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The Challenge in Retirement Planning

Often conventional retirement planning focuses on convincing us to meet any retirement shortfall by ploughing even more of our income at work into pension schemes. In the Pensions section we will discuss the pros and cons of company and personal pensions – but the fact that we are all living much longer means that increasing the level of pensions alone is not the only answer as many good pension arrangements are already perfectly adequate for funding into old age. The problem is that too much of your additional pension contributions is therefore wasted in increasing your income into extended old age at the time you don’t really need it.

Good pension arrangements are a vital foundation but the key to successful retirement planning is being able to utilise your disposable income and borrowings to build a mix of assets (property, investments, pensions and savings) which can be structured to be flexible enough to meet any shortfall of Income against the Retirement Expenditure Curve.

Click below for more detail on your financial planning priorities during each phase.

Planning Before Retirement

Planning In Retirement

Income vs Expenditure Chart

What this chart shows is that it is all about timing as income can be managed to exceed expenditure for most of the period.