Can you manage on just a state pension ?

Enjoy.? I’ve never regretted choosing time and freedom over money.

Best wishes for the future and it will be good to know how you get on?

Just to clarify our total income will be approx 19k per year but we are currently spending approx 14k to cover all essential costs .

Update ! . Having giving it some more thought DH and I still prefer having more time to having more money and having carefully checked our budgets feel we can manage on 14 k per year . We have both given notice at work and finish at the end of May . I have joined an agency and will do a small amount of part time work to top up the funds and give a little bit of fun money . I will let you know how it goes from June onwards .

Thank you for the advice everyone, I will look into it further.

Part time is good for the finances but does still limit your freedom. Personally the ability to just takeoff and do what I wanted, whenever I wanted more than compensated for loss of income, not just in enjoyment but in the ability to take advantage of very last minute deals.

Having been confined to the school holidays and standard work hours for all of my life, I had no idea how cheap things could be out of peak times and how many freebies were out there. Not just travel, haircuts, food, concerts, cinema, sports facilities. All the things I’d always pad full price for.

Go for it while you are healthy and get to old pent ions do rise but not at the rate everything else just remember that

I retired on my Occupational Pension at 60 having worked from the age of 18 and will receive my SP in October when I’m 66. I was fortunate to also receive a lump sum. My husband has been receiving his SP for 4 years now but doesn’t have an OP. My SP will be reduced to start with as I was contacted out due to SERPS and as I’ve not paid NICS will be further reduced so please be aware that you will be similarly affected. We’re mortgage free and Council Tax is our biggest monthly expense. I’ve looked on umpteen comparison sites to get good deals on our utility bills so I’d check and see whether you can do anything to reduce yours etc. We do live up to our income and I really would find it difficult to live only on SPs. Is there any way you could reduce your working hours so that you’d only be working 40 hours between you and drawdown on your OP to make up the value of the other 40 hours.This would at least allow you to at least still pay NICS to maintain your full SPs when you retire at the qualify age.

I wish I hadn't retired. I have savings and try not to touch them. Thank goodness I have that cushion.

Full state pension is approx £9k a year. If mortgage free it’s possible to live on it. But impossible to come up with spare cash for unexpected bills eg car or house repairs without some reserve savings for back up.

This is a really good and informative thread! If your employer would let you would you consider going to a 4 day week and living off the resultant income? You would still be paying NI towards your state pension and it would give you a bit more freedom. I did this just before the first lockdown (great timing on my part!!) and am looking forward to when I can finally get a long weekend actually away from the house! Was planning to retire at 62 but now need to see if I have to make extra NI contributions to top up the eventual state pension. Having worked out costs I think £25k a year is about right but hard to achieve!

I would purely LOVE to have 20k readily available!....actually I would purely love to have 20k full stop. It really depends on the kind of life you want. I don;t think I could live as i do on my state pension and I don't live extravagantly.

That sounds like a very sensible way forward @Sandytoes and will be a great balance.
I look forward to your updates, good luck!

Thanks again to everyone who has posted . DH and I are still.leaning towards early retirenent with possibly some part time work if we can get it . We are all different and some may feel 14k per year is just scraping by , but that is slightly over our monthly spend now and we are quite content and do not feel we are missing out on anything important in life . I will certainly update when we decide .

Just do it. You won't regret it. Sounds like you are sensible with money and don't waste it. My husband and I retired at 56. The following year he got bowel cancer. You have no idea what is round the corner. It is amazing how little we actually need to spend once we finish work. Provided you can cover your bills with a small amount to spare all will be well. The next 6 years will fly by and before you know it you'll be on State Pension along with your private pensions and savings. Life is too short!

I agree, the Which? survey is a small sample size and probably not representative.
So, here's a completely separate (and older) university study which had similar findings:
www.lboro.ac.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2019/october/how-much-to-retire-conversation-article/
It's from 2019 and found the minimum for a single person to have a basic standard of living was £10,200. That rose to £25k for a comfortable existence (again, for one person).
The OP is part of a couple and wondering if £14K is enough for 2 of them. They might be able to manage on that, but with no frills.

I think a lot depends on your pre-, retirement standard of living and I loved the wise comment earlier about working out what makes you happy and how much you need to spend to achieve that. If a basic standard of living with no holidays, socialising at low cost or free, not buying many clothes, maybe growing your own veg makes you happy, then I could see that working (and it's great for the environment), but the OP wants to run a car, and leaves them both vulnerable if big unexpected expenses come along.

set up?

What was it I meant to say?????

To be honest, I can’t think a survey of 600 odd Which subscribers is a very setup demographic to base anything on.

