Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs)

Review your pension today to get ahead with your retirement planning

The chances are you’ve heard of SIPPs – Self Invested Personal Pensions – and maybe you have a good idea how they work. However, lots of people have either never heard of a SIPP or have been put off opening one because they feel they are too complicated or too time consuming to manage.

The question “what age can I retire” is probably one of the biggest you’ll ever ask yourself. It is arguably the most fundamental question of any long-term savings plan, as retirement is normally the ultimate goal toward which most of us save.

It can be a consolidation conundrum to know when it makes sense to combine different pension pots, and when you are better off keeping separate accounts. The days of a job — and a pension — for life are long gone.

As a qualified chartered accountant, Leah* is all too aware how tax can eat into the value of people’s savings and investments. When it comes to her own money, she wants to make sure it is invested as tax-efficiently as possible, and this was one of the reasons she opened a SIPP with EQi.

You might enjoy the benefit of being in charge of your own work, but you can end up paying for this freedom in other ways. All companies that employ people now have a responsibility to provide pensions to their employees, but it’s just one of the many things a self-employed person will have to take care of themselves.

Saving for retirement can sometimes seem a daunting task. This situation isn’t helped by the fact that many of us today have a hotch-potch of different pension plans. This is likely to include various company pensions, private pensions and investments, as well as the state pension.

Retirement is an increasingly expensive business. Life expectancy and the cost of living for retirees are rising. So what you are expecting to be enough to keep you going when your working days are done is unfortunately not what you are likely to get. Unless you save as much as possible now into a pension, any money worries you are having today could follow you into old age.

Investing for a comfortable retirement is an ongoing process, not a one-off exercise. You will need to check you are on course to achieve the required level of income when you give up work as interest rates and returns from different assets may change over time.

If you are planning your own retirement savings on top of any workplace scheme you might have, then trying to choose between the many different options could leave you confused and frazzled.

Why a SIPP could be the right pension for you if you are self-employed