As a son of parents in their 80’s, I see first hand the effects of living longer from both a health and financial perspective.
I’m lucky that they are both in good health and are managing to survive on their pensions and savings but the gap between income and expenditure has eroded over the years primarily down to the inflationary costs of just living.
They don’t go holidays, run a ten year old car and rarely buy any “treats” yet they consider themselves well-off.
The outcry amongst our public sector workers is understood (if not always sympathised with) as the all important safety blanket of a Final Salary Pension is threatened.
The pressure on all workers in the UK, when they arrive at what I rather call later life than retirement, to maintain current standards of living will be immense.
I’m not going to tread the well worn pathPension as to why we are where we are but rather make a plea for a sea-change in mentality from one of dependency to one of personal responsibility and of saving for later life.
Imagine that you had 35 years of work ahead of you and that for argument’s sake, you started on a salary of £30,000 and it stayed static until later life and you stopped working.
That’s £1,050,000 of earnings over that period and assuming that it was enough to keep you, then it might be prudent to again assume that if you were to live a further 20 years post stopping work, then 20/35th of this figure would be needed to maintain your lifestyle.
£600,000.
Modest numbers, no assumptions for inflation, investment growth etc but I think it illustrates the point simply that generally we don’t plan to have enough in later life.
Working with a Wealth Manager to plan out what later life might mean for you and how to get an idea what the numbers might be will be initially daunting if not downright terrifying.
But once you have had a look at how you’d like it to be it’s the job of the Wealth Manager to help you take you there, provide the discipline of saving, use all the tax advantages at your disposal and make the whole exercise achievable.
Being specialists in later life planning means we understand the concerns of our clients who need not just pension advice but advice as how to create a tax efficient wall of money that will deal with all eventualities when they decide to stop working.
Our Personal Investment Account allows clients to see the progress they are making towards their goals on-line and we can provide efficient-frontier investment portfolios to control risk.
Having all your savings in our Personal Investment Account makes sure we can make optimum use of all your tax breaks now and importantly, when you need income in the future.
More details on how we provide later life planning are contained within the website but I’d be happy to hear from you personally if you like more information on how we can help you.
Roland Oliver