Part 304: Another Journalist Gets FI Wrong

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.  This week I look at a recent(ish) piece in The Guardian criticising FI. Also, a great weekend with an old friend, and some thoughts on The Peter Principle.

Weekly Update

I don’t have much to say about the working week, as it’s just five days of working with each shift followed by hours of walking to get my daily steps in.  On Friday evening, we had an early night as we planned to be up at 4:30 in the morning on Saturday.  Why would we do such a thing, you ask?  Well, we had a good friend coming to visit, and we had a big walk in the Peak District planned.  How we made this friend is always a funny story.

Back in my time at the University of Central Lancashire, I was sitting at a computer in the library one day just doing my own thing.  On my home screen, I had the Sheffield Wednesday logo visible, and one of the guys who was working in the library saw it and came over for a chat.  He was a few years older than me with a big beard and bald head, and he was from Sheffield and also called David.  We had a nice chat, and it turns out we’d lived in the same area of the city.  I figured that was that.

Some time later, Oana got a job working in the library a few hours a week around classes.  She told me that she’d made a few friends, and one day she introduced me to one of them, and it was the same David I’d met a while before.  Anyway, since then, we’ve kept in touch and become good friends, and eighteen years later, here we are. Over the years, he’s come to visit a few times, and we’ve always had a good laugh.  This was the first time we went on a hike together, and it was good fun, but very tiring.  We walked for over six hours, covering over 14km across hills, valleys, and some cool rock formations.  

We’d like to get back to Preston, as we’ve not been back since graduation in 2010, but the problem is transport.  We don’t drive, and getting a train from Sheffield to Preston is a ballache.  You can’t get a direct train and have to change in Manchester.  What should be a fairly quick journey based purely on distance becomes a real chore.  Then, there’s the fact that our rail network is shit generally, and mega expensive.  Each time we look at it and add up how much a trip would cost, we haven’t been able to justify it.  

Once we had finished our hike, we headed home to freshen up and rest a little.  Then, we met back up with Dave to go for dinner.  We had a great meal with every course being enjoyed and every plate being cleaned.

Early Retirement Isn’t the Problem — It’s the Work Itself

The Guardian recently argued that early retirement is bad for the UK economy, painting a picture of baby boomers cashing in their pensions, retreating to the golf course, and leaving younger generations to pick up the tab. On the surface, it’s a provocative narrative: the comfortable few indulging themselves while public finances strain and labour shortages bite.

But this framing is deeply misleading. The reality is that people don’t leave the workforce early simply because they’re greedy or lazy. They leave because the work itself is too often unfulfilling, unsustainable, and corrosive to their health and well-being. Early retirement isn’t the disease; it’s the symptom of an economy that fails to make work worth doing.

The Problem With Work as It Stands

If our jobs were meaningful, inclusive, and rewarding, far fewer people would want to retire early. Instead, the modern workplace often leaves employees counting the years until they can escape.

Uninspiring work: Too many roles are built around narrow targets, endless bureaucracy, or chasing short-term profit. Purpose and meaning are afterthoughts.

Stress and burnout: Rising workloads, long hours, and under-resourced teams leave workers mentally and physically exhausted. The UK already records some of the highest rates of work-related stress in Europe.

Lack of respect: Workers frequently feel undervalued and interchangeable, their contributions reduced to productivity metrics rather than recognised as human effort.

Ageism: For those who want to keep working, discrimination often shuts the door. Many older applicants find it nearly impossible to re-enter the workforce after redundancy, no matter their skills or motivation.

Given these conditions, why should anyone be surprised that people plan their exit as early as possible? Retiring early isn’t an indulgence, it’s a rational response to a system that too often treats people as expendable.  It’s an extreme comparison, but if people are in an abusive relationship, they are advised to leave.  I’m not suggesting all workplaces are like that, but some are.  Some are more gradual in how they wear people down until they are an empty shell of the person they once were.  For many people, their workplace is where their dreams die.

I’ve been fortunate in that Lloyds were a great employer, even if the work was dull and uninspiring.  In my new job, I have much more autonomy, and so far, the employer has been great.  But this hasn’t been my experience for all my working life.  I’ve worked for some truly awful employers in the past.  Now, my FI goal is coming primarily from a place of autistic burnout and a desire to follow my dream path of studying astronomy and astrophysics.  

The Golf Course Myth

The “golf course retiree” stereotype is a convenient political prop, but it doesn’t reflect reality. Many early retirees don’t spend their days in idle leisure. They’re providing childcare for grandchildren, caring for elderly relatives, volunteering in their communities, or even pursuing creative or small business projects they never had time for in their working lives.

These contributions may not show up in GDP figures, but they provide immense social value. In fact, they often fill the very gaps left by austerity-era cuts and an overstretched welfare state. To suggest that early retirees are purely economic drains is not only inaccurate, it’s insulting.

