John: doing the sums twenty years too late

John was, by his own account, the sort of person who plans. He and his wife spent three years preparing to retire to Thailand — costs modelled, exchange rate movements allowed for, healthcare researched, a margin built in for the things you cannot foresee.

The margin assumed his state pension would rise with inflation, as it had every year of his working life and as it does for everyone still in the UK. That was the single assumption he did not check, because it had not occurred to him that it was an assumption.

He is now some years into a retirement in which one of his two income streams is fixed in cash terms and everything else moves. His private pension has uprating. His state pension does not. The gap between what he modelled and what arrives widens each year in a way that is easy to calculate in advance and impossible to reverse afterwards.

His UK bank added a second problem. The account he had held since the 1980s was closed on notice, and replacing it from Thailand proved far harder than he expected — a residence test refused him at every mainstream bank he approached. For a period he was in the position of having a UK pension and no straightforward UK account to receive it in.

John is measured about it. He does not think anyone set out to disadvantage him, and he accepts that governments must draw lines somewhere.

What he wants is for the line to be visible before people cross it. "Tell people," he says. "Put it on the pension forecast in plain English: if you move to this country, this stops going up. That's all. Then it's a choice."

John now speaks at BOVF sessions for people considering retirement abroad, and he always begins with the same slide.

Case studies on this site are written from the experiences BOVF members have shared with us and are presented in anonymised form. Names and identifying details have been changed.