Luck, Stupidity, Automation and Inertia

These are not the four pillars you'll find in most personal finance books. Nobody's selling a course called “How Stupidity Made Me Rich”. But they're the answer to how I retired at 58 with a pension portfolio that's pretty decent. I think that honesty is worth more than another article about discipline and vision.

Let me start with the luck, because it's important to be clear about what I mean. I don't mean timing the market or backing the right stock. I mean a random afternoon at work and a pension salesman who happened to cross my path. He asked if I was interested, I said maybe, and he left me a brochure.

At the time my dad was in his fifties, dealing with health issues but unable to stop working because he had to. Watching that, I think subconsciously. I didn't want to be in that position. I picked the brochure up a few weeks later and called the salesman.

At that visit he convinced me to open a retirement account. Then he asked me what age I wanted to retire. I had absolutely no idea, so I picked 55. It sounded reasonable, far enough away to feel abstract but close enough to seem ambitious, and I chose it the way you pick a number on a spinning wheel.

That's the stupidity, and I mean it affectionately toward my younger self. I was 20 and didn't fully grasp the scale of what I was agreeing to. But that 55 number mattered. Because of it, he recommended I set aside at least 15% of my wages and automate it to rise with inflation every year.

The automation did its background work. Every month, without my involvement or enthusiasm, money moved. I got married. We had a family.

There were months when that pension contribution felt like a punishment. I meant to call and reduce it but never quite got around to it. The paperwork, the hold music, the general busyness of life with small children meant inertia made the decision for me. Inertia, it would seem, was the smartest financial advisor I never hired.

At 31 I started my own business. For 27 years the pension ran in the background, largely ignored, while I focused on payroll, clients, and the worries of being responsible for other people's livelihoods. I sold the business at 58 and walked away with a decent lump sum. Meanwhile, the boring infrastructure a 20-year-old had accidentally assembled had been compounding the whole time.

Admittedly three years past my youthful self's 55 target. Not bad for a guess made by someone who couldn't have told you what compound interest was.

I'm obviously not trying to dress this up as a strategy, because it wasn't. But buried inside the accident are a few things that actually matter. Start early even if you don't know what you're doing. Automate so your future self can't interfere, and sometimes the best financial decision you make is the one you never get around to undoing.

The salesman moved on years ago and I never thanked him. In truth, I can't even remember his name. But I hope during the rest of his career, he asked many more 20-year-olds what age they'd like to retire.

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