Illustrations · not clients

Three households, entirely made up.

We use composites so a trade-off has a street and a job attached to it. Helen, Priya, and Owen are not readers who wrote in, and nothing here is a result you can expect. If your life rhymes with one of them, the rhyme is a prompt to check your own numbers.

A wet autumn high street in a small Scottish town

A person reading on a garden bench, seen from behind

Composite · Fife

Helen and Angus, and a mortgage that finished first

Helen is 59 and teaches in Glenrothes. Angus is 61 and plans maintenance for a housing association. The flat is paid off. Their workplace pensions are left invested. They have about £140,000 in stocks and shares ISAs between them, which they have mentally labelled “age 60 to 67” even though labels on a spreadsheet do not stop a market falling.

Angus’s State Pension age is 67. Helen’s is also 67 under the timetable for her birthday. They do not plan to touch taxable pension income yet, because both may still do a little paid work and they have read, slightly nervously, about the money purchase annual allowance. Helen keeps one day of supply teaching. That day is not a hobby. It is National Insurance, a reason to leave the house, and a smaller gap for the ISA to fill.

What the sketch is for: a paid-off home changes the spending number more than a clever fund does. What it is not: evidence that £140,000 lasts seven years. At £20,000 a year it does not, even before inflation. Their gap is smaller than £20,000 because of the supply day and Angus’s small preserved defined benefit pension of £4,000. Run your own gap on the withdrawal page. Do not borrow theirs.

Composite · Manchester

Priya drops to three days, then notices the match

Priya is 49 and tests software. She dislikes the phrase barista FIRE and uses it anyway. She moved to three days. Take-home pay covers the flat, the travel, and a life that still includes friends. For a year she also stopped her pension contributions because the internet told her she had “won” and contributions were optional.

Her employer was still willing to match. She was refusing pay. She restarted contributions at a level that collected the match and left the rest of the surplus in cash while she watched whether three days was actually tolerable in February, not just in a warm September. Her pension remains untouched. She is 49. The minimum age is not a suggestion she can argue with.

What the sketch is for: part-time work can be the plan, and the employer match still counts. What it is not: a claim that three days will feel like freedom after the novelty fades, or that her ISA will not be needed if she changes her mind at 54.

Composite · Bristol

Owen starts properly at 42

Owen is 44. A divorce at 41 left him with a smaller flat, no joint savings worth the name, and a strong wish not to tell a dramatic story about it. He earns £48,000. He sacrifices enough salary to collect his employer’s full match, and he puts £400 a month into a stocks and shares ISA aimed at the years before pension age. He knows the normal minimum pension age moves to 57 in April 2028. He will be well under that age then, so the ISA is not a luxury account. It is the only pot he can plan to touch if he wants a gap between work and 57.

He is a Scottish taxpayer? No. He lives in Bristol, so pension income later would be taxed on the bands used in England and Northern Ireland. He still reads our Scottish notes, because his sister in Dundee cannot reuse his worksheet unchanged.

What the sketch is for: starting in your forties is ordinary, and the ISA and the pension are doing different jobs. What it is not: a savings rate you should copy. £400 a month is what this invented person can pay without pretending he does not eat. Your figure is the one that survives a dull month.

If you want the arithmetic without the people, the coast sketch and the bridge sketch are both on their own pages, and both forget your details the moment you close the tab.

Open the coast sketch