Providing for retirement and pension fund

PROVIDING FOR RETIREMENT AND PENSION FUND

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Providing for retirement and pension fund, pension annuities, stake holder pensions, retirement plans and funds and alternative ways of building capital

First of all you should always take advice from your financial advisor before making any decision about providing for your retirement. This is an article and is in no way intended to give financial advice; simply provide food for thought. However, it has to be said that everyone should provide for their retirement whether it is through a pension fund where you end up buying a life annuity or through building capital in other tax efficient ways. You will find plenty of links to financial advisors qualified to provide pension advice through these pages.

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There are numerous life assurance companies who are also pension providers. If you take out a life assurance policy, the company is betting against you not dieing too soon. However, if you take out a pension plan that provides the funds to purchase a life annuity when you retire, the company is betting against you living too long.

It is not so long ago that you would be sitting at home and receive a telephone call or a knock on the door from an insurance salesman selling life assurance and pensions. You may have found these people an annoyance but they provided and essential role and ensured that many people at least had some kind of pension to help them with their retirement.

The financial services act more or less killed them off and I doubt if you have had a cold call from anyone selling pensions in more than a decade. Life assurance companies no longer have direct sales forces and many have closed their books to new business because the FSA made it unprofitable for companies to employ sales people. If you are self-employed or in business or someone who is not in an occupational pension scheme, the chances are that you have not made any pension provision for yourself.

Politicians being fairly stupid and most having no commonsense whatsoever believed that they were protecting the public by introducing the financial services act and in their stupid ignorance believed that people would make their own pension arrangements without the need for them to be sold a retirement plan. This of course hasn't happened because without the insurance salesman going out and knocking on doors and actually selling a pension policy, most people, left to their own devices have done nothing about it.

This hasn't affected the people on high incomes who have their own financial advisors, but the ordinary general public, the people most vulnerable and in need of financial support in retirement no longer have an insurance salesman looking after their affairs. Now coupled with the fact that we are living longer, retiring earlier and not having adequate pension arrangements when we retire, the burden on taxpayers has become and will get even greater.

Any idiot, unless you are a politician, would have known that people don't buy pensions; they have to be sold. Few people are going to part with their hard earned cash and invest it in a pension fund when retirement is so long off and by the time they get around to thinking about it, it is usually too late to be able to accumulate sufficient funds.

So we now have a huge swathe of people who have done nothing about building enough capital to fund their retirement and nobody out there selling pensions. Furthermore, the government in their ignorant stupidity have done nothing to sort this mess out and it would appear do not seem to realise the mess they have caused.

So what should you do? Well the first thing is to take financial advice from a qualified pension advisor and start to investigate other investment opportunities. Failure to act now will almost certainly result in a miserable and poverty riddled retirement.

The recent decline in property prices has shown that property or your home is not the guaranteed investment you thought it was and with everything where you have to sell in order to liquidate cash, timing is everything.

The most important thing is to start planning for retirement as early as possible. It may be forty years away but the day you finally retire, your ability to generate an income ceases and you will have little control over your income levels.

Providing for retirement and unlocking a pension