Over 50s are big spenders on home and lifestyle into retirement and beyond

Be afraid, people, be very afraid. Saga ¹ tells us the over 50s are big spenders. It’s the beyond retirement that I’m intrigued by, have these profligate silver surfers found a way of borrowing from their own cold dead hands? I’m sure the intergenerational foundation would have something to say about that, but Saga?

I’m sorry, but by the time you’ve gotten over 50. you shouldn’t be in the business of borrowing for frippery, For sure, you shouldn’t be paying down your mortgage if there are better things you can be doing with your money, like socking it into a pension or investing it. But if you want a new kitchen, and need to buy that sucker on the never-never, then you need to take a long hard look at yourself. Now there is a case to say YOLO, but only if you can be sure that you can outrun your debts. The advantage a young person has in going YOLO and living beyond their means is they have human capital in spades – their future self gets to work longer or harder to redeem their overspending. The finished at fifty, not so  much.

For a fifty-something to play the YOLO game effectively, you need to be able to know the year you die. Now you can determine that, but it’s all going a bit Logan’s Run

Jenny Agutter in Logan’s Run

and often involves Dignitas. I’m personally of the opinion that a sentient being ought to be able to choose that option, but terror management theory generally induces most of us off the way of the Cylopes. It really would make retirement planning a damn sight easier, but the option is still an uncommon choice.

So many new cars, Saga surfers, so few holidays, WTF?

Saga say these over 50s buy three new cars in the decade 50-60 and yet only seven foreign holidays, which strikes me as odd, what’s with the materialism grizzled citizens of Saga-land? Mind you, Saga are one of the few banks to advance a loan based on income both from a pension and from savings and investments. The trouble is the usurous 7.9% APR. I’ve groused before on how an retiree is a loans pariah, even when the aim of the loan is to use tax allowances, indeed a 7.9% APR would be tolerable to get a 20% uplift. But not if you have to be a homeowner and it’s secured on the house. Although taking up a use it or lose it tax allowance is a reasonable sort of thing to borrow money for, it becomes non-reasonable if you open yourself up to the risk of losing your house or becoming a forced seller.

Paying nearly 8% for a new kitchen or car before you have saved for it is just foolish in my view. and by the time you are into your sixth decade you really ought to have learned better. Unless you have a good reason to believe your future self will be richer than your present self, just don’t do it.

The 50s is a very tough decade for the FI crew to get right

This decade is tough for many reasons. You can’t get hold of your pension savings until your are 55 and rising, so a whole chunk of your savings may be sterilised, the old silo problem again. You are fast running out of human capital – it very much depends on the field you have been working in, but openings at the sort of salary you were on if you can consider early retirement may be rare. Your financial risk exposure to redundancy is high, and you have less time to catch up if it does happen to you. You may be at a peak of child-related spending unless you had your children very early in life. One of the notable features of the early retirees from The Firm before 55 was that they were mostly the child-free, and being out of the university expenses meat grinder was probably a big part of that.

Retiring before 55 runs against the general way people do retirement, and it’s a more critical decision because just as you cut the power you have the longest glide path to sustain. It’s a hard balance to get right. Looking back, it is clear that I underspent in the early years following retirement in 2012. Compounding the error I earned a few lousy bits of money in a few one-off hit and run jobs and then picked up a steady income from some technical stuff and bookkeeping until last month. I never recognised these amounts as any useful amount of money, because they were typically less than 10% of what I had been earning when I was working, and I didn’t trust them, so they formed no part of my budgeting. But they seemed to make a surprisingly large contribution to the slowing of the fall in my networth, which was aided by the stock market being tremendously kind to me across the years 2009 to now, until I could make it with just my DB pension because I could defer it long enough.

Much as I was a purist in that the aim of retirement was to bust The Man right out of my life, I discovered that it was freedom from the rules and the bullshit that I wanted, only later did I find it was also the freedom to do other things, which is why it is time to get work right out of my life again as my pension savings come on stream. No SHMD The Returned for me I am no longer self-employed as of this month, now that I have collected my second and last year of Class II NI contributions purchased at the spiffing price of £150 p.a. When I was on PAYE I was paying over £5k p.a. and the cheeky barstewards made those years count less for being contracted out. It’s not necessarily the last money I will ever earn, but I will favour no-commitment one-off hit and run jobs in future.

I don’t know what the personal circumstances of all these profligate Saga spenders are. This extract doesn’t convince me they are that well off –

Lenders have been short sighted by turning down people by looking only at earned income which is one of the reasons we launched Saga Personal Loans, to give more people access to credit they can afford in order to live the way they want to.

Perhaps Saga haven’t targeted me because I am simply too poor, not because I have cleverly dodged their tracking mechanisms. But if their fifty somethings are borrowing money to do up their houses and buy three new cars in 10 years, then these guys aren’t that rich either, and they certainly aren’t living within their means. I spy trouble ahead for these indebted consumers as their human capital rapidly dwindles. The ermine may look poor to Saga, I’ve never bought a new car in my entire life, never mind three after retiring. But I am rich in a way that these silver borrowers aren’t. When I buy consumer goods on credit cards I pay them down in full each month as the statements fall due. Saga’s big spenders are rich in cars and kitchens, I am rich in self-determination. Each to their own.