GUEST COMMENT: How to retire richer and happier than Geraint Anderson
I work for a millionaire. This isn't unusual for the financial sector you might say, and you'd be right. What I like about my boss, apart from his filthy sense of humour, is his philosophy on life and how much money one needs to retire into a life of contentment.
David (not his real name) is happy - he genuinely works to live and not the other way around. He has a large house on the continent, one in the States, and another one in a well-heeled part of the capital where he lives with his family.
David never worked in investment banking, which is not to say that he hasn't worked hard - one of his favourite war stories, that doesn't involve Stringfellows, is about how he finally closed a long and hard-won deal. As the sun rose above Smithfields went to his chophouse du choix with the whole deal team and ate a small cow (he's not a small man, needless to say).
Instead of slogging away in an investment bank, David joined a small firm and grew with it until the height of the credit boom. At this point, he retired - temporarily. During the most painful period of the credit crunch, he played golf, went shooting, and walked his dog.
He also concentrated his energies on his own investment portfolio. Instead of stuffing his wealth (that which wasn't tied up in his properties) into mutual funds, he sought out interesting and tax-efficient nest-eggs, like a pool of film royalties. He jokes that a recent and notorious gore-flick pays him tens of thousands of pounds a year, tax-free, although he's never even seen the movie.
How is this view different from Geraint Anderson's? Well my boss chooses to work - he likes having his own firm with offices, a website and headed paper. I think he genuinely gets a kick out of having a business and being his own boss.
He certainly doesn't need to work again as he has no mortgages and his kids are grown up. Most importantly, he's liquid too. He's not counting on 25k of earned income a year from here and there. He also stayed in the game longer and waited for his net worth to rise considerably above Geraint's 2.5m target.
I think this is because he actually enjoyed, and still enjoys working. His career has been far from a prison sentence; there's no counting the years of "time served". He enjoys what he does and this is self-evident. Perhaps this is because unlike Mr. Anderson, he made his money investing capital himself, not telling clients how to invest theirs.
Moral of the story: work longer, but find a job in the City you love which makes it bearable. And invest wisely instead of entrusting that job to others. Anyone with half a brain in the City knows that's a mug's game.
The author is a former corporate financier who left investment banking for a job in a private equity fund.
