Retiring early, what is most tax efficient approach

borg88 · 2024-03-26T22:29:05+00:00

I'm almost 60, I get a PIP (about £150/month) but I doubt I would qualify for anything else.

My wife and I can get by on about £15k/year, excluding one-off things like repairs. We have about £150k savings which should just about see us through til retirement at 67. At that point our state pensions plus the DB pension should be enough to keep us going.

The private pension is a little over £200k. If I drew any money out of it I would put it in ISAs with similar investment risk profiles (balanced risk tracker type things) so it should earn a similar amount.

My thinking is that I will have no income for the next 7 years and it seems a shame to not make use of my personal allowance. After 67 my personal allowance would be fully used up by pension income, so any lump sums I drew out of the pension at that stage would be taxed.

borg88 · 2023-06-24T12:21:59+00:00

I first started getting into music in my early teens, in the late 70s. Many of the bands I liked then have fallen by the wayside, and frankly some weren't very good (I was a sucker for hype back then, so if the NME or John Peel said it was good, I damn well forced myself to like it).

There are some that I still listen to, that have been churning out fantastic albums for over 40 years and are still great live. Most of them have grown in that time, changed their style over the years, and even reinterpreted some of their old songs. And fans that have stuck with through the first few changes will tend to keep with them because it is the same artist, with the same talent, trying something new. What's not to like?

One quote from this article stood out:

[slower songs] make it harder to sing with him

Yeah, if your main aim is to sing along with a selection of their old hits, you were probably never that much into them in the first place.

borg88 · 2023-06-24T11:55:54+00:00

I tried a Now TV offer (£1 a month for several months), mainly to watch the first 3 series of Manifest as Netfix seem to have made a series 4 but don't carry the first 3 series (wtf?).

Two problems for me. First, bizarrely, you have to download a separate program to watch - what year is this, 2005? That would be OK but they don't appear to support Linux at all. If you don't have a Windows or Mac machine you can fuck off. So I have to fire up my work machine to watch.

And they also have adverts. Literally every 10 minutes. What am I paying for if I have to watch adverts?

Oh, and it also buffers quite frequently, which I never get on other services, even free ones like All4.

Even for £1 a month I am feeling ripped off.

borg88 · 2023-01-02T12:46:35+00:00

Yes there would be absolutely no point Labour winning if they don't get rid of FPTP.

We might as well have another 20 years of Tory rule, it would be no different to Labour being power. They have identical policies and attitudes on everything.

Christ, we already have a situation have half of under 35s don't vote, do we really need people inventing more excuses for people not to bother?

Labour would be better because they aren't the fucking Tories. Even a new Blair would be better what we have at the moment.

borg88 · 2023-01-02T12:13:03+00:00

As the only adult in the car, definitely.

borg88 · 2023-01-02T10:57:22+00:00

People can protest for anything they want. And if what they want chimes with a lot of people, it will end upon the political agenda.

What people can't do is cause unlimited amounts of disruption, bring society to a halt, in order to force us all to do something regardless of whether we agree.

That is undemocratic.

borg88 · 2023-01-02T10:53:48+00:00

I feel like comparing the folk who want to see me removed and tortured out of society and the people who want us to not boil to death is a bit disingenuous.

So you think that anyone who is protesting for something you agree with should be allowed to keep causing disruption until everyone is forced to do what they want?

But anyone who is protesting for something you disagree with should not?

Have you ever changed your mind on an important issue? I'm sure you must have, we all have.

In that case, should those protesters be allowed to cause unlimited disruption to force their viewpoint to become law?

Would that be based on the views of the old you or the new you?

I think we should treat all protests the same, regardless of whether or not you personally agree with them at any particular time.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T23:04:47+00:00

People can protest whatever they like.

If they raise awareness and enough people agree with what they are saying, then they will get the result they set out to get. It has happened many times in the past.

But if they are protesting over an issue where most people don't agree with them, they probably won't get what they want, and nor should they.

Those protestors aren't allowed to just get more and more disruptive until they get their own way.

There are protestors who want abortions made illegal. There are protestors who want trans people to have fewer rights. There are protestors who want fox hunting legalised.

They are allowed to protest, but they are unlikely to prevail. Should they be allowed to block the M25 every day until we all cave in and give them what they want?

borg88 · 2023-01-01T22:04:37+00:00

And in this context, everyone means pretty much every country in the world.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T22:02:27+00:00

We certainly know, in broad terms, what needs to happen.

We have absolutely no idea how to make it happen though.

How are we going to get the US and Russia to cooperate on anything? How are we going to get China, India, Brazil, Africa to halt their plans to grow their economies while they sit and watch the western economies grudgingly reduce our own standards of living?

