Pensions & Retirement

If you’ve been diligently saving into a pension throughout your working life, you should be entitled to feel confident about your retirement. But, unfortunately, the best savers sometimes find themselves inadvertently breaching their pension lifetime allowance (LTA) and being charged an additional tax that erodes their savings. If you are a high-income earner or wealthy individual, you could be putting…

Six years on from pension freedoms, non-advised savers aged over 50 are facing a ticking time bomb at retirement, according to a new survey . 66% of those saving into a defined contribution pension and 58% of those who have already retired have either no firm plans or no plans at all for their retirement finances. This has translated into…

If you’ve spent a lifetime saving for retirement, you’d probably like any remaining money to go to a loved one after your death. But whether pension benefits are payable to a beneficiary, and how they’ll receive them, is dependent on the type of pension you’ve chosen and how you’ve accessed it in your retirement. Thanks to changes in the way…

What you can do to reduce a future financial shortfall. A lot has been made of the gender pay gap, but what’s not so well known is how this can affect women in retirement. Unsurprisingly, women don’t fare as well as men when it comes to the savings they’ve built up for a healthy and economically stable retirement. The gender…

Time to get back to dreaming about stopping work. Not dreading it. Life changes when you retire – and so does how you spend your money. Whatever your plans, it’s important to keep on top of things and think about the lifestyle you want. It’s also worth noting the average life expectancy at age 65 years is 18.6 years for…

How to make the most of the various pension allowances. Saving into a pension is one of the most tax-efficient ways to save for your retirement. Not only do pensions enable you to grow your retirement savings largely free of tax, but they also provide tax relief on the contributions you make. There are various pension allowances that you need…

In 2015, the retirement rules were rewritten. The rules, which came into effect from 6 April 2015, have changed the way people take money out of their pensions, with new freedoms and options available to anyone over the age of 55. Pension freedom tax rules allow members of defined contribution pension schemes to access their pension savings early, provided they…

With Greater Freedom Comes Greater Responsibility ‘The secret to happiness is freedom’ wrote the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. And with the introduction of the pension freedom rules, those aged over 55 now have far greater freedom of choice over how they use their pension pot to fund their retirement years. When pension freedoms commenced during the tax year 2014/15, it…