UK workers may have several jobs before they retire and there may have been many house moves and different addresses during that time as well. Which could mean a collection of different workplace and personal pension pots varying in size and value that may not be updated with the correct address details and which may be difficult to keep track of. If not ‘lost’ altogether.
If this is the case for you, a pension review with a financial adviser can help, not only in assessing the level of retirement provision you have built up in your various schemes, but in helping to identify features of certain pension schemes which, if addressed early enough, can bring a wide range of benefits – and also avoid some potential pitfalls – at various stages of life, not just at retirement.
While you are building up your pension to provide for your retirement, you need a clear overview of where you stand. Working with a financial adviser can help you to understand where and how you are invested, how big your pot is and how much retirement income that may provide in the future. Importantly, it can also identify where there may be a potential shortfall against the retirement you want and, crucially, what you might be able to do about it.
The second stage to consider is accessing your pension at retirement. Modern schemes offer a full array of retirement options including greater flexibility and tax efficiency offered by income drawdown. However, many schemes have a minimum fund size before a member can use income drawdown, and many simply don’t offer that flexibility at all, so it is beneficial to identify that sooner rather than later.
Finally, it is important to consider how your accumulated pension wealth will pass to your loved ones. Modern pension schemes offer a much fuller range of death benefits options to help maximise wealth transfer to family and friends. The option of inherited drawdown for instance can allow family or friends to keep the remaining pension fund invested within the pension. This means they could continue to enjoy tax free investment growth, keep the pension fund outside their estate, while still having access to the funds at any time.
However, if funds are left in older schemes which may not offer inherited drawdown, those loved ones may only have the options of a lump sum or an annuity, which may not suit their needs or could even result in an entirely avoidable tax charge.
And this is where a financial adviser can help.
At Siddons & Co Financial Planning, we can review pensions you may have with other providers to assess whether the funds are invested appropriately to offer you the options at retirement that you expect. And plans and funds with St. James’s Place get reviewed annually as part of our ongoing service to ensure that your pension is working as hard as it possibly can be.
Call 01943 262600 for a no obligation chat or visit www.siddonsand.co.
The value of an investment with St. James’s Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds you select and the value can therefore go down as well as up. You may get back less than you invested.
The levels and bases of taxation and reliefs from taxation can change at any time and are dependent on individual circumstances.
Siddons & Co Financial Planning is an Appointed Representative of and represents only St. James’s Place Wealth Management plc (which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority) for the purpose of advising solely on the Group’s wealth management products and services, more details of which are set out on the Group’s website www.sjp.co.uk/products.
SJP Approved 9/3/2023