It’s easy enough to recommend a pension to people and mention the fact that the Govt gives you tax relief on all contributions, but when it’s time to start withdrawing from your pension when you retire – they start to take it all back, and this is what a lot of people don’t take into account.

The ideal situation is to take £12,500 a year from your pension as that would mean that you don’t pay any tax at all on it. However, not a lot of people would be able to live comfortably from this, so what do you do then ? Well, there are two alternatives as follows :-

1. When we activate a person’s pension, we invariably always extract the 25% tax free cash that is available from the pension, and if this is not needed at the time, then we put this into a savings package that can then be accessed at any time thereafter. In quite a few cases, where people need something in excess of the £12,500 a year but perhaps not that much, then we can setup a monthly withdrawal from the savings and of course this would be tax free. We have had quite a few situations of clients getting £18,000 – £20,000 a year all tax free, with £12,500 being taken form pension and the balance being taken from savings.
2. Where the total pension needed is in excess of this, then more can be taken form the pension but any amounts in excess of £12,500 will be taxable, so you need to bear that in mind.

As you can probably imagine, there are all sorts of alternatives here especially when you take the taxable State pension into account as well, but as financial advisers, M A P can quite easily plan things out for you at commencement and then monitor them on an ongoing basis. That way, when you have got tax relief on paying into your pension, and you are minimising the amount of tax you are paying when taking it out, can make an enormous difference to the end result, and give you so much value for money – which is what we always try and do.

The last thing that you want to do is merely take out x amount every year and pay the tax WITHOUT planning, as that could cost you a great deal.

This is what I have mentioned before when discussing cash flow models – where we update them every year as you go through life. This then gives you something to work to each and every year and gives you a great deal of comfort knowing that you are looking after your money to ensure it lasts as long as possible and that the taxman doesn’t take a bigger share than is necessary.

We work closely with clients to show them what their pension can achieve, and also to reduce tax wherever possible – why don’t you let us help you.

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