Retirement planning is not just for the old. You should start your retirement planning as early as possible.
At Nicholls Stevens, we have been specialising in giving retirement advice for nearly 40 years. Carole Nicholls, the Principal of the business, has in the past been the winner of the Money Management Retirement Options Planner of the Year Award.
Retirement Planning is not about joining your company pension scheme or buying a personal pension and forgetting about it for 40 years. In fact, if that is your retirement planning scheme, you will be in for a bit of a shock when you reach your 60th birthday!
The very word ‘plan’ is at the centre of this activity. First, you need a ‘plan’: you need to have some idea of when you may want retirement income. This may not be all at one time but spread over a period. Then consider what you may do in retirement, where you may live and most importantly, how much money you may want to live on. Even if you are young, you should have a plan; it may need to be reviewed along the way but it is a good starting place.
Having a target income is paramount to the ‘plan’. You then need to consider how you will achieve this. It is likely to arise from a number of sources:
- State benefits
- Savings
- Pensions built up from employment or self-employment
- Inherited wealth
- Property, including buy to let properties
The more varied your portfolio, the greater your retirement options are likely to be. It is unlikely that in the future many people will 100% retire at, say, age 65; there will be a need for a glide path into retirement income. So if you have a number of sources, this will give you greater flexibility.
If you are interested in putting together a retirement plan, please let us know. We will work with you, reviewing your existing assets and making recommendations to achieve your target income. It is essential to keep any retirement plan in line; and so we will insist that regular reviews are carried out, at least annually and most probably bi-annually as you near retirement.