To Saul, the perfect retirement is living in Greece, with a healthy amount of steak dinners.
In some ways, it’s more achievable for him than most Brits: Saul is half-Greek, so it would be a bit of a homecoming. For now, he’s based in Yorkshire.
While he won’t be running into passport issues for his retirement dreams, he will still have to come up with the retirement pot to fund it. That’s why Saul opened a Lifetime ISA, to provide an extra boost to savings alongside pension contributions.
The 25% bonus on contributions into the Lifetime ISA, he said, was too good to turn down. He’s maxed out his £4,000 allowance for the past two years and is hoping to close the gap on his third.
Learning about investing
Saul’s investment journey took some self-realisation. Growing up, he didn’t have anyone to teach him about investment.
“I’ve always come from a family where it’s kind of ‘put your money in a savings account, try not to spend more than you make’,” Saul said. “But I just realised that you have to look out for yourself.”
He started his own financial education, diving into a pile of online investment articles, talking to friends and colleagues about investing, and watching videos on YouTube. He even started striking up conversations about investing at the gym.
“I just try to pick people’s brains to see what they did, what they messed up, and what they didn’t do. Like, if they didn’t start or didn’t consider it because they have a pension and could retire at 60.”
Once he investigated the numbers, Saul decided for him, investing was a ‘no-brainer’. It wasn't smooth sailing at first. There was a whirlwind of options, between individual shares, actively managed and passive funds, not to mention the different offerings within each of those.
Fine-tuning the investment plan
Saul tried to choose as many options as he could to diversify, piling together a list of investments including single stocks, tracker funds, and a mix of dividend paying investments.
“It was a bit of a scattergun approach at first,” Saul said. “I was just thinking ‘oh, I want this or this looks good, I want that.’ And then overtime, you start to dig into the detail a lot more, and you find within some of these funds there isn’t a lot of difference to what they hold.”
Eventually, Saul decided to simplify his portfolios. He lets himself have a little more fun with his Lifetime ISA holdings than his pension, investing in some funds and chooses about five stocks that pay dividends, and then reinvests. The first year, the dividends yielded him just about £10. But the next, it jumped to £80. “Once you see that growing, it helps fuel the fire,” Saul said.
But mainly, Saul just tries to let the money compound and plans to enjoy the fruits of his labour once he turns 60. He hopes that by that point, he will have built up a pot that can keep reimbursing himself as he spends. Preferably with a nice view of the Mediterranean.
Hannah Williford: Content Writer
Hannah joined AJ Bell in 2025 as an investment writer. She was previously a journalist at Portfolio Adviser Magazine, reporting on multi-asset, fixed income and equity funds, as well as macroeconomic impacts and regulatory changes...
