Don’t be tempted to pay into your retirement fund and ignore it. Check you’re on track from time to time.
Congratulations! You have a pension. You’re saving towards your retirement. That’s the good news. The bad news (you knew there would be some) is that there’s more to do. You need to monitor where your money is going and how much it’s making. Why? Because your own ideas about how much you want to retire on will change and because investments may do better – or worse – than you expect.
With several high profile companies weighed down by huge pension deficits, how are you protected if things go wrong?
If you’re a member of a final salary pension and your employer goes bust, you should be covered by a pensions safety net. But how does it work?
With so many headlines about company pension shortfalls, you might be wondering about how safe your own pension is. The first thing to say is that just because your scheme has a shortfall doesn't mean it's in trouble. But if you’ve joined a final salary pension scheme, it’s down to the Pension Protection Fund to pay compensation if your employer goes bust. In broad terms, if there's enough money in the company to pay everyone’s pension, the Pension Protection Fund doesn’t get involved. If not, it steps in. What does that mean?
Whether you’re a risk taker or cautious by nature, retirement is not the time to start gambling with your money
When you retire, you leave behind the daily grind of the nine-to-five, but it doesn’t necessarily mean one long holiday for the rest of your life. Unless you’re lucky enough to have more money than you’re ever likely to need, you’ll have to squeeze the maximum income out of the money you do have, without taking on more risk than you feel comfortable with.
