This is a guest post by Jon Hogg of Old Mutual Wealth. Jon is kindly speaking at our next Technical Club event on 20th September 2018 titled: Reaping the Harvest.
6th April 2006 heralded the introduction of “Pension Simplification”!
I think it fair to say that this premise was not delivered with successive Chancellors tinkering with the rules every year since then.
The Lifetime Allowance introduced at £1,500,000 increased to £1,800,000 subsequently reducing significantly to the current £1,030,000.
The Annual Allowance once hit a high of £225,000 only to reduce to £50,000 then £40,000 and potentially £4,000 if an individual seeks to access their pension savings “flexibly” add to this “high earners” who are now subject to a “tapered annual allowance” of somewhere between £40,000 and £10,000!
The Taxation of Pensions Act 2014 introduced by George Osborne saw yet further changes to how individuals could access their pension savings with significant flexibility where there used to be very rigid structures and significant enhancements in how individuals could pass remaining funds to other family members on Death.
To add further confusion not every pension provider has adopted these new rules meaning some individuals and potentially their chosen beneficiaries won’t have access to these new features leaving them and arguably their advisers at the whim of the product provider.
In this session we will aim to highlight the opportunities and perhaps more importantly the pitfalls that face individuals when planning for their retirement with a particular focus on “death benefits” and the Annual Allowance.
