Holding our nerve

Heading rapidly towards early retirement on the strength of taking my pension early and counting the pennies behind the sofa, is a testing time.  Together we have to be holding our nerve, as they say.

We have some spreadsheets where we have a record of our income and expenditure since we got married in 1996.  Every year we set a ‘budget’ for the year ahead and generally balance things at the end of the year.  Now, this is different and we really will have to be holding our nerve.

My employment income will plummet to zero.  This really is a case of moving into the next phase of life, a huge change that is difficult to comprehend.  Changes in life’s phases don’t happen that often for us; we grow up through education, we leave home, start a career, get married, have children and now retire.  A huge change!  This really is uncharted territory for us, it’s not like changing jobs or heading off on a different career at middle age.

Spreadsheet error!

As I mentioned, we have various spreadsheets planning our income and expenditure.  Rachel maintains these and quite likes doing this.  On one of the numerous times we have re-visited the spreadsheets, Rachel was getting anxious that our expenditure was too high in the future.  Sure enough we were thousands out.

How could this have happened?  Can we afford to do this after all?  Crikey I have handed in my notice and I don’t think the Council would want to keep me on, now I have resigned officially.

I also started to panic.  It looked as if we were short of £10,000 each year.  That is serious stuff.  We had been over all the figures a couple of times with our financial advisor and surely we couldn’t be wrong?  Then we couldn’t find the spreadsheets he had sent through – serious panic – although I knew in my heart-of-hearts we were okay.  Rachel was starting to get very twitchy and anxious over the last few days with thoughts of cutting back.  Already we are having to go down to one car and go easy on holidays and leisure costs. What else can we do?  Stop giving? No. Cutting our energy bills? Hard to do unless we freeze in the winter.  Cut our critical illness policies? Maybe.

Then we looked together at the spreadsheet.  Some £10,000 had been factored in twice. Phew.  We found the spreadsheet we had mislaid from our advisor and that confirmed this was all do-able.

We do often reflect on the things we promised each other when we got married.  We took our marriage preparation course very seriously and this genuinely did help us, especially in those early years.  We looked at the different roles within a marriage; different for the husband and wife.  Although the roles are different, it doesn’t mean one is more important than the other.  Amongst the promises I made to Rachel was absorbing her worries, her concerns and helping to soothe any anxieties.  When I do that in a conscious way, I often look back and remember the vows and promises I made.  Knowing we, as Christians, had made these vows and promises to each other and before God is something we have always taken seriously.  It is so precious and valuable.

There have been many times in the past when we have been in tricky situations and each time I have been conscious of not panicking and holding our nerve.  So once again we have needed to do this.  Thankfully we’re okay.  Phew.

See also: Why financial planning is important