As we are not getting any younger, let’s get straight to the point.
Have you thought about your pension?
I’ll be completely open and honest. I am 32 next week and I don’t have one. My pension currently is our house. When I was younger I always thought I have loads of time, then years have just started to fly by.
It’s not the ideal situation and I’ll be honest, it’s not how I planned to be saving for our pension but life hasn’t always gone as planned. Bad financial decisions and the costs of owning a home and having children have not always been kind on the pounds to plan better but we do plan to change it all.
Now I have gone self-employed though, I really need to start planning a bit better for our retirement.
During retirement, you obviously want less stress than you had while working. However, having the same amount of bills or more than you had while working is difficult when you have less income. A reverse mortgage allows you to pull cash from the existing equity in your home and spend it as you need to. If you qualify, a reverse mortgage purchase calculator determines the total you can extract. A reverse mortgage calculator is an online tool that balances factors like government regulations to come up with that total. Reverse mortgage funds are not owed back at established times. You receive no scheduled mortgage bills. Instead, you pay what you can when you can. Everything you owe is only due when you stop living in the home, which gives you a lot of control over the process from start to finish.
So, what is the plan?
Firstly, I need to get organised in my personal pension and set up a savings pot for this. I’m not sure at the minute whether it will be through a pension company or if I would just go for a saving account. This is something I really need to do a bit of research in as I want to make sure I make the right decision for my money.
With my first few weeks in self-employment now under my belt though I am also starting to look to the long-term future. The plan is this blog and my other blog would become a family business with Daddy Vs Work coming on board to help with some of the workloads and ease the pressure off me.
Now although this is not going to happen straight away it is something that will need to be considered. Alongside the whole payroll issue that would need to be managed, there is also now the government auto-enrolment on pensions that need to be looked at. The FSB has a great support package in place to help the smaller companies ensure that they are completely compliant.
As I don’t really understand the whole policy that is in place I think this is one thing that is better outsourced from my point of view.
For me personally now, my priority is just to ensure that I have a pension plan in place, even if it is just a little sum at the moment. It will soon all start to add up!
Do you have a pension in place? I would be interested to hear your opinions on the different pension plans in place and how you have found them!