Productivity Isn’t the Real Issue

Critics argue that early retirement drains productivity. But the UK’s long-standing productivity problem didn’t begin with people retiring in their 50s. It stems from decades of underinvestment in skills, infrastructure, and technology, combined with a business culture that prizes short-term shareholder returns over long-term growth.

Blaming retirees is an easy distraction. It avoids asking tougher questions about why so many jobs fail to engage or inspire people in the first place.

Work Should Be Worth Staying For

The real debate we need to have isn’t about how to stop people from retiring early. It’s about why they want to retire early in the first place. The answer is clear: because work doesn’t give enough back.

Imagine if jobs were structured to be more socially valuable, more inclusive, and more flexible. Imagine if older workers were respected and supported rather than sidelined. Imagine if pay and conditions rewarded loyalty and effort, instead of leaving people burnt out and underappreciated. In that world, early retirement would stop being a desperate escape route and become what it was meant to be: a genuine choice.

The Bottom Line

Early retirement isn’t undermining the economy. What undermines the economy and society is a culture of work that leaves people drained, uninspired, and eager to get out as soon as they can.

If policymakers want fewer people retiring early, the solution isn’t to shame or punish them. It’s to fix work itself. Make jobs more fulfilling, more inclusive, and more humane, and people will stay in them longer, not because they’re forced to, but because they want to.

Diabetes UK Step Challenge – Update

If you want to stay up to date with my progress or donate to the cause, please check out my JustGiving page:

https://step.diabetes.org.uk/fundraising/davids-fundraising-page1055

Saturday was insane, with a little over 40,000 steps completed.  

What I’m Doing

Listening: Unfit and Improper Persons by Kevin Day, Kieran Maguire, Guy Kilty.

Watching: Breaking Bad (Netflix).

Reading: Mickey 7

We are now in the last season of Breaking Bad, and it’s one of those rare shows that improves constantly throughout its run.  There is an argument that it peaked in season four, but I think season five serves as an interesting denouement.  Our characters have the opportunity to walk away, but greed, ego, and ambition make them continue down their destructive path.  It really is a fantastic work of fiction, and the fact IMDB rates it as the top TV show of all time demonstrates I’m not alone in that belief. 

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Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £20,500.000.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £119,224.14.

Fuck It Fund: £0.00.

Pensions: £101,797.42.

Residential Property Value: £239,368.00. 

Total Assets: £480,889.56.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £177,640.47. 

Total Debts: £177,640.47.

Total Wealth: £303,249.09.

My total wealth has now been held above £300k for two consecutive weeks, and I suspect it will continue to rise moving forward.  Now that Oana will be starting work and we will have two incomes, it will help us invest much more each month.  It’s all looking positive on that front.

Another bonus of Oana being in work is that we can start moving our mortgage to interest-only.  However, as with the last four or five times we’ve made changes to our Halifax mortgage, we have run into more problems with them.  I’ve spent almost three hours on video calls with the advisor, a friendly young woman who obviously knows her mortgage stuff.  The problem isn’t the person, but the systems and the process.  We’ve still not got it sorted because of repeated IT issues at their end, and now I’m going to have to wait days, or maybe weeks, for their IT team to resolve it.

I don’t understand why every single time I deal with them as a customer, there are issues.  It’s very frustrating because I often know the people I’m speaking with, and I know they’re frustrated as well.  Hopefully, there will be a resolution by next weekend.

The Peter Principle

Over dinner on Saturday, the three of us got talking about workplaces, and colleagues we’ve worked with, and the incompetent bosses we’ve had in the past.  The point came up that so many people in different workplaces seem to be, well, rubbish.  Fortunately, I had recently read an article about this phenomenon, and it even has a name: The Peter Principle.

The idea is that people get promoted to “a level of respective incompetence”.  For example, a shelf stacker might get promoted to a cashier, and in turn be promoted to a supervisor, and then a manager.  However, at this point, they have been promoted beyond their capability.  The result is they struggle, and those working for and with them also struggle as a result.  

For a single business, this can be damaging, but if it’s happening thousands of times across hundreds of businesses, then the end result is that many people will be working in jobs that they struggle to complete to a good standard. 

There will be exceptions to this, with people who are not interested in progressing, or in businesses where upward progression is difficult, but it’s an interesting concept.  

When I look back at my employment history, I remember one guy in particular who was a prime example of the Peter Principle.  He was a colleague in a retail business I worked in through sixth form and in my gap year.  He was promoted to store manager, and he was fucking useless.  However, had he been a likeable guy, it wouldn’t have been that much of an issue.  He was a total prick, though and was constantly trying to stitch up his colleagues.  

He was eventually moved aside, and the store manager role was broken into two supervisory positions, of which I was handed one.  He didn’t take that development very well and tried to get me into trouble by staging a theft of some items in the store.  This dipshit didn’t realise he was spotted by at least five other employees.  He really wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.  

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.

If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional.  If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:

StepChange

MoneyHelper

Biolink 

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bio.link/davidscothern.