Welcome

My name is Lee Noble, I am not a financial consultant nor have I worked in the finance industry. I am an average Joe with a family and a job, working my way to retirement when I hope that I will have everything in place to support me through my remaining years. The final line of the above paragraph is a scary one, how do I know how much is enough? If you follow the government advice on this there are set percentages of your current income that you should be working towards.

Source: The Money Advice Service

While this is better than nothing it doesn’t seem a very scientific approach to working out how much my wife and I will need to retire on. After attending an Agile Conference in Prague, I had a realisation that retirement was coming quickly and I didn’t have a plan for what the next steps were. With this in mind I started doing some research and reading to try and pull together a plan to ensure that I was going in the right direction. I also decided that I would create a blog to document the steps I took and results that this achieved should anyone wish to follow my journey. I have broken down my blog into 4 main categories:

Finance.

In this section I will focusing on the financial decisions for the future that I have taken and why I took them; I will also be detailing any consequences these decisions have on my future plans. I will also add any useful information that I come across than can help save money as rule 101 should be never paying more than you have to!

Lifestyle Planning.

In this section I will be focusing on plans for the future, answering questions such as do we intend to move or downsize when we retire? Also, are there staging plans to my retirement such as reducing hours or days at work. The decisions that I make in this section will have a major impact on the finance section.

Travel.

I love to travel and dedicate as much time to this as possible. This has a major financial impact on my future so I felt that it warranted its own section. It is also important to understand my love of travel when lifestyle planning for the future. Finally, it will also give me the opportunity to share my experiences and agendas should anybody want any ideas for future travel.

Life Balance.

As I may have stated more than once retirement is a journey not a destination, I don’t want to miss the journey because I am too busy planning for the future. Therefore, it is essential to me that I keep a happy balance between planning for the future but enjoying the today. I intend to use this section to detail out decisions that I have made that will impact my retirement plans but that I felt was worth the investment for a life balance. I will also use this section to detail any left field events that have a major impact on plans such as job loss or illness.

The reason for having these sections is that I believe all of them are interlinked; I don’t believe that you should be solidly saving for the future without focusing on the journey that you are taking and missing out on life, this is where the travel and life balance sections come in. I also believe that unless you fully understand the lifestyle in which you want to live in later life, how can you financially plan for it? Well if you have stayed with me this long it is time to start on the real detail. Look forward to my next post where I will be talking setting up finances for planning.

Retirement is a Journey not a Destination!