Who's got a good plan for retirement / pension?

39, renting, i do have 12/60ths final salary which i don’t know what it will be when i need it. Plan this year is to buy a house, if i can get a bank to lend me the money, and sort out a new pension.

Hopefully that will be enough to survive when i am older….

I’m lucky enough to have a final salary pension with work plus 3 others that I contributed since my 20’s (I’m now 50) – also, after losing my parents I invested my inheritance in some valuable purchases. Wished I had bought property instead though!

My Dad was a tosser , but did make me take out a pension at 17 when i started work. TBH I would have been tens of thousands of pounds better off if i had paid a small amount more into a savings account as a deposit for a house . Probably could have got something mid eighties and cashed in on the ridiculous gains since then.

Got 20K with Scot Mutual, and 15K with Equitable life ( IL funds not GAR /With profit) Pay £90 a month into these. Took out the Equitable in 89 I think, Scot M in 87.

Worth bugger all , I think I will net about £100 a month when i retire, but with no mtg now can save alot more.

If your in your 20’s your **** . Cant save for a deposit , rents are high , old folks living for longer so no nice inheritance coming your way , and any of that has been used up in long term care home fees anyway.

26, no pension, I’ve got 29 years left on my mortgage and I’m self employed. Retirement, lol…..we’ll look back on that as a quaint thing of the past by the time I reach my sixties. Not saving anything-we currently have no kids and spend most of our disposable income. I guess things will change over the next decade for us, but I’m not worrying too much about what happens to me in the arse end of my life.

How to create a simple retirement plan

Bought a place in Alicante region year and half back but
certainly made me think how cheep it is to live there.

We have on property in London and about to finish the mortgage and rent that and then buy
another and convert/flatten the garage and build a 1 bedroom bungalow and
rent that out. to maximise on rental until parents want to move into it.

But looks like a move to Spain is on the cards as its cheaper and a better climate
and only 2hr 30 mins flight back to london

Police pension, which is going to end up being a mix of final salary and career average schemes. Should be enough to live off and mortgage will be paid off before then. Costing something like 13% a month though.

32 and nothing. That what working hard, getting educated and sacrificing fun get you. Yay!

This is just another dick slapping thread isn’t it?

my dick is too small to slap.

Oh someone’s **** up their finances and is going to be working till their dead.

Obviously have an NHS pension, though OT sure where that’s going. Glad I was too busy (read:lazy) to buy added years….
Also have a stakeholder pension, which seems to bubble along on the back burner…will probably add the extra from what the added NHS years would have cost, into that, at some point.

My plan is to pop a bit of cash into houses – accept the tax liability from the ‘extra income’ (even if rent = mortgage, still ave to pay tax on anything above the interest payment), and after 25 or so years, they become yours, which then provide rental or lump sum income. Or I’ll probably transfer them into current/future children’s names so there’s no tax to pay on rental income, and use that to fund their university….buy some student digs for them, and there’s another cost sorted….

Or, buy a really fast bike, aim to get all my local KoMs, then die mashed up against a tree in a pile of sweaty lactate….

DrP

Just waiting for the oldies to die so I can retire…
Actually inheritance is a massive issue, with the Government wanting 40% after the first £325k. So if you’re oldies are thinking of giving you a wedge when they kick the bucket, get them to do it now! If they give you the money within 7 years prior to their demise the rules still apply, so even more reason for them to share the love/cash ASAP!
You might not want to cut and paste this response in an e-mail to them though…

I thought I had mine sorted, I’ve got 16 years of pension paid into fire service at 300 a month, it’s going up by about another 20 a month from this month and another 50 a month from next April, recent forecast has shown that despite having to now work an extra 6.5 years I will get around 1/4 of the lump Sum I was promised and less per month 🙁

What I’ve paid in is protected (if worth naff all can be deemed as protected) as long as I stay in the new scheme but if leave it I’m screwed and it appears they are trying to price us out of it , and the new scheme is actually only better than putting it under the bed if I survive past 87 years old .

Dogwank

i’m paying into one of those public sector pensions, which means i’ll be working till i’m 75, to get 4-tenths of f***-all.

If your in your 20’s your ****

what about those in their 0’s, 10’s, and 30’s?

oh yeah, they’re screwed too.

Bloke who lives over the road from me was a very successful professional photographer, retired at 45 with three houses owned outright, one he lives in and two he rents out. Travels the world for half the year, the other half he comes back and potters around on his allotment and does a bit of odd jobing (inc helping me dig the Workshop foundations). Nice life if you can get it!

Decent company pension (I pay 3%, they pay 22%), company share scheme (currently buy 1 get 3), a flat to rent out once we find somewhere else to live, and wife with a final salary scheme. I don’t expect to be retiring early, but it should at least be comfortable.

I’d really like some advice on what’s the best option…overpay your mortgae or pay into pension ?

i’m paying into one of those public sector pensions, which means i’ll be working till i’m 75, to get 4-tenths of f***-all.

Really?

Firestarter

Whats your % contribution to the scheme compared with your employers?

They planned for retirement in very early stages and started to save money for future rather to spend today

they’re called Germans.

Pissing everything you have, and more, up the wall on consumerist tat is the British way. It’s what Thatcher would have wanted 😉

surfer – Member

i’m paying into one of those public sector pensions, which means i’ll be working till i’m 75, to get 4-tenths of f***-all.

Really?

right now, my retirement age is 70, i think ? – which is irrelevant, it keeps changing, and changing in an upwards direction. It started off being based on Xyears service divided by 60, but now it’s 80, and soon it’ll be 100

so yes, really.

