Retirement income
Turning a lifetime of saving into money to live on.
Building a pension is the long, slow part, and in some ways the easy part — pay in, leave it alone, let time do the work. Spending one is different. It's a set of decisions taken once, mostly irreversible, under conditions of genuine uncertainty about how long you'll live, what markets will do, and what your health will hold. This topic works through those decisions in the order they arrive, and none of them require you to predict the future — only to understand the trade-offs you're choosing between.
The whole of retirement income planning reduces to five questions. Here they're, and how they fit together.
The number everything else depends on — and why retirement spending isn't a flat line.
Five levers, roughly in order of how much difference they make.
Two people with identical pots and identical spending can pay wildly different tax. The difference is the order they draw from.
The most-anticipated part of a pension, and the one most often taken too early.
The 4% rule, why it travels badly to the UK, and what to use instead.
Guaranteed income you can't outlive, or flexible income you might. The honest case for each.
Going part-time and topping up from a pension, without walking into the traps.
Who inherits your pension, what tax they pay, and why April 2027 changes the answer.