Quote:
Originally Posted by Ignitionnet
Que?
My contribution to my pension scheme is quite prodigious precisely to ensure I can retire at some point before I'm too old to actually do anything with that retirement.
Quick check suggests I'd have the equivalent of £1320 / month at current prices if I maintain current contributions. Main concern is paying for my housing, I need to purchase and pay for a home before then which is looking rather difficult with the housing market as screwed as it is here.
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Yup - only way to ensure a (reasonably) comfortable retirement is to save (be it in a Pension Fund or property - btw, pension funds are cyclical, so as long as we take a medium-to-long term view of savings, we should be OK); problem I have, like a lot of people in IT, is that I changed jobs roughly every four or five years, and whilst you can transfer your contributions, you lose the companies contributions and pay transfer fees. I tried to mitigate this in the early 90's by taking out a personal pension, and convincing the companies I worked at to contribute to it; that worked until I joined BT Cellnet, who weren't as flexible (ho-hum).
So, at the moment, I have about five little pensions which should return about £500 a month, I am in a final salary pension which (if I can hang on for 12 more years, and into which I pay 14% of my gross salary) will give me a quarter of my salary, and the mortgage gets paid off late next year (meeting one of my goals, which was paying off the mortgage before I was 55 (just)); (then I will probably have to pay for my daughter's wedding a few years after that, which should manage to take most of our savings....
).
However, as I said at the beginning, I don't think the state pension will pay for much more than the basics, so it is up to us all to put something away to make our retirement, whenever it happens, a bit more enjoyable.