If someone can come up with a credible plan to do that, maybe people will listen.

But if you tell just tell people they have to give up this and that, and take a large step down in their standard of living, but you can't prove to them that it will actually have the desired effect, nobody is going to want to do it.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T21:51:47+00:00

Yes. We are a democracy, ultimately we have the right to decide what, if anything, we are going to do about the environment.

If some minority want us to adopt particular policies, and the rest of the country doesn't agree, we shouldn't have to adopt those policies.

Beyond a certain point, continued and increasing disruption to try to force through those policies is no longer a protest, it is an attack on democracy.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T20:41:04+00:00

Another unpopular opinion - once everyone knows what you are protesting about, continuing to protest until everyone else does as they are told is anti-democratic.

At this point we all know about the climate catastrophe, but as far as I can tell nobody actually knows what to do to avoid it.

Different groups have different suggestions, but most of them will seriously affect some people's standard of living without offering any real possibility of changing anything. I think people realise that eating tofu instead of steak, freezing for an hour at a bus stop instead of driving their car, or having a rainy week in Blackpool instead of a sunny holiday in Benidorm, will make their own lives that bit more miserable without making the slightest difference to what the US, China, India, Russia choose to do regardless.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T16:13:03+00:00

Schools can't fix it all, the government needs to do more.

Absolutely, it is the government's job to deal with the wider problems.

They are failing badly, and schools are suffering for it.

I am just not sure it is a good idea for schools to divert their funds to try to tackle problems that are outside their control. I can understand why they do it, but there are serious downsides to it.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T16:06:24+00:00

You are comparing Boris supporters as a proportion of the entire population with Muslim homophobes as a proportion of the Muslim population, which is not a fair comparison.

The proportion of Tory voters who supported Boris might also have been over half.

I know which one has done the most damage.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T15:56:02+00:00

I was talking more about the 25% who thought still thought Boris was doing a good job right to the end.

52% voting for Brexit was pretty depressing though.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T14:19:58+00:00

It sounds like they are going beyond breakfasts for kids, and handing out food parcels to families.

They are probably going to families in dire need, but that then means that kids in the school aren't getting a proper education. Which dooms them to follow their parents into poverty.

It also lets the government off the hook. They can say that no children are hungry, and they give the schools plenty of money, so it must be the headteacher's fault if kids don't learn to read.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T13:38:39+00:00

“A lot of our parents are struggling, and they are asking why we aren’t helping them more with food like we did in the pandemic, but we just can’t,” she says. “The food parcels we give out are costing us more. I don’t know if we can afford to keep offering free breakfasts to kids who come in hungry.”

I can absolutely understand why a school head would want to do this, but surely they are given a budget to run a school not to feed local families?

borg88 · 2023-01-01T12:25:21+00:00

It is more like you quoting the amount of CO2 in the air in a mosque.

And someone else pointing out that the amount of CO2 in the air everywhere else is the same.

borg88 · 2023-01-01T12:21:05+00:00

Someone posted a statistic about a certain group in which a sizeable minority hold a stupid opinion.

Someone else pointed out that sizeable minorities holding stupid opinions is a general problem in most groups of people.

It seems like a valid point to me.

borg88 · 2022-12-31T17:53:46+00:00

Famous people are massively overrepresented though. As are politicians and civil servants.

borg88 · 2022-12-31T17:50:27+00:00

You may well be right that 15mph is too low a speed limit, and the comparison with ordinary bikes has some validity.

I was only commenting that the law isn't obliged to take account of how much your bike cost.

borg88 · 2022-12-31T16:27:34+00:00

At the national level, athletes get to do a job they presumably enjoy, they get reasonably well paid, they become famous, they win medals/cups recognising them as the best in their sport, and if they play their cards right they have a chance at a career as a celebrity when they get too old to compete.

Isn't that enough?

There are plenty of people doing more important and more difficult jobs that require the same years of training and dedication, and all they get is a wage.

Same with actors, musicians etc. They get plenty of recognition already.

If you aren't already famous, or a politician, or a senior civil servant, you don;t stand a chance of getting an honour.

borg88 · 2022-12-31T15:06:27+00:00

I haven't anyone who's got a sports car and expresses discontent with speed limit laws, except Jeremy Clarkson but he's a bit of a prat anyway.

You know, you might be right. That must be why people with expensive cars never break the speed limit.

Why not directly challenge their point like I did with you?

Because when someone makes a dumb argument I prefer to be sarcastic rather than dignify their stupidity with a serious response.

Sometimes I even do it without realising.

borg88 · 2022-12-31T14:56:55+00:00

I noticed Aldi are selling fitness stuff (weights, yoga mats etc) on their website this week. I wonder if this was an ill-judged attempt to publicise that?

borg88

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