Retirement Planning Made Easier
It can often be difficult to envision what retirement might look like, perhaps you’ll pick up a new hobby, take time to travel or simply enjoy a slower pace of life.
With most of us having an element of uncertainty when it comes to the direction our retirement might take, it can be tricky to predict how much income we will need to support our lifestyles. To gain a clearer picture of how our finances in retirement could look, the Retirement Planner available on the My Pension+ portal can present a useful tool.
The Retirement Planner has three categories of lifestyle – “essentials covered”, “living comfortably” and “luxurious retirement”. Within each of these, you can adjust your expected expenditure on items such as holidays, shopping and home improvements. The planner then gives a prediction of how your retirement goal looks against your expected retirement income. With this, you can see if you are on track to meet your goal.
As well as giving you an idea of how much money you’ll need, the planner also:
- Consolidates your pension records - If you have multiple records with us, the planner pulls together all your savings for a clearer view of the overall picture.
- Allows you to adjust your retirement age and lump sum to see how your pension is affected – You can instantly view how your pension will look if you decide to retire sooner or later and see how taking a lump sum changes its value.
- Offers the ability to add other sources of income – If you have pensions elsewhere or other income streams, you can add these for a more accurate view of your financial situation.
Available for our Active members (members paying into the scheme) and Deferred members (those who have paid into the scheme but haven’t yet taken payment of their pension), the tool allows you to save your retirement goal for future reference, or alternatively refresh the Retirement Planner and input new figures to model different scenarios.
The Retirement Planner is based on the Retirement Living Standards tool from Pensions UK (formerly the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association) which similarly offers a helpful insight to understand how your life may look during retirement. This tool also categorises retirement lifestyles into three different levels ranging from a basic standard of living to comfortable. The Retirement Living Standards tool has recently been updated and shows that while costs for Minimum retirees' needs have decreased, Moderate and Comfortable standards have experienced modest rises in line with inflation.
Both the NESPF’s Retirement Planner and Pensions UK Retirement Living Standards offer an insightful glimpse into your future. While many factors of retirement may be unknown, it is important to consider how we want life to look after retirement and whether we’re on the right path to achieve it.
