Our clients, a married couple, were intending on retiring from a long career in Accountancy. We helped them put together a strategy to secure their short-term spending requirements, as well as their ongoing income needs in retirement.
Background
Our clients, 53 and 56, had been working as Chartered Accountants for many years. During that time, they had managed to repay their mortgage in full on their £500,000 property, had around £150,000 in cash savings, £100,000 in various investments, and a pension portfolio of around £750,000. The couple had no children and were not concerned about Inheritance Tax or leaving a legacy, so were focused on satisfying their own income requirements for the rest of their lives. They anticipated that their income requirements would be around £3,000 per month (net) in today’s terms, as well as the requirement for around £20,000 per annum for holidays/traveling, much of which would be done in the early years of their retirement.
Key Needs
The clients’ primary objective was to ensure they could generate enough income to provide for a long and financially secure retirement. They had accumulated various plans throughout their working lives, which needed to be reviewed, and they felt they had lost control of their financial planning. They were not receiving proactive advice from their existing adviser, and were concerned about the adviser’s lack of independence, recommending their own in-house investment portfolios, as well as having many years of poor returns in comparison to the markets.
Our Solution
We analysed their requirements and built a financial strategy tailored to them, detailing their potential tax structure, considering income from a Defined Benefit pension, as well as their State Pension entitlement. Utilising lifetime cashflow modelling enabled us to provide them with a long-term projection of their financial planning beyond normal life expectancy, allowing them to visualise how they might achieve their financial objectives, and the parameters necessary to do this. We planned a future tax strategy allowing them to withdraw their income in the most tax efficient manner, in their case with zero tax to be paid for most of their retirement, utilising multiple tax wrappers and allowances.
We recommended a consolidation of their personal pensions into a more modern structure, which allowed them to flexibly access their pension funds when required and offered a much wider range of investment choices. We aligned their investment portfolios with their individual attitudes to risk, and empowered them to understand what needed to be achieved each year as an investment return, their taxation structure, and how much income they could take each year (if they desired it), which was more than their basic income requirements, based on certain assumptions.