Have you looked at your pension pot ?

[AwayADay]

Due to the current world situation pension pot is down £11,000 .
Sadly dh is retiring at 60 , which is basically now so that is not the situation we wanted to find ourselves in .

The trick is to look regularly maybe once a month at least. You will then see the ups and downs occuring all the time. Losses happen and recover a lot. If you only look at times when there is a big event it gets out of proportion.

Nothing has really happened though to the market in the last 7 days. A global tracker is maybe down 2-3% which is a minimal movement all things considered. You need to ensure that you invested to match your own appetite for risk, although if the market has dropped 20% I could understand your concern, but 2-3% is just a normal market fluctuation that happens quite often. No one can tell you what will happen next week ,month or year.

Like others have said, unless you are planning to use your pension pot to but an annuity, you will likely be invested for many more years to come.

Mine had a large jump Feb-Mar compared to previous months, but even so I am not overly concerned about forthcoming dips.

If I was looking at withdrawing from it in the next few weeks/months, maybe, but apart from that, I am confident any dip will bounce back, just like it did with Covid. I have alternative savings as well that I could use to tide me over while I wait for that.

Did he de-risk his investments in the 5-10 years approaching retirement age?
If not, then delay his retirement age and once the markets bounce back start de-risking into bonds, cash, gilts etc.

Our joint net worth tanked by £100k when Trump anounced tarrifs in Feb/March 2025 - I had to grit my teeth and not look, because I knew it would come back, and that dip would only be a problem if I had to cash in the stocks at that point. It took about 4 months to return to Jan 2025 levels and has continued to grow well since and out net worth is massively up vs 14 months ago, despite that dip.

He certainly shouldn't be taking an annuity right now, but sit tight, delay retirement or live off savings. Or take an easy part time job to tide him over until the value bounces back to where it would have been before Iran.

De risk into what? and if he had done so, would have missed out on some spectacular growth in world markets since Ukraine.

Bonds/Gilts traditionally the go to safe haven, is no longer this, with returns little better and often worse than cash on deposit.

People need to remember that stockmarket valuations, even with the recent falls are still substantially higher than 2/3 years ago, FTSE is around 20% up than in 2023/24.

It's not about de-risking everything. What you need to do is make sure you're never in a position where you have to take money out at times when the market has dropped. This is the cash ladder concept referred to above.

If you're looking to retire 'now' you need to be able to pay for the next few months/year or two at most from cash, not investments. For a pension pot to be down £11k it must be pretty big, my ISA has just under £50k in it and it's down around £1k. So it would be quite foolish to have half a million in investments and not have £20-50k or whatever in cash that you can use instead so you can leave your pension pot alone until investments have stabilised.

Even with big drops like the first credit crunch, COVID etc, the markets recover, often more so, within a few months so all you have to do is leave the pot alone, and indeed put more in if you can, during that time, to not lose money - your adviser should have told you that, assuming you have one. Not that it's often necessary, just listening to Meaningful Money teaches most people all they need to know (and covers the situations where you would benefit from paying for advice).

I’m planning on accessing soon. Early medical retirement.

i’ve been advised annuities are a very bad buy and I’m probably going to go for flexi drawdown.

I’ve had stock market investments for the last 30 years so no a short term fluctuation does not bother me.

Thats not what the pp was saying, the old plan was move into bonds cash property, away from equities, as you reach retirement has gone.

De risking is actually the risky thing to do, selling/buying anything incurs charges too.

World events have been very hectic, we had Covid, quickly followed by Truss, then Ukraine, then Trump, now Trump again & he has another 2 years to fuck about with.
One needs a bit more than a few months cash to ride out that lot.

& what about people with far more modest pension pots, without 30k to ride out the downturn.

On an £11k drop, a 5% downturn on a 200k pot (hardly large) is £10k.

Mines down 2.9%. However it had gone up 11% in the last year so overall not too bad so far. It’s a small pot as my main pension is DB.