Posts by Simon Garber

Accessing your pension tax-free cash before retirement, or earlier than planned within it, is a decision that feels simple and often carries consequences that last the rest of your financial life. The motivations are varied and entirely understandable: paying off a remaining mortgage, funding major home improvements, a once-in-a-lifetime trip, buying a holiday home or…

Early retirement is one of the most common financial goals among high earners, and one of the least well-planned. Not because people have not saved enough, but because the decisions involved in retiring at 55, 57 or 60 are considerably more complex than those made during the accumulation years. You face a gap of up…

Building serious wealth over a long career is a strong foundation. Most high earners approaching retirement have done the obvious things right: contributed consistently to their pension, built some ISA savings, paid down the mortgage. What many haven’t done is look closely enough at what they’re leaving on the table. The difference between a good…

Redundancy is rarely planned. For most high earners who experience it in their 50s, the financial risk is not that they have not saved enough; it is that they have not modelled what their savings can actually sustain, and under the pressure of suddenly losing their income, they make decisions that feel rational in the…

Most workplace pension holders have never heard the word ‘lifestyling.’ They set up their pension when they joined their employer, contributions go in each month, and they assume the money is being managed sensibly. What many don’t realise is that a default investment strategy may have been running in the background the entire time, quietly…

Retiring at 55 is achievable for the majority of high earners who plan carefully, but it is also the most financially demanding version of early retirement. Even if you’ve built a sizeable pension pot, you face a 12-year gap before State Pension arrives, a retirement that could span 45 years or more, and a pension…

Each year, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association publishes its Retirement Living Standards — a set of benchmarks intended to give people a sense of what different retirement lifestyles cost. For 2026, a ‘comfortable’ retirement requires £43,900 per year for a single person, or £60,600 for a couple. These figures are worth examining in detail,…

Retiring at 60 with a pension pot of £1 million or more is genuinely achievable for high earners who have planned well, but it comes with a specific set of decisions that need to be made carefully, ideally in the 12 to 24 months before the target date rather than on the morning you hand…

You’ve spent 20 or 30 years doing the right things. Earning well. Funding your pension consistently. Building ISA savings where you could. Getting to your 50s with a pension pot that reflects genuine discipline and hard work. That foundation matters enormously. But the work isn’t done — and the decisions you make in the years…

If you’ve spent a career earning £100,000, £150,000 or considerably more, the standard retirement guidance you’ll find online isn’t written for you. PLSA benchmarks, £60,000-a-year ‘comfortable’ figures, and calculators built around average UK salaries will tell you very little of practical use. Your retirement planning problem is a different and considerably more interesting one: how…

The government announced that it would be abolishing Lifetime Allowance (LTA) in March 2023 with changes effective of 6 April 2024. However, the removal of LTA has not meant people can access more tax free cash from larger pension pots. Not helped by lack of clarity, HMRC errors and a new system that looks suspiciously…