I'm sure I'll have said this before but it's worth repeating.
A good friend managed to get himself made redundant by one of the big banks at 48, despite an excellent pension scheme, for the very good reason that he couldn't stand it any longer and they just piled too much work on him. He got a less stressful, 9 to 5 job and at 53 he announced to me that he was retiring. I knew he had some decent savings but IIRC his pension at that point was only £16,000 a year. I couldn't believe that a relatively young, fit man didn't want to carry on for a few years to get a bit more wool on his back.
He reminded me that his dad had had a short period of retirement before getting Parkinsons, being ill for 5 years and then dying so really hadn't had much of a retirement at all.. He said something like "We know what we want to do in retirement, we've worked out that we have enough money to do it, so why carry on marking time?"
They bought a motorhome from savings (they subsequently updated it twice), and spent months away each year pursuing their hobby of watching wild birds and animals all over Europe, wild camping much of the time.
He's 72 now, and guess what - he's had Parkinson's for the last 5 years and it's now affecting him badly, but he and his wife have had 15 good years of doing what they liked most.
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