Four Things To Avoid Doing With Your Pension

There’s no doubt that we’re in a time of considerable change when it comes to pensions, with a great many people unsure of whether or not they should take advantage of the new freedoms and how they can best put the new system to work for them. As well as the positive things you can do with your pension, there are a number of things you should probably avoid doing with your retirement funds too. We’ve collated our top four suggestions below:

1. Try to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket – There’s a temptation to invest everything you have available in a single option once you’ve discovered that it works for you. However, typically this exposes you to much greater risk. Just because an investment feels safe now doesn’t guarantee that it’ll stay that way in the future, which could result in you losing all that you’ve invested. It’s often a much better idea to invest in a range of options, matched to your preferred level of risk.
2. Don’t make retirement decisions without thinking them through first – The reforms that pensions have undergone recently mean you now have greater freedom to begin drawing your pension at a time of your choosing. But if you don’t need to tap into your pension early, it’s typically advisable to leave it where it is until you do. Any money you take out of your pension can make you subject to additional fees and, if you’re still working, push you into a higher tax band which means less of your savings will go to you overall.
3. Don’t forget where you are invested – It’s all too common for people to start paying into a pension only to stop thinking about it almost straight away. Doing this is likely to have an impact on your eventual retirement income, as failing to increase your pension payments as your salary goes up makes this less and less likely to happen. You can make sure this doesn’t happen by…
4. …Avoiding going more than a year without a pension review – Another frequent mistake with pensions is for people to go years without having a formal review of what they’re paying in and how well their contributions are performing. It’s advisable to review your pension every twelve months – that way you’ll know that your savings are doing what you want them to at a level of risk you’re happy with.