Originally Posted by
Re-sign Carl Dale
Hi Mike. I’m an IFA and specialise in retirement planning - would be happy to have a chat at some point.
To answer your question, yes, you can draw and keep working - any pension income is taxed as unearned income (taxable but no national insurance is due).
As mentioned above, annuities aren’t too popular. I’ve never seen anyone “talked into them”. As are no ongoing fees for almost annuities,there is no incentive for an adviser to recommend them (me being cynical!) - however for many people, the flexibility of income drawdown outweighs the guaranteed income of an annuity - it depends what you have in terms of other assets and what your income needs are.
Rule of thumbs is that if it’s a company final salary style pension, it’s likely to be best left alone, if personal pensions then it often worth transferring to pool them together - but need to be careful that there aren’t any contractual guarantees built into them (lots of old pensions have these) - if these are transferred then the guarantees are lost.
I’d be slightly careful about taking the whole 25% tax free lump sum in one hit too. It depends on your circumstances, but it’s usually much more efficient to drip it out gradually if you don’t need cash immediately.
You don’t need to use an adviser (unless you have pensions with guarantees and then it’s a requirement) - however I would certainly recommend having a chat with someone who’s qualified to give advice before doing anything.
Like many things - we don’t know what we don’t know!
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