Pensions

[Hoolahoophop]

Has anyone any suggestions where to get pension advice for free preferably online.

I just looked at my pension statement. I am only 12 years from my ideal retirement age. Will be entitled to state pension, and have a work pension worth £70k. This will not give me anything like the pension I would like. DH has some investments and his own work pension so between us we could have a nice retirement. But if something happened and we split I would very much have a downgrade in income and lifestyle.

Thanks.

When you are getting the advice, or learning about it yourself then as well as calculating the implications of divorce it would be a good plan to look at what position you might be in if your dh dies first. It sounds like he has the bulk of the pot otherwise I would say for him to do the same.

This is good advice. Many on MN will be in PAYE and paying into pensions via payroll but if you own a Ltd company, it can be tax efficient for the company to pay into your pension.

Rather than put taxable dividends into your pension would it not be better to increase your salary and do a salary sacrifice against that?

I currently salary sacrifice around £30k a year and it's saving so much on tax and NI that the net effect is approx 50% (i.e. if I put £2500 as salary sacrifice then I see approx £1250 less in my wage). Unfortunately salary sacrifice at this level will end in 2029 courtesy of the last budget but at least you have a couple of years to throw some money at it.

You need to understand what your pension is invested in and what growth the invested money is giving you and what fees are being taken plus any terms and conditions, usually the fund sheet will tell you all of this - many pensions do a lifestyle approach with higher risk in younger years and lower risk in later years. Do you need to be in lower risk when you are 12 years until retirement? Or would moving to lower risk at say 5 years to retirement be acceptable to you.

Im 45 and paying in but moved my pensions to higher risk lost index trackers which grew 13% last year, minus less than 1% fees, for example.