Pensions & Retirement Planning
Do you know how much you will need to comfortably retire?
Many people don’t. Did you know that retiring is often the biggest expenditure in a life time? Commonly 20-30 years of income requires quite some commitments to achieve. Whilst many living in the West feel secure thinking that their pensions and retirement will be provided for them by their employers and the government, this is increasingly becoming a false security. With many people in the UK after a lifetime of saving, the average UK pension pot stands at £61,897. With current annuity rates, this would buy you an average retirement income of only around £3,000 extra per year from age 67, which added to the full UK State Pension, makes just over £12,000 a year, just enough for a basic retirement lifestyle. This becomes even more true for expatriates. Many of our clients outside of Europe in the Middle East, Asia and Africa have no support when it comes to their retirement.
The responsibility to save for this very important period of life becomes entirely their responsibility. Many expats move abroad for the opportunity of higher earnings and greater tax savings. This is a great idea but often opportunities are missed which leads to an unsustainable standard of living. As an added stumbling block, any existing pensions that the individual may have contributed to whilst they were working in Europe get left behind and unfortunately pension administrators are not proactive in encouraging investors to review their pensions and ensure they are holding the correct funds with their respective risk profile. We commonly review existing pensions and find that clients have held funds within their pensions that have provided negligible returns for many years, in some cases not even beating the rate of inflation.
