We retired at 60. Now what?

Molly and Jeff did everything right. The question was whether they'd done enough. Here's how they found out.

We retired on the same day.

Jeffrey's idea. He'd worked it out months in advance — if we both handed in our notices in January, we'd both finish by the end of March, and we could start April together.

It was a good idea. It still is. We travel. We see the grandchildren. We do the things we talked about for decades while we were too busy doing other things.

The mortgage was paid off before we left work. That was the plan and we stuck to it. No debt. Two pensions. Savings we'd been building since our thirties. By any reasonable measure, we'd done it right.

The question — the one that arrived about six months in and has never quite gone away — is whether right is enough.

The honest question

We're 62. We're healthy. Jeffrey's father made it to 91. My mother to 88.

That's potentially thirty years of retirement. Thirty years of two people travelling, eating well, visiting family abroad, living properly — not just existing. How much does that actually cost? And do we have enough to do it?

We'd never sat down and run the real numbers. We'd assumed. We'd hoped. We'd told ourselves it would be fine because everything had been fine so far.

Assumption isn't a plan.

What we did

Our daughter showed us giltedge. We were sceptical — we're not really app people — but she sat with us and we put in everything. Both pensions and when we'd started drawing from them. The savings. The investments Jeffrey had built up over the years. Our monthly expenses, which are higher than they used to be because we're actually spending now instead of saving.

The Projection page ran everything forward. Thirty years. Both of us.

The wealth trajectory held. Not forever — nothing does — but well past any age either of us is likely to reach. The State Pension arrives for both of us at 67, and the model showed exactly what that does: takes the weight off the private pension drawdown at precisely the right moment.

We looked at the How Much Can I Spend card. It told us we could spend more than we currently do and still be fine.

That was the moment Jeffrey laughed. Properly laughed.

"We've been too careful," he said.

What's different now

We booked a trip to New Zealand. Three weeks. Business class on the way back because the numbers said we could and we're 62 and we've earned it.

We're not spending recklessly. We checked first. The difference is that checking now takes an evening with giltedge rather than weeks of spreadsheets and guesswork.

Turns out we did do enough. We just needed to see it.