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I talk about retirement for a living and yet I can certainly be guilty of not thinking enough about my own. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been diligently contributing to my pensions since my mid-twenties, and I’ve made sure I’ve kept track of pensions from previous jobs.
I know what I’ve got so far but I haven’t thought too much about what that might mean for when I actually retire. To be honest it all felt like a long way away.
Looking through some of the most recent research from Hargreaves Lansdown, I know I’m not alone in this. When asked when they thought they might retire, more than one in five people said they didn’t know. A further 27% said they thought it would be somewhere between the ages of 66-70.
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My vague retirement musings seemed to land with that of a slightly smaller group (23%) who hope to retire somewhere between the age of 61-65.
However, a few months back I got a bit of a wake-up call when my boss announced he was retiring. It’s something he had been thinking about for a while and the plan was now in place. All of a sudden it has got me thinking about my own pathway into retirement and what that might look like. What age was I thinking of retiring, what might the intervening years look like and was any of it feasible?
You can’t plan for retirement if you don’t know what you want that retirement to look like. People will have very different ideas about this.
Some will want regular travel while others will want something a bit more modest.
Once you’ve got an idea of what you want yours to look like you can use a pension calculator to see if you have a chance of affording it.
If you are on track then that is great, but if you aren’t then this gives you some time to put a plan in place to fill the gap. Online calculators can even model the impact of increasing your contribution over time on your overall pension pot.
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Having done this myself I can say that I feel better about my retirement prospects. I’m not expecting to retire for another 15 years or so and a lot can happen in that time but keeping track of how my overall pension position is doing over time and what that might get me gives me confidence.
Dare I say you might look at your pensions and find you are in a better position than you feared. This happened to a friend of mine recently who had resisted all previous attempts from me to look at how much she had only to get a nice surprise when she actually did.