For years, retirement can feel like a finish line. You imagine the final day at work. The laptop closes. The out-of-office goes on. Maybe there’s a leaving do, a few slightly embarrassing speeches and the strange realisation that you don’t have to come back on Monday. Then comes the first holiday. A few jobs around the house. Longer mornings. No commute. No Sunday evening feeling. Brilliant. But I’m interested in what happens after that. Not during your first week of retirement. Not while you’re on the holiday you’ve been promising yourself for
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Retirement: What Are You Planning For?
There comes a point when retirement stops feeling like something that will happen one day. It starts getting close enough to picture. You might find yourself looking at the calendar and counting the years left at work. Holidays become slightly more important. Monday mornings slightly less appealing. Conversations begin with things like, “When we retire, we could…” And then comes the awkward bit. What exactly are you going to do when you get there? Most retirement planning quite reasonably concentrates on money. Pensions, State Pension, savings,
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Five Years From Retirement?
Five years sounds like plenty of time. Then suddenly it’s three. Then eighteen months. Then somebody at work asks what you’re going to do when you retire and you realise your answer is still “I’m not really sure”. If you’re somewhere around five years from retirement, you’re actually in a very useful position. You’re close enough for the numbers to mean something, but far enough away to change them. You can increase pension contributions. Clear debt. Rethink when you stop working. Build savings outside your pension. Work out what your retiremen
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The 2026 retirement numbers
The latest Retirement Living Standards, produced by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University for Pensions UK estimate the annual spending needed for three different standards of retirement. The figures aren’t plucked from thin air. They’re based on detailed research into what members of the public consider necessary for a Minimum, Moderate and Comfortable retirement, covering areas such as food, household bills, transport, holidays, leisure and helping others. Here are the latest 2026 figures: Retirement lifestyle One
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Welcome to GoodLifeBetter
There comes a point in life when we begin to think a little differently about the future. For some, it arrives in their thirties. For others, it comes in their forties or fifties. And for many, retirement slowly moves from being a distant idea to something that is beginning to feel real. That is exactly where I found myself. After more than 30 years working in software engineering and technology, I started asking questions that I could not easily answer. What do I want my retirement to look like? How much will it really cost? How do I stay heal