What should I do if I’m nearing retirement age?
If you’re living and working in the UK the first thing to do is check whether you’re on track to receive a full or partial state pension. This is based on your national insurance contributions over your years of working and can be checked here.
If you’re eligible you’ll start receiving the state pension once you reach your retirement age, although you can defer it if you’d like to. You can also top up your national insurance contributions if you have gaps, although this isn’t always the best solution so check that here.
Next, track down any workplace or personal pensions you might have. We’ve written about how to do that in a previous newsletter here. There are several things you can do with these:
You can consolidate them - we took a look at the pros and cons of this in this newsletter.
From the age of 55 you can take out all or some of your pension (with 25% of it tax free) and/or buy an annuity, which we looked at in this newsletter.
You can transfer pensions to different countries, which we looked at here.
Or you can leave it to someone when you die (although there are tax implications to this).
Your decision on what to do will be based on your plans for retirement, so once you’ve calculated what you might receive from the state pension and other pensions you may want to use a budget calculator to assess your plans. It’s worth thinking about any outstanding debts and ongoing payments as part of this.
You may then want to speak to a financial adviser or a guidance service to help work out which of the options above would be best for supporting your plans.
Action of the week: Please take our survey as we come towards the end of the year (it will only take a couple minutes, we promise).