200 per month in rental income, which we reckoned would be enough to live on – overheads in France being far lower than in the UK.
It made sense to me to move as a part-time worker and retire completely later, particularly since my pension pot was worth barely £120,000. Working might help me stay alert for longer, too.
Brexit may have made the move more bureaucratically tricky for those who came after us, but high-speed internet has made it easier than ever before to live where you want while earning enough money to keep a roof over your head.
I’ve met immigrants from the UK who teach English online, write advertising copy, fix computers, run bookshops, make sausages, sell antiques on eBay, or run their own YouTube channels. Broadband is the one thing we could not live without.
The internet can be a great help in preparing for a big move, too. Social networks, though a frequent target for criticism, are brilliant resources. On sites such as Facebook or Reddit, you will almost certainly find a group of local people who are happy to share their experiences, or offer advice on everything from the practicalities of a house move to changing driving licences or registering for health services or income tax.
The key is not to try and cheat the system. My wife and I both loathe paperwork, and the price we pay for living here while renting out our London flat is to fill out tax returns for both the UK and France. Tax-filing days are the darkest of the year, no matter how brightly the sun shines.
We’re fortunate to have found a place that suits us so perfectly. If we had one wish for the future, it’d be for continued good health and for more good wine.