I might be wrong, but I’m inclined to think they are mostly middle class professionals who are used to a high standard of living with lots of extras that they think are essential.

Oh well, as far as the OPs query is concerned I think it’s perfectly possible to live without want, in her circumstances, on £14,000.

@Peasblossom You realise I'm quoting from that survey, those aren't my calculations and the figures are per couple?
I don't have an opinion on how people choose (or are forced) to live in retirement, but the OP wants to know if her figures are manageable. £14000 a year for a couple is low, not 'good' and, according to the survey, certainly not comfortable.

£40,000 per couple is classed as being able to live without money worries and with a number of luxuries. £25,000 per couple is comfortable, again, according to that survey.

For those of us approaching retirement, that's useful information.

Sorry OlderthanIthink but inheritance and investments? As well as two thirds pensions.

We obviously inhabit parallel worlds?

A classroom teachers pension for 40 years would be about 14,000. I think I could live really well on that. Coming later to the profession I get about 8,000 plus state pension and honestly there’s nothing I want that I can’t have.

A few luxuries on 40,000 just seems laughable. Sorry.

£40,000 in retirement! You must be joking. What would all that money be spent on I wonder. We will be living quite well on nothing like that much.

growstuff

Doodledog

The date at which the pension age changes were announced (with little or no fanfare, and no letters to the affected women) was many years before the first women were affected. Women were not retiring at 66 in the 90s - that is a much more recent state of affairs.

But you had to be living with your head permanently in the sand not to have heard/read about them. I honestly despair if people are so unaware of what's going on around them, especially as the changes affected them. It makes me wonder how much/little people are aware of a world outside their bubble.

No need to despair on my account, honestly.

My post was not about my personal situation, but was in response to your comment that pension age changed in the 90s, which I think is disingenuous.

As anyone who is not in their own little bubble will be aware, millions of women did not receive letters or any other form of notice that their pension age had moved forward, first by 5 years and then crept up after that.

I didn't have my head in the sand, but that does not alter the fact that a whole generation of women have been very badly treated as far as pensions are concerned. I know that you feel that benefits are more important than pensions - that is your opinion, to which you are entitled, but that does not alter the fact that people made plans which were, in many cases, snatched from under them.

In my opinion the two things are separate issues and to suggest that one injustice is irrelevant because there are other injustices helps victims of neither.

FWIW, I was fortunate enough to be able to pay into an occupational pension, which I did as soon as I was allowed, but one of the reasons that so many women feel aggrieved about the claim that pension ages were 'equalised' is that for many of us (me included) it was not possible to pay into occupational pensions in the earlier part of our careers - I was 37 before I could start paying into mine, and I lost years which were impossible to make up.

Being aware of the change does not mean that the plans we had made were unaffected, though - there was no way that I could make up the missing years of state pension on top of the ones I had missed from an occupational one, and I think that will have been true for the majority of people.

None of that is relevant to this thread, however, (I only mentioned it for context in my earlier post) so I'll leave it there.

kwest

Many of us changed to the reduced rate for married women when we got married. Our generation married young by today's standards and on the whole women stayed home and had children. We had no concept of retirement when we were in out twenties. I believe that there is some sort of top up by the state if our total income comes below a certain figure so it would be worth finding out about this.

Speak for yourself! Women of my age generally didn't stay at home for more than a few years and weren't quite so naive about their own finances, unless they chose to be.

Doodledog

The date at which the pension age changes were announced (with little or no fanfare, and no letters to the affected women) was many years before the first women were affected. Women were not retiring at 66 in the 90s - that is a much more recent state of affairs.

But you had to be living with your head permanently in the sand not to have heard/read about them. I honestly despair if people are so unaware of what's going on around them, especially as the changes affected them. It makes me wonder how much/little people are aware of a world outside their bubble.

OlderthanIthink

@LovelyLady £1400 a month net isn't a good income by any stretch.
Lots of people live on that, and less, but it allows for few luxuries and makes you vulnerable when unexpected essential expenses arise.
The survey below suggests £25,000 a year (2083/month) is the minimum to be comfortable, £40,000 if you want a few luxuries:
www.which.co.uk/money/pensions-and-retirement/starting-to-plan-your-retirement/how-much-will-you-need-to-retire-atu0z9k0lw3p

I will be living on about £13,000 gross - and that's more than I've had for the last few years - even before the pandemic. It will cover my outgoings without having to worry.

Olderthanyouthink The maximum teacher pension is half salary after 40 years of service and very few teachers, especially female, ones have that.

I do agree with you that many pensioners are much wealthier than people think. They're actually the richest cohort of people in the UK after housing costs.

Nevertheless, they're not a homogenous group and there are poor pensioners, but they still have more than poor people of working age.