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TV review: Dream of retiring early, but you're not going to make it at 40

How to Retire at 40 presenter, Anna Richardson (centre)
How to Retire at 40 presenter, Anna Richardson (centre) How to Retire at 40 presenter, Anna Richardson (centre)

How to retire at 40, Channel 4, Monday at 8.30pm

It’s the dream of every wage slave to retire early, but Channel 4 set the bar pretty high at age 40.

I think most people would be happy to be able to walk away at 60, given that the state pension age for most of us is now at least 67.

The key to retiring early, it seems, is to be “financially independent,” but that doesn’t mean just leaving home and paying your own rent and household bills.

In retirement terms, it means having at least 25-times your annual spending in savings.

Now of course, the more lavish lifestyle you have the more difficult it is to get to the magic 25 years.

And it was never explained how 25-years of savings would allow a 40-years-old to retire. Wouldn’t that mean that you would be penniless at 65?

Anyway, isn't there something morally wrong in striving to give up work at least 40-years before you expect to die? Given that most people don't start full-time jobs until after they leave school, it would mean little more than two decades of work in an average 80-year life span.

Regardless, “super saving” was the first of three ways suggested to help you retire early, although it did sound exceedingly difficult.

An accountant told us happily that you could go from broke to being able to retire in 19-years if you saved 50 percent of your income. And you could do it in just seven-years if you saved 75 percent of your income.

Now I’m sure that '7-years' bit caught lots of people’s attention. It’s a very imaginable time frame to reach the sunny upperlands of retirement.

Two problems. Firstly it assumes you are merely broke, as opposed to in-debt with mortgages and car loans like most of us. Secondly it requires Jesuitical discipline.

One couple introduced to the viewers were on a financial 5/2 diet. Based on the popular weight reduction plan it required not spending ANY money for five days of the week.

‘Trend spotting’ was the other road to financial independence and we met one man who was making £20,000 a year by drawing things on potatoes and selling them online. Sounds easy, but a business adviser pointed out that having a good idea was the easy bit, implementing it effectively was the hard bit.

In other words, there’s been lots of delivery firms, but only one Deliveroo.

The last option then was “taking a risk” and this meant giving up your job to go into business on your own.

Ach, who am I kidding. The 40-year-old target has long disappeared from my rear view mirror.

GAA Nua, RTE 1, Monday at 7.30pm

The GAA also has some problems with money. The association needs it to run its games professionally but it is criticised by some members who say the leadership is too focused on the corporate and has forgotten its grassroots.

In the final edition of the magazine show GAA Nua, Dara O’Cinneide asked “Who owns the GAA?”

The correct answer is, of course, its members but many of them feel alienated from the Croke Park leadership by, for example, the decision to sell some of the broadcasting rights to an international sports group like Sky.

In truth, the GAA’s difficulties, albeit complicated by the fact it doesn’t pay its players, are not dissimilar to many other sporting organisations.

Fully professional sports such as soccer and rugby also have a tension between generating income to run their games and supporting the grassroots.

Perhaps they all need to become 'super savers.'