“It’s not fair” is a phrase you will know all too well if you have children or grandchildren! But, whilst we might not say it out loud when we have grown up, it turns out that our sense of fairness affects the choices we make with our retirement savings. Actuaries have long argued that annuities […]

Another title for this blog post could be, why the 4% rule is unlikely to be right for you in retirement. When you think about the withdrawals that you take out of your retirement savings over a lifetime in retirement, imagine that as a financial road trip. You are going to drive for a long […]

There are many economic milestones in life – buying your home, paying off your mortgage, leaving employment – which take place on one particular day. These are the financial changes with which we easily identify. It’s more difficult to decide when to act when gradual changes are taking place, and particularly when we would rather […]

Clients often ask Financial Planners whether they are spending more, or less, than everyone else. For those who are interested in an answer to this question, the Office for National Statistics’ Family Spending Report, which was released last week, is a goldmine of information. It samples a huge number of households, and sets out how […]

Time is running out to top-up your State Pension before a price rise being introduced in April. Paying voluntary National Insurance contributions can be a financially attractive way to boost your income in retirement. However, filling these gaps in your National Insurance contribution record, and receiving a higher State Pension in return, is set to […]

One of the most powerful ways to boost your income and capital in retirement, and to increase the amounts you can leave to your family, is to keep the amount of tax you pay to a minimum. Your approach to tax saving in retirement needs to be quite different to the approach you used when […]

Last week was aptly named “death, divorce and debt” week. Martin covered this phenomena in detail last Friday in another interesting episode on Informed Choice Radio. Most people enter retirement as a couple. It is, of course, inevitable that one half of the couple will die before the other, and any retirement income plan must, […]

Modern retirement isn’t a straightforward business. Our grandparents were sent home from work at 65 or 60, with a guaranteed pension income and a state pension, which would be enough to keep them content in their old age. Nowadays, our employers can’t force us to retire, guaranteed pensions make up a small part of our […]

If you were to read the financial sections of the New Year financial press, you’d imagine that 2018 was a terrible year for your finances. After all, the FTSE 100 index has fallen in value by around 12% over the course of the year, and the downward trend has been in place for nearly four […]

In recent decades we have witnessed huge shifts in the way in which we fund our retirement. In the past, people were able to rely on a pension funded by the employer they had worked for (in exchange for 40 years of service), topped up with a state pension to provide a reasonable standard of […]