The date question
Can I afford to stop at 60?
It's the most common specific question we get, and the answer is almost never the one people expect — because the cost isn't what they think it is.
It's the most common specific question we get, and the answer is almost never the one people expect — because the cost isn't what they think it is.
Stopping at 60 rather than 65 doesn't cost five years. It costs three things at once, which is why the answer surprises people.
The obvious one, and the smallest of the three for most people.
Including anything an employer was putting in. For someone contributing £1,000 a month with employer money on top, that's a substantial sum plus the growth it never gets.
The pot has to last five years longer and is five years smaller when it starts. This is the one that does the damage.
The State Pension doesn't arrive until 66, rising to 67 and then 68. Stop at 60 and you're funding everything yourself for six to eight years.
For a lot of people, stopping five years earlier needs somewhere around a third to a half more capital. Not 5/30ths more — a third to a half. That's the arithmetic almost nobody does in their head, and it's why “I'll just work a bit longer if I need to” is a more powerful plan than it sounds.
Same person, same money, three different stop dates. £420,000 in pensions at 58, saving £1,200 a month, wanting £3,200 a month after tax, State Pension at 67.
Pot at 60 is roughly £477,000. Seven years of funding everything before the State Pension arrives. Money runs out around 84.
Pot at 62 is roughly £535,000, and only five bridge years. Runs out around 90. Two years of work bought six years of security.
Pot around £633,000, two bridge years. Lasts past 100.
The gap between 60 and 62 is far bigger than the gap between 62 and 65. Most people assume it's linear. It isn't — the early years are the expensive ones.
You can run exactly this comparison for yourself in about two minutes with the free projection. Put your real numbers in, then move the stop age two years each way. For most people it moves the answer more than any realistic change to what they save.
“Stop at 60” and “work to 65” aren't the only two settings.
Two days a week at 60 to 63 changes the picture dramatically — not because the money is large, but because it lands in the fragile years when you'd otherwise be selling investments to live.
Three days from 58 is often cheaper than full retirement at 60 and gets you most of what you actually wanted, which is usually time rather than the absence of work.
Some people hold a couple of years of spending in cash before stopping, so a bad market at the wrong moment doesn't force selling into a fall. It costs growth. Whether that's worth it is a real decision and it's yours.
Most people's spending falls through retirement anyway. Planning for that honestly, rather than assuming a flat line, can move the date by a year or two.
Not the average return. The order of returns.
A bad three years immediately after you stop does far more damage than the same three years a decade later, even though the long-run average is identical. You're selling investments to live at exactly the moment they're worth least, and the pot never fully recovers.
This is the single biggest reason a projection with one flat growth rate can flatter an early retirement. It's why the Plan runs your numbers two thousand times with the good and bad years reshuffled — so you find out whether stopping at 60 works, or whether it merely works if you're lucky.
That is a real input, not a soft one — and it belongs in the conversation rather than being overridden by a spreadsheet. But it is worth knowing the price before you decide. Plenty of people who thought they had to choose between five more years and stopping now find that two more years, or three days a week, gets them most of what they wanted.
Normal minimum pension age is currently 55 and rises to 57 in April 2028, so for most people yes. Some older schemes have a protected earlier age. Being able to access it and being able to afford to are different questions, though — and the second is the one that matters.
Enormously, and it changes the whole shape of the plan. Guaranteed inflation-linked income acts as a floor, which means the rest of your money is buying choices rather than covering survival. It also often has its own normal retirement age, and taking it early usually reduces it permanently — the size of that reduction is worth knowing before you decide anything.
That is a regulated advice question and we cannot answer it for you. What we can do is model what different approaches do to your projection, so you arrive at an authorised adviser knowing what you are actually trying to achieve rather than starting from a blank form.
The failure mode that matters is discovering at 75 that you cannot afford the next twenty years, when your options have largely gone. That is precisely the argument for modelling it now, while working an extra year or spending slightly less is still available to you.