The deferred holiday is not free. It costs you the holiday - and by the time you decide it's finally safe to go, the knees may not be up to the walking trip you had in mind.
-Why most of my retired clients should be spending more, not less.
Debra and I have just bought a secondhand caravan. It is a slightly ridiculous thing for two people in their fifties to be this excited about. But we are. We have plans for France this summer, ideas about the Kent coast in autumn, and a daughter who is already braced for years of stories about our own childhood caravan holidays, in detail, whether she wants to hear them or not.
I mention all this because of a conversation I had with a colleague last week.
She has just paid £500 for a flight to Turkey. One flight. A week in November, off-season, to play golf. £500, for a flight, in November. That is where holiday prices have got to in 2026, and I do not think they are coming back down any time soon.
If you have tried to book anything for this summer, you will have noticed. Flights up. Hotels up. The pound jittery. The news exhausting. And there is a fairly persistent voice in the back of most savers' heads at the moment saying maybe just leave it for another year, see how things settle.
That is the voice I want to talk about.
What does waiting actually cost?
The thing is, the conversations that worry me are not usually with clients who are spending too much. They are with clients who cannot bring themselves to spend at all.
People who have saved sensibly their whole working lives. Decent pensions. Healthy ISAs. Mortgage paid off. Could comfortably afford a proper holiday, a kitchen they actually like, a long weekend with the grandchildren. And who keep finding reasons not to. The boiler might go. The market is wobbly. Something on the news about Ukraine. Maybe next year.
The numbers back this up. Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others has consistently shown that UK retirees underspend their resources, often quite significantly. Most people who have saved well will die with more money than they ever expected to. Which is a perfectly fine outcome if leaving it to the next generation is a deliberate choice. It is a less good outcome if it happens because nobody ever quite told them it was OK to enjoy what they had built.
The deferred holiday is not free. It costs you the holiday. And by the time you decide it is finally safe to go, the knees may not be up to the walking trip you had in mind.
You don't have to leave SE3
OK, so none of this is me telling you to rush out and book the all-inclusive Norwegian fjord cruise because of a blog post. Live the money, enjoy the money is not the same as spend it all on flights to Turkey. (Sorry, Kelly.)
What it actually means, in practice, is being a bit more deliberate about joy. Picking the things that genuinely matter to you, and putting them in the diary rather than the maybe-pile.
For us, that turned out to be a caravan. Partly because we both have happy memories of caravan holidays as children. Partly because we like the idea of pointing at a corner of France and saying let's go there next weekend. For somebody else it might be a week in a cottage in Whitstable, a National Trust membership and a year of Sundays at Sissinghurst, a season ticket at Trinity Laban, lunch out every Friday with a friend you have not seen properly since 2019.
And you really do not have to leave SE3 to do this well. We forget, in Blackheath, that we are sitting on top of one of the best-kept Royal Parks in the country. The Heath is on the doorstep. Greenwich Park, the Maritime Museum, the river walk down to Woolwich. An hour on the train gets you to Whitstable, Margate, Folkestone, Bedgebury arboretum, Walmer Castle, and a stretch of quiet coast that most of London forgets about. Most of the best stuff is closer than the airport.
What is the money actually for?
That is the question I end up asking clients more than any other. Not how much have you got, or what is it invested in, but what is it for. Because once you have answered that, the rest of the planning gets a lot easier.
If the answer is security for me, and whatever is left for the kids, we plan around that and you get on with your life.
If the answer is the trip my parents never got to take, we put it in the diary.
If the answer is I have not really thought about it, that is usually where the most useful conversation starts.
The world will keep being expensive. The news will keep being noisy. There will always be a reason, on paper, to leave it for next year. And that cost compounds.
So book the trip. Or buy the caravan.
PS – if you happen to be a seasoned caravanner, do drop me a line. We are absolutely open to pro tips.
