The Number
- Nic Round: Chartered Wealth Manager
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Retirement should start with words, not numbers
Stephen and Lynne arrived well prepared.
They'd done the work — more than most. A spreadsheet, properly built, with the two pensions, the ISAs, the bit put by from Lynne's mother. Projections to ninety. A tab for the cautious case and a tab for the careful one. They knew their outgoings to the month. They had, between them, spent the better part of a year circling a single question, and they asked it almost as soon as they sat down.
Did they have enough?
It's the right question, in a way. It's certainly the one everyone arrives with. So the numbers were gone through, carefully, the way they deserved to be.
It was only later, going back over it, that you could see what the spreadsheet had quietly been built to do. The assumptions were reasonable — but they were reasonable in a particular direction. The costs sat at the gentler end. The years that don't go to plan were allowed for, but lightly. Nothing in it was wrong. It was simply a document that had been hoping, all along, for a yes. They had not built a tool to find out the truth. They had built one to grant them permission.
And it did. The answer, when it came, was yes. Comfortably, on any reasonable reading, yes. They had enough.
They should have felt something at that. A year of circling the question, and here was the answer they'd wanted, said plainly. Lynne looked at Stephen. Stephen looked at the spreadsheet. And what settled over the table was not relief, exactly, but something closer to a quiet, unexpected flatness — the feeling of arriving somewhere and finding it wasn't the place you'd been walking towards.
Because they could tell you, in detail, what they were retiring from. Thirty-odd years each of it. The commute, the meetings, the Sunday-evening weight of the week ahead. They knew that landscape exactly, and they were more than ready to leave it.
What lay on the other side they had pictured only as a kind of brightness. An absence of all the things they were glad to be rid of. They had assumed, without ever quite saying so, that the brightness would simply arrive — that once the number worked, the life would take care of itself.
Because they could tell you, in detail, what they were retiring from. Thirty-odd years each of it. The commute, the meetings, the Sunday-evening weight of the week ahead. They knew that landscape exactly, and they were more than ready to leave it.
What lay on the other side they had pictured only as a kind of brightness. An absence of all the things they were glad to be rid of.
Lynne looked at Stephen. Stephen looked at the spreadsheet. Well, he said. That's that, then.
And neither of them said anything for a moment, in the quiet of having got exactly what they came for.
Continue thinking
The cost of deciding before you've understood.
The kind of clarity a spreadsheet can't give you.
Two people, united in an assumption.
New stories arrive when they're ready. There's no schedule, and nothing to sign up for.
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