When it comes to money, Bryce openly admits to being rather boring! In his late 40s, he lives in London where he and his partner now run their own business together.
After a 20 year career as an IT worker with the security of a regular salary, Bryce wanted to know if it was possible to join his partner and become self-employed. Learn how he used Moneyhub to get a full picture of his money and made the decision to achieve his goal of becoming his own boss.
““To make a decision about leaving employment we needed to figure out where we stood financially. How much money goes in and how much goes out each month””
What’s the biggest financial decision you’ll ever make? Buying a house, right? Wrong!
In 2020 nearly a million1 people turned 55 and achieved ‘pension freedom age’. And, whilst the average UK house price is about £270,000, with the average Brit now living over 20 years beyond the state pension age2 the timing of the decision to leave full time work to retire is arguably the biggest single financial decision most people will ever make.
Which is exactly the situation in which this Moneyhub user from London found himself. In his late 40s, and after a 20 year career as an employee working for large IT companies, the decision to leave paid employment and join his partner to run their own business was a big one.
He explained: “To make a decision about leaving employment we needed to figure out where we stood financially. So, a full picture of the assets and accounts we've got and understanding the basics like how much money goes in and how much goes out each month. I could only make a decision when I knew what was going on”.
He explained that he’d been educated about saving since he was young and, apart from a mortgage, was debt free. He’d also accumulated several pension pots from the different employers he's worked for and has invested in a simple tracker ISA.
We asked him about his relationship with money and he told us “I’m risk averse. I’m not scared of money but I consider myself rather boring and I don't take part in stuff I don’t fully understand like crypto and buying stuff in the virtual world! It’s not something I really get into - there's too much to learn and it’s too risky”.
He went on to tell us how, when he first started to think about leaving full time work, it was his desire to understand his money better that led him to Moneyhub. He said: “The first step of making any decision is knowing what’s going on. Without that understanding you can’t put a goal in place. For me the goal was simple, it was to know when I can stop working. I just needed to figure out how much money I use in a month and what I needed to set-up in advance to make that happen so I would no longer need to depend on a salary”.
Having made the leap from salaried employment about a year ago we asked him what ‘financial wellness’ meant to him now. He summarised: “Now that I’m getting older, it’s not worrying about paying for things and making sure we’ve a structure in place so we don’t need to depend on anything else”.
He continued: “It’s about being financially free. For example, to go and look after my parents [who live overseas] if something happens to them and to not struggle with money”.
He went on to explain how Moneyhub and Open Banking had helped him by making it easy to consolidate all of his financial products in one place because “I was never going to log on to each of these accounts individually, so it’s very time saving on my side"
“Moneyhub made it easier. It’s connecting me to all my financial products using a central technology and that fits with what I want to achieve”. We asked him if he had concerns about using Open Banking and as you might expect from a former IT worker, his response was clear: “there is no reason to be concerned. I am comfortable”.
To sum up, we asked him what advice he’d give to anyone considering their retirement plans and looking to make a successful transition from paid employment to working for themselves and he said:
“Managing money is not complicated. Don't try to make it complicated. The basics have never changed. Make it 3 steps. First, understanding what is going on. Second, understand what you need or want, and third, look at the numbers and work out how to get there. You can’t make a decision without the information and Moneyhub is a quick, easy way to get information”.
1. https://moneyandpensionsservice.org.uk/2020/09/15/3-million-over-50s-will-leave-planning-retirement-finances-to-final-two-years-before-stopping-work/
2. https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/three-million-brits-sleepwalking-biggest-22680380
