Planning For Retirement – Our Advice Service
Planning For Retirement – Our Advice Service.It doesn’t matter what age you are. Until you actually retire, you should be planning to retire.
Planning for retirement probably isn’t something that fills your thoughts every day, unless of course, you’re nearing your chosen retirement age. However, The younger you start, the more options you will have in later life.
Just as getting periodic health checks is essential for your well-being, so too is getting a financial check at regular intervals. This allows you to take stock of your position and make changes or little adjustments to your plan. Small changes over an extended period of time can make a significant impact, especially where pensions and retirement planning is concerned.
Planning a Retirement Lifestyle Requires a Lifetime of Planning
Of course, we are not suggesting you wake up each day and review your pension and retirement plan. What we are suggesting is that you take a planned approach to how you review your retirement goals and make any necessary adjustments over the course of your working life. This may involve meeting with a professional retirement planning advisor once a year or every few years.
For a lot of people, particularly younger people, their first experience of thinking about pensions and retirement is when they join a company that offers a workplace pension. Being young, this is often a fleeting experience. After all, there are much more important things in life than thinking about retirement when you are in your 20’s; aren’t there?
So when should you consider pensions and planning for retirement? Well, the answer is, you should always have one eye on that, all the way through your working life.
What do I want my retirement to be like and how do I set my retirement goals?
One way is to think about the lifestyle you’d like. Another is to consider it simply from a financial perspective; how much per month would I like my pension annuity to pay out?
As we progress through life, through different jobs, stages of family life, our perspective can change. We may start out with fancy ideals about a boat in the Caribbean, retiring to warmer climes, holidays two to three times a year or a house in the country. But, as we age our circumstances and priorities often change. All of a sudden we’ve reached 50, the kids have left home, the mortgage may be nearing settlement and we now take stock of where we are.
It’s not surprising to find that over the 30 to 40 years or so of paying in to a pension plan, it doesn’t quite match our expectations. This may be because raising a family and giving the kids a good education took priority over savings and pensions. It may also be because you chose to enjoy what you earned.
What can you do now if you perceive a shortfall?
There maybe several options open to you at this point, including:
- Consolidating multiple pensions into a better performing plan.
- Increasing your contributions in the latter stages of your working life
- Changing your risk profile and becoming a little more aggressive in your investments
- Continuing to work for a few more years.
Making Retirement Planning Practical
One way to break down your planning over the term of your working career is to consider the points at which we naturally reflect on where we are in life. For most of us it’s our significant birthdays – 20, 30, 40, 50 & 60.
Planning For Retirement – Our Advice Service
Each decade means something different to us in terms of our achievements, lifestyle goals, commitments, expectations and priorities. Each point provides an opportunity to reflect and reassess. If you have a retirement plan in place, it can be adjusted. If you don’t, it’s not too late to start.
Further Reading:
Approaching Retiremrnt, Have Multiple Pensions and Need Advice?