Retirement planning is important to ensure you properly fund your future
Many people are not adequately saving for their retirement, and the state pension is looking increasingly inadequate to fund a reasonable retirement. Taking responsibility for yourself is becoming increasingly important.
There are many options for providing for your future:
- Employer and Personal Pension: many people already have a pension from their employer, and Auto-Enrolment is currently being introduced, whereby every employer must provide access to a pension fund to their employees, will make these far more prevalent. If you do not have an employer pension, you can also pay into a personal pension. On all UK registered pensions, you receive tax relief for payments that you make into a UK pension fund for up to £40,000 of contributions per year (overall your pensions, including employer pensions).
The tax is postponed until you take the retirement benefits, making pensions a tax efficient way of saving for retirement. However, you cannot access the pension fund until retirement (without hefty tax charges) and you have little or no control over how your funds are invested. There are also tax charges if your pension fund exceeds the lifetime allowance (currently £1.25million, but reducing to £1million from 6 April 2016).
- Overseas pensions may not be subject to the annual and lifetime limits, but your contributions may not receive tax relief in this case. Again, your access and control over the funds are limited.
- A Qualifying Non-UK Pension Scheme (QNUPS) is an offshore retirement fund recognised by HMRC, so it receives some tax advantages, whilst not being subject to the limits to contributions that a UK fund has. You can also suggest investments that the QNUPS could make, and loans of up to 30% of the fund can be made to you by the QNUPS.
If you want to be able to access the funds and have full control over them, then you can simply make investments, such as property, shares and tax efficient savings- giving you a range of liquidity and tax exposure.
A complete retirement plan should have most, if not all, of the above aspects so as to give you a full range of options and leave you prepared, whatever happens. While some aspects are easy to deal with yourself, others require specialist knowledge and can have unforeseen effects for the unaware.
Tax Innovations has extensive experience of all aspects of tax efficient savings and planning for retirement. Our dedicated team of experienced tax advisors are ready to advise you on the best way to save and plan for your retirement, tailored to your own particular needs.
If you would like more information regarding tax-efficient retirement planning, please contact Tax Innovations on 01962 856 990 or customerservice@taxinnovations.com.
Please call us on 01962 856 990 or visit our contact page.