Foreward by Russell Snowdon, Independent Banking Consultants

I have been fundraising for Willen Hospice and would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all those people who were kind enough to donate.  Your support means a lot.

By way of a special ‘thank you’, to anyone who donated enough to cover at least 30 minutes of Willen’s costs – that’s £270 – I offered in return some free publicity by sharing a profile of them and their business.  So here is some information from Tony Byrne of Wealth & Tax Management, who has a few words on the importance of planning for your retirement, which I hope will be of interest.

Do you have a retirement plan?

The key message I want to get across to you is about the importance of having a retirement plan.

What is your retirement plan? In fact do you even have one? And when I say a retirement plan I mean one in writing with clear goals, in fact a SMART goals. What are SMART goals. Ones that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time scheduled.

Whether you run your own business or you work for someone else do you have a retirement plan? If not, and you are within 10 years of retirement, you’d better prepare a plan, and damn quickly, otherwise you may find you cannot afford to retire when you reach your desired retirement age. The very last thing you want to do is join that growing line of retired people stacking shelves or serving behind tills in supermarkets and DIY stores. Let’s face it are they doing it because they love work or because they cannot afford to retire? Sadly I suspect the latter reason applies to most of them.

Research by Aviva a few years ago showed that the vast majority of people do not start to seriously think about retirement until they reach an average age of 48-52! In my opinion that’s way too late. You should seriously start planning for retirement as soon as you start working.

Fortunately the government has gifted most people a retirement plan. It’s called auto enrolment. Basically unless you are self-employed, in a partnership or unemployed, you will automatically join an employer’s pension scheme. Your pension will be funded by both employer and employee pension contributions. Over a working lifetime most people will build at least a reasonable sized pension to fund their retirement and boy will they need it. Why? Because auto enrolment is, in effect, the government’s privatisation of state pensions. You see state pensions are totally unaffordable in the future as they are based on a pay as you go system. With an increasingly ageing population there simply will not be enough people working and paying taxes to support the sheer number of pensioners in the future.

I see a future in which state pensions will become means-tested so that only the poorest people in society will earn them. I also forecast much later state retirement ages in the future probably prolonging retirement from ages 65-68 today to age 85 or later within the next 20 years. Unless there is mass extinction of the human population through nuclear war, life expectancy is forecast to increase to age 120 within the next 20 years. Scary but true.

In my opinion auto enrolment alone will not give you a very high standard of living in retirement. In fact for the average person it will only give a modest income. Is that what you want? Is that what you deserve after a long working life? Of course it isn’t. So why not do something about it? And the earlier you start the better.

The good news is you can plan your retirement with a specialist known as a financial planner, preferably a Certified and/or a Chartered Financial Planner. Why am I so sure this will work for you? Well it’s because my firm has practised financial planning for over 30 years. The hundred of clients who have successfully achieved a dream retirement after taking advice from us over the years is testimony to the fact that financial planning really works.

So, if you are serious about really making your money work for you then get that retirement plan drafted. You know it makes sense.

Tony Byrne APFS CFP FIFP
E: tony@wealthandtax.co.uk
T: 01908 523 740
www.wealthandtax.co.uk