How much in pension pot at 41?

[chubbaa]

I have almost 44k, which I think is shite. Trying to build it up as much as possible now though. What does everyone else have in their 40s?

I'm 39 and have a DBS Civil Service pension, which is currently projected to be around £35k per year i think. (Although with the CS pension issues, ive not seen a statement for a while). DH is 42 and has a DCS pot of around £100k. Once our youngest goes to school in a couple of years, our plan is use the current money that goes on childcare to put some towards overpaying the mortgage and some towards topping up DH's pension. I might also start a separate smaller private pension just in case the terms of my CS pensions are drastically cut in future.

40. I have around 150k in pension, but also have around 120k in other investment which we’re planning on using in our retirement. We spread our retirement money as we didn’t feel they were performing as we as other investments which are more aggressive with higher return.

Not enough sadly - I put in as much as I can but hopefully when our mortgage is paid off it can be more saved

I’ve got a mix of defined benefit and contribution pensions and probably didn’t really realise the power of compounding until recently. Those early contributions are doing a lot of heavy lifting and I’ve now reached the point where my pot is making more in growth than I am putting in. I’d been working off what I’d likely to have in my pot at 58 when taking the pension but If you then project it out to 80 it’s quite interesting to see the continued growth even when taking quite chunky sums out.

As a bit of a hedge, we’ve put 3 years of pension contributions in for our children. For the £2880 contribution they immediately got the £700 top-up. By the time they’re 18 I’d expect that to be around £25k and from then on, the existing capital starts to do some pretty heavy lifting. At 58 I’d expect that to be around £270k at 6%. Now obviously there will be a hell of a lot of inflation to factor in but time is on their side re compounding.

@Bunnycat101is 2,880 the max for children per year? I’m keen to do this. Which provider are you with

I had approx £40k at 40. At 50, I have £220k. This has been a combination of increasing my employee contributions (employer contribution has never been above 5%) and moving funds to a SIPP where I have a better choice over investments.

Yes that’s the maximum. It’s worth looking around as some providers don’t charge fees for junior SIPPs (I think fidelity doesn’t).

£2880 is the max for anyone that has no qualifying taxable income, not just children. If they got a job at 16 you/them would be able to add more.
I read recently that £2880 a year from birth - 67 should, with conservative 5% growth give a pension pot of 1.5M. Of course, that won’t be a huge sum in 70 years time, but its a great start!

I’ve got to the point where I don’t need to put in any more after this year, so turning my attentions to DH’s now. By the time I turn 40 I should have about £500k in there. I’ve always put in loads (20% of my salary) as grew up in poverty and do not want to go back there, never knew how long I’d cope with my high stress job etc etc.

47, about 170k. DH has about 600k. He's always worked for large companies which have good pensions and I've always worked in places that had auto enrolment. We jointly pay into my private pension to boost it and I recently started putting additional into my workplace pension via salary sacrifice (this wasn't an option earlier). We're aiming to have £1m between us by retirement around 60.

@BurningOutt genuine question why do you believe you don’t need to put any more in after this year?

appreciate you want to level up DHs pension but what about any tax breaks or employer contributions (if applicable)

it was good few years ago but for a £500k pot after taking our the tax free lump sum it was only about £14k per annum

That's a low return - assuming you took 25% and had 375k, 14k a year is less than I'd expect.

ETA - Also I don't understand why you're not including the lump sum returns in your calculation.

Why what would you expect @Mithral ? I got the details from my provider and they were sent to a FA I was using at the time (was 2019 I think) who pulled everything together for me

@Mithral because I plan to blow my lump sum on stupid things 😂. I'll have no mortgage before then but want to make sure I have enough monthly income

Fair enough but it's a bit weird to declare that £500k only returns 14k when that only applies if you don't count 25% of it! But I like your style!

I think 14 isn't that far off sorry I think my maths is wonky. 4% is (I thought) the minimum to expect and it's under that bit not much I guess!

Because I’ll have £500k at 40 but aiming to retire at 60, so with average returns/conservative estimates and 20 years of growth it should be worth £1.1-£1.3m at 60, which should give annual income of £40-55k per year, which is plenty for me assuming I’ll be mortgage free.

@Mithral i might have rounded up or down that caused confusion sorry. And I’m absolutely going to blow my £125k tax free lump sum

@BurningOutt are you employed or self employed?

like you I was VERY lucky and I worked for a pension firm for 18 years that got me the £500k by age 40. I’m still though putting a lot in my new pension (not as good) to maximise my payout and tax free lump sum at the end

41 and about £200k but we also have about 2.5m in equity in properties and my OH has about £650k in his pension. I am also contributing an extra 50k a year to my pension.

We've done this for our kids too.

We have our kids pensions with AJ Bell then we choose global equity funds for the investments.

@OnTheBoardwalk I’m employed. It doesn’t make sense for me to have a pension pot so big that I pay tax at a higher rate on withdrawal, vs building up DH’s and our ISA’s - ie much more tax efficient to have 2 x £30k pots than 1 x £60k.

Plus from 2027 my contributions will be capped at £10k/year so can’t take advantage of employer contribution anyway (has to be taken across the year).