pensions

[didireallysaythat]

Does anyone know of a website where I can enter the current pension pot values and get a forecast of what this would give me, and then an option to say what I'd like as a pension and it calculates what I need to put in each month ? It needs to include the state pension if possible....

Ta!

If you Google 'annuity calculators' you should find a few comparison sites. What you can then do is take your pension fund value and see how big an annuity that converts to at today's rates. Forecasting for the future is trickier, obviously, but you can also run some 'what ifs' calculating the annuity based on bigger funds and work back from that. The state pension is fairly fixed and you can't do anything to influence the amount beyond paying in full NI contribs. Again, use today's numbers to work out if the total of state pension and annuity sounds like a reasonable amount to live on.... bearing in mind that your living costs may not include some big expenses that you have today e.g. you may have paid off a mortgage etc.

sadly the answer with almost all DC pension pots under the £150k mark is "bugger all"

I have my own annuity spreadsheets that my DC pension provider (grudgingly) accept to be accurate
and it runs at about £100 per year of £10,000 in the fund

so £100,000 in the fund pays £1000 a year
£1,000,000 in the fund pays £10,000 a year

remember that DB schemes are still a black hole to be paid for by our children.

Thanks - I'd looked at the state pension website and a calculator there was quite useful. I hadn't thought about not having a mortgage or childcare vouchers to pay for when I retire (hopefully!) And no tax ... So I think about a quarter of my current earnings would be OK.

The rule of thumb is very useful. I started paying into a pension relatively late as I worked abroad but I panic that I will never have a £1000,000 in my pot !

Just remember than you won't have to buy an annuity when we get there. There are ways of making your pension pot work much hard using SIPPs and WRAPs. I have really good advice and have changed 35k into 137k in 4 years doing this not all is lost.

I worked out recently that £100k potentially gets me a lot closer to £5k/year annuity income rather than £1k . ... that's on today's rates admittedly.

I'm not too up with all this - I've heard of SIPPs but not WRAPS. I currently have a pension pot my employer pays 10% into. I haven't been paying in as the advisor literally made my skin crawl (patronising incompetent man) so I've been paying £300/month into a Norwich union one (advice of competent IFA). Starting March we have a new advisor at work and it's changing to a salary sacrifice scheme with 0.3% charges so I think I'll move my extra payments. But I'd like to understand my pension statements first !

I'm impressed with changing a pot by 100k+ in 4 years - do you mind if I ask how you did this ? I've a lot going on at the moment so I don't feel that I can actively manage my pension if I'd have to check in on things every week for example...

So I changed my regular pension to a SIPP purchased a commercial property with a mortgage equal to my pension (I also put in my SERPS). This generates a rental income of £600 per month, mortgage is £150 per month leave £50 per month in SIPP account invest £400 per month into WRAP along with the £190 per month have been paying in since I was 25.
WRAP is made up of multiple tiny investment funds. The one I belong to had massively out performed market and all the big funds.
You do have to have a fair appetite to risk to go down this route.