That golf trip made me think…

Garry is 50, single, and starting to take the future seriously. Here's what he found when he actually looked.

There were four of us. Portugal. Five nights, two courses, one very good dinner that got slightly out of hand.

On the last evening, somewhere between the second bottle and the third, the conversation turned — the way it always does at fifty — to retirement. Not in the abstract. Specifically. What are you doing? When are you going? What does it actually look like?

Dave's got it sorted. He's been with the same company for twenty-two years and has a defined benefit pension that makes the rest of us quietly envious. Rich is planning to sell the business. Mark is doing something with property I didn't fully follow.

I'm on my own. Decent salary, decent pension, small mortgage, no dependants. By some measures I'm the freest one at the table.

But free to do what, exactly? I realised I didn't have a specific answer. Just a vague sense that I should probably be doing more, thinking more seriously, making decisions I kept putting off until some unspecified later.

Fifty is later.

The situation

I earn well. I've been contributing to my workplace pension since I started — not the maximum, but consistently. I have some investments I set up a few years ago and don't really look at. I have savings that are fine but not growing particularly fast. A small mortgage with four years left on it.

On paper it looks reasonable. In practice I'd never actually modelled what it means — what all of it adds up to, whether it's enough, and for what.

What I did

I set up giltedge the week after I got back. Put in everything I could find — pension value, salary, the investments, the savings, the mortgage, my actual monthly outgoings including the golf membership and the travel budget because those aren't negotiable.

Then I looked at the Projection page properly for the first time.

The picture was — fine. Better than fine in some places. The mortgage clears in four years and that changes the monthly picture considerably. The pension is growing solidly. The investments are doing their job quietly in the background.

But I could see a gap. Between when I'm thinking about stopping work and when the State Pension arrives, there's a stretch where the drawdown is doing more work than I'd realised. Not a crisis. But tighter than I'd assumed.

I went to the What If card. Added £500 a month to my pension contributions. Watched the projection redraw.

That gap closes. Not completely — but enough that the numbers stop making me uncomfortable.

What I know now

I'm not in trouble. But I was coasting, which at 50 is a different thing to being fine.

I've increased my pension contributions. I'm looking at the investments properly now instead of ignoring them. I have a number in my head for retirement that's specific — 62, if everything holds — rather than just "some point in my sixties."

The golf trip started it. giltedge finished it.

Dave still has the best pension at the table. But I've stopped just assuming I'll be all right and started actually making sure.