Can I afford to retire at 60?

It's one of the most common questions we're asked, and understandably so. Sixty can feel like a meaningful milestone: the traditional idea of retirement, arriving a little earlier than the state pension age most people now plan around. But whether it's actually affordable depends less on the age itself and more on a handful of specific factors.

It starts with what "retire" means to you

Retiring at 60 doesn't have to mean stopping work completely. For some people it means winding down gradually, for others it means stopping paid work altogether and relying on pensions and investments from day one. The affordability question looks quite different depending on which of these you have in mind, so it's worth being specific about what your version of retirement actually looks like before doing any of the maths.

The real question is whether your money will last

Affording to retire at 60 isn't really about having "enough" in absolute terms. It's about whether your combined pensions, investments and other assets can sustainably support your spending for what could be a retirement lasting 30 years or more, accounting for inflation, market ups and downs, and changes in your circumstances along the way.

This is where cashflow modelling becomes useful. Rather than relying on rules of thumb, it lets you test your specific numbers against your specific plans, retiring at 60 versus 63, spending a bit more in the early "active" years of retirement, or building in a buffer for the unexpected, and see what the outcome actually looks like.

A few things worth thinking through

• How your income needs might change across different phases of retirement
• The gap between age 60 and when your state pension begins, and how it gets funded
• Whether accessing pensions earlier changes the tax-efficiency of your overall plan
• How a market downturn in the early years of retirement could affect things

There's no single answer that applies to everyone, which is exactly why this tends to be one of the most valuable conversations a financial plan can start with.