Don’t wait to be pushed

And, in The Times this week: "Why you shouldn’t touch your tax-free pension in your fifties"

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Feature: Don’t wait to be pushed

From Bec’s Desk: Trying new (hard) things

Read my article in The Times: Why you shouldn’t touch your tax-free pension in your fifties

Don’t wait to be pushed

You’ve worked for 30 or 40 years. You’ve built your skills, your reputation, your income, your super and hopefully your investment returns. You’ve paid the mortgage, raised the kids, carried teams, carried families and carried the mental load required to make everything function. And you’ve familiarised yourself with retirement enough to know that you have ‘enough’.

And then when it’s finally time to step into your Prime Time (the phase before full retirement) on your own terms, when you begin the conversation about reducing your days, reshaping your role or stepping out of the front line, something rather odd happens.

You hedge it and you downplay it. You call it temporary and you reassure everyone you’re not disappearing.

Why do you do that?

For many, it’s because you’re not only adjusting your hours – you’re adjusting your identity.

For decades work has been the spine most people’s adult life. It structured your weeks, shaped your conversations and anchored your sense of competence. When someone asked what you did, you had a clear answer. And that identity located you in the world. So even moving from five days to three, from executive to adviser, from operator to mentor or manager to casual worker, can feel like stepping away from something much bigger than a pay cheque. And if you haven’t built an identity outside work in the run up, that shift can feel destabilising.

But here’s the part we need to stop and think through.

If you don’t choose your glide path, sometimes the market or your health chooses your cliff.

Layoffs in your late 50s or early 60s are not just financial events. They are psychological events. Research suggests it can take up to two years to fully recover from involuntary job loss at that stage of life. That’s two years of rebuilding your confidence. Two years of identity repair and healing. Two years of trying to re-enter a market that may quietly prefer someone younger, someone hungry to learn new technologies, or someone who isn’t going to tell the middle manager how we did it in the year 2000. Or two years of accepting retirement happened to you and healing.

That is a very different experience from choosing your timing.

In your Prime Time, I don’t recommend a cliff edge exit from your workplace unless you need one. I recommend taking a glide path. A slower shift out of full-time work is a smart strategy. It allows your pensions to keep compounding at the highest balances you’ve ever seen. It protects you from sequencing risk if markets wobble. It keeps cash flow steady while you test the shape of your next chapter. And it gives your identity time to evolve instead of having to crash and rebuild.

Culturally, we celebrate grinding on and we celebrate big, dramatic retirement style endings.

We don’t celebrate deliberate transitions enough. So when you decline the next promotion, reduce your days or decide you no longer want the intensity, you can feel the need to justify it or apologise for it.

But, you don’t need to.

You are not stepping back because you are less capable. You are stepping differently because you have built yourself the powerful ability to choose.

For most of us, our pensions didn’t accumulate by accident. Our investments didn’t magically appear in our accounts. They are the result of decades of work. Of showing up, contributing and making contributions to your workplace pension and deliberate decisions to add to it (hopefully), year after year. The same is true of your career. Your credibility didn’t just land there either. All of that effort, over time, creates flexibility. And flexibility is not something you hoard. It is something you use.

Used well, it gives you the option of a glide path.

In my view, it is far better to step sideways on your own terms and reshape your sense of self at a time of your choosing than to be pushed out unexpectedly and left questioning your value.

I cover a lot more on this in How to Have an Epic Retirement, my UK Bestseller (and Australian/New Zealand)

I’m writing this on a wet Saturday morning, having done my first ‘parkrun’ ever today. I might be late to the party but I’m here, looking after my health, trying new things and getting out there. My run time was far from epic, and I earned a wicked blister, but I did it. #1 is done and that, to me is important. Because starting things that are just outside your comfort zone can be something we put off, but not me, not this year! Now, #2 and #3 will feel easier I’m sure.

This week just gone was one of those chatty weeks that somehow disappears in conversations and tasks. The highlights? Nina and I packing a record number of Welcome Packs for the upcoming Aussie How to Have an Epic Retirement Flagship Course. And seeing some of our UK filmed footage, and finalising the rest of the draft scripts for the UK program we’re filming soon and will be launching in May 2026. (You can register your interest, obligation free, here).

And my parkrun of course.

There’s a couple of interesting projects moving and shaping in the UK to help people have more epic retirements, I can’t wait to be able to tell you more - so watch this space. My goal is to bring you a podcast, the epic retirement tick, and the course this year… and maybe more. But every step takes time and hard work, so stick with me here, and I’ll tell you all about them as they evolve.

And don’t forget to pick up a copy of my UK book - How to Have an Epic Retirement. it’s only available in hardcover - and you can get a copy here.

So, until next week - Make it Epic!

Cheers
Bec xx

Author, podcast host, columnist, retirement educator, and guest speaker

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Why you shouldn’t touch your tax-free pension in your fifties

Just because you can access your pot from 55 doesn’t mean that you should

In the UK, something rather odd happens in your mid-fifties. Nothing dramatic changes about your health, your energy, or your usefulness to the world. But suddenly the system taps you on the shoulder and says: you may now start spending your pension.

For many people, that permission quickly snowballs into a big and often poorly examined question. If I can make withdrawals from my pension, should I take as much of it as I can? And once that thought takes hold, retirement can start to feel like the logical next step, even if nothing else in life is actually pointing that way.

Someone called Sam wrote to me last week grappling with exactly this issue. He is 54, tired, financially organised and approaching pension-access age.

“I don’t need the money yet,” he said. “But it feels like this is the point where I should take the 25 per cent tax-free. The system lets me do it for a reason, doesn’t it? Or maybe I should think about retiring.”

That feeling is a real problem.

Read the rest of this article here in The Times. It was published on Monday 2nd February 2026. I write fortnightly for The Times - keep an eye out as my next article will drop any day!

The new edition of How to Have an Epic Retirement: Your ultimate guide to living well, loving life and retiring with financial confidence

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