(as someone else says up there ^, it seems as though there’s an effort being made to price us out of it)

D28boy – Member

I’d really like some advice on what’s the best option…overpay your mortgae or pay into pension ?

save up a bit, and for your 60th birthday buy a superbike and a DNR tattoo.

right now, my retirement age is 70, i think ? – which is irrelevant, it keeps changing, and changing in an upwards direction.

I understood the state pension age is 68. How do you calculate 70? Of course you can continue to work after this date as long as your employer has no objection.
Unless you mean you are estimating an income and have projected a date to achieve it?
I assume it is a final salary scheme from your edit?

I’m comfortably on track to leave the country by the age of 50, buy a nice house in rural France with some gites to rent out and a fishing lake where I can spend the rest of my days quite happily catching large carp, eating cheese and drinking wine (aka, living the dream).

17 years to go…

D28boy – Member

I’d really like some advice on what’s the best option…overpay your mortgae or pay into pension ?

save up a bit, and for your 60th birthday buy a superbike and a DNR tattoo.

Thanx most helpful….Not

The answer is “it depends”

If your employer is willing to match or beat your contributions then even a relatively bad pension is good value given it is a tax free investment, even one of those terrible public sector ones 🙄
If you have no matching contributions then an ISA may be better as it provides guaranteed tax free income later and if you are fortunate enough to earn income in your retirement over the tax threshold then you can have an income from this untouched.

I dont expect a large income in retirement but I have several pensions, one of which which give a nice income from a final salary scheme.
I intend to take a chunk out at 55 to reinvest in a way that gives me tax free income when I retire late.
I also have some ISA investment in various cash and investments.
I havent beat myself up paying off my mortgage and at this rate it will be paid off comfortably in less than ten years. The house is worth a reasonable amount and is a nice size.
I have spent the last 15+ years bringing two kids up and hopefully will be supporting them through university. We have also had as many skiing/summer/camping/w/ends away as I can fit in based on the understanding that “I will be a long time dead”

Hope to have enough to live on and retire about 65. A bit earlier would be nice.

Private pension with company contributions, not final salary. I’ll be quite poor if I get old. But based on my family track-record, I wont make it to retirement age, so the pension is just insurance in case I do.

i’m not sure exactly what my plan is…

i’m 30 and self-employed. never had an employers pension, but my old man and his brother have always told/encouraged me to save, so i did. have got about 60K in savings, about 50/50 pension/savings (ISA).

folks have already given their house over to my sister and me.

sounds bad, but as and when mum and dad pop thier clogs my sister and i will get a decent lump sum each (assuming my sister doesn’t start having babies and therefore her brood getting more 🙂 ). same for the GF. her folks have their own place.

one thing that am i sure of though…. i will not be working till i’m 65 and i will not be kicking around northern europe during my retirement – far too cold and not sure i want to be forking out X-thousand a year on heating bills.

I’m 40, I started paying into our company scheme when I was 35, probably far too late but they do put in the same as me (5% each) so at least i’ll end up with double what I put in!

We have a huge scary Mortgage at the moment (£240k – runs until i’m 70!) but it is just a temporary measure as we needed to raise some funds to develop, and add value to our house.
Next year we’ll re-mortgage and shorten the terms. We’ll keep doing the same, and try to overpay a little bit aswell.
I’ll be early 50’s when my kids leave school so would like to be in a position to help them out if I can.

My wife is a teacher, and although her pension won’t be anywhere near as good as she thought it would be when she started, between us we should be OK when we retire.
I’d like to pack in work when i’m 62 (if not earlier) as my wife is 2.5 years younger, and I don’t want her to have to work passed 60.
My parents don’t own a house, and my in-laws are unlikely to leave us very much (long story) so it is down to us to look after ourselves.

Personally I’ve never got the idea of working towards the pension finish line in life. There is so much life to be lived before you get old.

I’ve never paid into a pension plan.
Aim to keep investing in and building my business. Get it to the place where the work life balance is favourable.
In time I hope to not so much retire, but keep working. But work in a way that suits me.

As someone who gets bored approximately 17.39 seconds after finishing doing something previously, retirement sounds like Hell!! 😉

surfer – Member

I understood the state pension age is 68. How do you calculate 70?

it seems to change (upwards) every 5 minutes, it’s 68 now, will it still be 68 in … er … 33 years? – i doubt it.

I assume it is a final salary scheme from your edit?

it was, not any more.

Surfer currently I pay 13.2 and they pay 13.8 but as of next year I’ll pay 15 and they will pay 12, tho they have also explained that depending on the pull out rate of members in the new scheme then our payments may well have to go up but theirs will never increase,

I can currently withdraw to a different scheme and my current cash figure is 106k. But I’m led to believe altho ours has gone to the dogs their isn’t much better out there, but much more increases and I’ll have to jack it I’m anyway 🙁

Having started this thread, it’s kinda reassuring to hear a range of ‘plans’ or not … I sometimes think I have a plan for me and my family, and then realise I don’t really know what I’m on about, so ignore it. But based on this thread, we’re worse planned than some, and maybe a wee bit better than some (assuming gov’t doesn’t make drastic changes on tax, pensions, properties, inheritance etc). Makes me feel a bit better 😯

I have got to 55 retirement final salary but have good easy job offer so I intend carrying on working for a bit longer. Will get some more pension and state pension at 66. Enjoy the work and its easy money really. Dont think there is any one answer to this but not having a plan is planning to fail.

40 here. current plan is to put as much as I need to into the company pension to maximise the company contribution (me 6% + 7% from them) and not a penny more.
any spare cash goes on mortgage reduction with the aim of paying that off as soon as possible.

god knows when ill retire, wife is a teacher but after a number of years part time she isnt going to get a fortune (unless she goes full again). We wont be minted but as long as we are mortgage free it should be okay.