Retirement strategies

Achieving a Comfortable Retirement

Even if it is not currently top of your agenda, being able to retire when and how you want, is sooner or later likely to be one of your most important financial objectives. But achieving this goal takes planning and perseverance. Unless you are in the fortunate position of having a final-salary pension scheme which is not underfunded you will almost certainly need to augment your state pension. You could spend a third of your life in retirement. Will you find those years the golden times we all dream of, or a constant struggle to pay the bills?

Relying on your state pension, which this year is just over £6,800 for a married couple, is an unrealistic proposition at best. For a full state pension, a man needs to have made 44 years of national insurance contributions, a woman 39.

According to Government estimates, the gap between how much people are saving and how much they need to save to ensure a comfortable retirement is over 55bn. It believes that 13 million people - nearly half the working population - are not saving enough for their retirement.

A-Day - 6 April 2006

6 April 2006 is the starting date for unifying rules for all occupational and personal pension schemes that are registered as qualifying for tax relief. Read more about the new rules here.

For now, whether you choose to focus on investment in a pension scheme or pension policy or to spread your retirement savings into other products, you should seek advice on your options.

Retirement planning

Your retirement planning strategy will be determined by a number of factors:

* Is there a company pension scheme?
* Are you self-employed?
* How old are you?
* How much can you invest for retirement?
* How much state pension will you receive?