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Chris Exley DipFA
Creator of MoneyGeek | Financial Coach, Planner
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MoneyGeek Digest - Issue 12:
6 (Wrong) Reasons You Delay Retirement...
Dear Reader,
I've spoken to 24 people this year who can probably retire, but haven't.
They're comfortable financially.
They've hit every career goal.
They want to stop.
But they don't...
"Just one more year".
But that one more year of work isn't just one more year off retirement - it's one of the golden years - one of only a handful you get before your health starts to decline.
So why does the delay happen?
Here are the 6 reasons I've heard most often:
1. "I'll wait until things calm down a bit"
Markets feel wobbly. AI is unsettling. Geopolitics is messy. Trump. Iran. Labour. Blah blah blah.
This is noise.
Every retiree in history has felt this. Two world wars. Stagflation. Black Monday. The dot-com crash. The financial crisis. COVID.
Every time, retirees have come out the other side.
Might you have to make adjustments to spending, or investing strategy during retirement - sure.
But should you let the doom loop news cycle steal from you the most important decade of your life? I think not.
There is no "all clear". If perfect conditions are the prerequisite, retirement will never arrive.
2. "I'm going to wait until [insert round number here]"
£500k. £1m. Age 65.
I covered this in Issue 3, but it's the single most expensive shortcut I see.
People pick a round number because it sounds clean — not because it's been stress-tested against their actual lifestyle.
The number is psychological. It should be scientific.
Why wait until 65 if you can retire at 63.
Why wait until £1m if £874k is enough?
Test it. Don't just choose it arbitrarily.
3. "My number is £1,250,000"
The 4% rule strikes again...
Most people assume their spending stays constant (in real terms) from 60 to 90. It doesn't.
Spending typically follows a smile shape — higher in the early "go-go" years, lower in the middle "slow-go" years, and rising again in the "no-go" years for care and support.
The 4% rule doesn't factor in other income sources - buy to let, State Pensions and so on.
For a 60-year-old needing £50,000 today, flat spending implies £1.25m of lifetime expenditure based on the 4% rule.
Model the spending phases properly and that figure can drop to around £900k.
And more again when you factor in State support and other income sources.
That £350k difference is often the gap between "I can't stop" and "I should already have stopped".
4. "The state pension is barely anything"
It's actually quite something...
The full new state pension (2026/27) is £241.30 a week — £12,548 a year, inflation-linked, government-backed.
For a couple, that's just over £25,000 a year of guaranteed income from age 67. Across a 25-year retirement, that's around £625,000 of real-terms income — before you've drawn a penny from your private pots.
Most people I speak to assume the private pension does almost all the heavy lifting. It rarely does.
5. "What if I retire just before a market crash?"
This one's a real risk — sequence risk is genuine. But it's a structure problem, not a "delay another year" problem.
A cash buffer, dynamic withdrawals and a mix of guaranteed income (state pension, defined benefit, partial annuity, buy to let) can absorb most of it.
And on the annuity side specifically, rates for a healthy 65-year-old are some of the most generous we've seen in 15 years.
The honest answer: the bigger risk for most people isn't the market crashing the year they stop. It's missing out on another golden year of retirement.
Run the numbers - if the market crashed by 30% - would you become destitute - the answer for most - is actually no.
6. "I'll keep saving a little longer to be safe"
This is the reflex I see most often.
But every extra pound saved past sufficiency is a pound not spent in your healthiest, most active years.
The opportunity cost is real.
Remember what this is all for.
How many Summers will you still enjoy in good health?
The closer you get to "enough", the weaker the "just save more" lever becomes. And the louder the case for actually using what you've already built.
I'm not telling everyone to retire today. Some genuinely need more contributions, more time, or a different plan.
But for many, the bigger risk isn't running out of money in their 90s.
It's running out of healthy years in their 60s and 70s.
Test the maths properly — against your actual lifestyle, your actual state pension, your actual spending pattern — and you might find permission was sitting there all along.
As always — education, not advice.
Until next week,
Chris
