Planning for Retirement

Age UK provides invaluable advice and planning for retirement, including:

• Pension calculator
• Claiming your State Pension
• Using your pension pot
• Tracing old pensions
• Dealing with your debts
• Boost your retirement income
• Preparing emotionally to retire

Pension Geeks Awareness Campaign has lots of resources which simplify the complicated jargon, scary forms and pages and pages full of technical information around pensions. Their resources cover things like:

• Why do pensions go up and down?
• What to do if you’ve lost track of a pension pot
• Can you pause a pension contribution
• Pension Geeks+, a service to help HR, Pension and Reward professionals deliver financial education to employees and pension scheme members.

It’s good to start thinking about your retirement options, and the choices you’ll need to make, a few years in advance of when you stop working. Money Helper’s checklist can help you make sure you’re ready for retirement. In this guide:

• Step one – work out how much income you might need in retirement
• Step two – work out your likely retirement income
• Step three – assess your income options
• Step four – check your position and make a retirement plan
• Step five – what do next

Financial expert and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Moneybox, Paul Lewis gives his tips on planning for retirement.

Pension Wise is a service from MoneyHelper. They offer free, impartial guidance to over 50s. They’ll explain the options to take money from your defined contribution pension pots.

During your appointment, they’ll explain:

• how each pension option works
• what tax you could pay
• how to look out for scams.

Appointments last around 60 minutes.

You can have an appointment if:

• you’re aged 50 or over, and
• you have a UK-based defined contribution pension pot (this could be a personal or workplace pension).

It doesn’t matter how small your pension pot is.

Money Helper offers guidance on tracing and finding lost pensions, particularly helpful for VCSE sector employees who may have changed employers multiple times. You can also find guidance on:

• Using your pension to pay off debts
• What happens to my pension when I die?
• Pension and retirement changes after Brexit

On average, the gender pension gap jumps from £100 to £100,000 over a woman’s working life. As part of their 2024 International Women’s Day campaign, Scottish Widows explain what’s driving such a huge difference in women and men’s pensions, and what you can do between the ages of 22 and 65 to help get pensions equality.

Employment rates drop after the age of 55, and over half of people have stopped working before state pension age. Yet we know multigenerational workforces drive productivity and innovation.

The Ageing Better initiative offers the Age-Friendly Employer Pledge, in which organisations take steps to recognise the value of older workers.

Ageing Better want employers to support older workers in thinking about and preparing for retirement, so they are working with employers to identify the best approaches for supporting staff to plan for their future. The resources include:

• Why saving for a comfortable retirement is more difficult for women, Disabled people and people from minority ethnic backgrounds

• Mid-life support: Insights for employers

• Navigating later life transitions: An evaluation of emotional and psychological interventions

Make My Money Matter provides a Green Pensions Guide for organisations committed to sustainability, assisting VCSE organisations in aligning their pension investments with their values. Learn how to make your pension investments matter.

WTW offers practical ways to support your workforce in addressing the gender pensions gap, providing actionable insights for VSCE organisations.