79. How to start a pension (pension mini series 1)

Ready to take charge of your future? In this power-packed episode of the Women & Money Cafe we unveil the ultimate guide to starting a pension and securing a rock-solid retirement plan. If you've been wondering where to begin, this is the episode you can't afford to miss!

We break down the daunting task of starting a pension into simple, actionable steps. From unravelling the complex jargon to providing practical advice, this episode leaves no stone unturned. We dive deep into the different types of pension plans available, whether it's a personal pension, a self-invested personal pension (SIPP), or a robo pension. Discover the pros and cons of each option and choose the one that works for you.

But it doesn't stop there! We unveil strategies for determining the ideal contribution amounts and tips for maximizing your pension contributions, ensuring you're on track to achieve the retirement lifestyle you've always dreamed of.

We also address the burning questions you might have about pensions. Say goodbye to confusion and gain the clarity you need to make informed decisions about your pension.

The episode wraps up with a discussion on monitoring and adjusting your pension plan as life evolves. We shed light on the importance of regular reviews, ensuring your pension remains aligned with your changing circumstances and aspirations.

Compound interest calculator to see how £50 can grow!
Money Helper pension calculator
And if you want the spreadsheet, drop Julie a message.

YOUR HOST
Julie Flynn is an experienced independent financial adviser and financial coach. Justice and equality drive Julie. Which is why she’s spent years studying and researching how stress affects our financial decision making.

Julie is best known for her work with women who have lost their partner and coaching financial services business who want to implement fair and transparent charges.
Ebb & Flow Financial Coaching | Bree Wealth & Tax | Instagram


CO-HOSTS:
Michelle Lambell  started her career in financial services as a Stockbroker in 1999 undertaking both advisory and discretionary investment management. Today she is a Chartered Financial Planner, specialising in retirement planning advice, pensions and investments and a Certified Financial Coach.

Jennifer O'Neil is a mortgage and protection specialist and director of Athena Mortgages. Having been in the industry since 2014 Jennifer decided to set up a company in 2020 that suited her core values as a broker – integrity, service, honesty and continuous improvement.
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Transcript

Julie Flynn [00:00:05]:

Welcome to the Women and Money Cafe. I'm your host, Julie Flynn, independent financial advisor and financial coach. And this is the weekly Money podcast for women by women, exploring the practical and emotional side of money.

Michelle Lambell [00:00:26]:

Welcome to this episode of the Women and Money podcast. So today, with me on the sofa, I have Julie.

Julie Flynn [00:00:32]:

Hello there.

Michelle Lambell [00:00:33]:

And I have Jennifer. Hello. So we thought we would carry on our theme of pensions, a subject that we all know, that I quite love. I don't tell many people at parties, to be fair, really looking at how to set up a pension. Now, when you're employed, your employer will generally provide you with a pension and they have to, it's part of law. So you will have a workplace pension scheme, which you pay into and your employer pays into. So lots of benefits all around to having that. It is allowing you to build that pot for retirement. But when you're self employed, it's not quite as easy, and it could be for anyone who's not self employed. In fact, he just wants to set up a pension and start thinking about that time of retirement. So we thought we'd do an episode which sort of gives you a bit of a guide as to how to set up your pension, where to start and how these things are done for you. So, does anyone have any initial thoughts on their immediate reaction? When I say, how do I set up a pension?

Jennifer O'Neill [00:01:38]:

For me, it's one of those things that you've always meant to get round to doing, and it's on that big, long list of things that you don't really know how to do, so it just keeps getting pushed further down that list.

Julie Flynn [00:01:49]:

My immediate reaction is, Kathy Romana, if you're listening, this episode is just for you. So for everybody that is self employed or runs their own business, this episode is for you, the ones that haven't got a pension and you're like, I know I should do that, but I haven't got a clue where to start. We got you in this episode and.

Michelle Lambell [00:02:08]:

I think that's what we hear. So we will deal with clients every day who come to us later in life because they want to look at retiring. They're thinking about retiring, but the earlier we start that journey, the easier it becomes. So this is part of that jigsaw of allowing you to start earlier and to start building that. So there's many options which are available to you as to what you can do. And I think we've sort of narrowed it down to three main options with different providers and they all have different levels of interaction required by you. So I think the first one sort of wanted to bring up, and this has been something that's been quite.

Julie Flynn [00:02:51]:

Well.

Michelle Lambell [00:02:51]:

Visual, I think, in pension b. So it's been on the TV, seen everywhere and I didn't know whether, Julie, you wanted to give us a quick overview of what Pension B is.

Julie Flynn [00:03:01]:

All right, so, yeah, we've identified these three categories, three ways you can go about doing a pension, and this is one subsector, if you like, so I'm going to call it the done for you category. And in the done for you category, you'll find companies like Pension B, Wealthify, Nutmeg, just to name but a few, and essentially they do everything for you, like a lot of them are apples. You download the app, it's going to walk you through a series of steps to figure out how you should be investing money. You'll tell it how much you want to put into your pension each month and it basically does it all. So it's really simple. Now, I've tried Pension Bee myself, I don't think I've tried Wealthify for a pension, but I have used it for an Isa. So all these things, they will have risk ready questionnaires on there as well, and they'll have a pre built portfolio that your money goes into. So all you really need to do is download the app and follow the steps and boom, it's done.

Michelle Lambell [00:04:00]:

And I think that's really important because ease is much nicer for everybody, isn't it, that's what we want is something easier. And I know I've had experience of Nutmeg in the past and it does very similar, but it is slightly more costly than Pension B. And Pension B I think has the widest fund range out of most of the done for you pensions that are available out there. So if we were to turn to another option, I think one of the others is what we call a sip. So, self invested personal pension. So this is where you go to a provider and you select the options that you want, so you select the funds. And I think this is where the tricky bit comes in, because it's not quite like Pension B, where it will help you answer some questions and tell you what to invest in and give you what they call pathways. Whereas this is you're looking at funds, specifically.

Julie Flynn [00:04:57]:

What you're saying there is the self invested personal pension. It's like a more hands on version. So with the done for you thing, minimal effort on your part. All right? If we go down the self invested personal pension route, you're going to have to get a little bit more fiddly and that might appeal to you because you have heard us refer to in the past of platforms and fund supermarkets and what have you. So that's kind of get built into the pension, if you like. So examples of people that you could go to for things like that is Hargreaves Lansdown, Interactive Investor, AJ Bell Invest Center, slightly new to the Market Vanguard. So you're going to go buy their pension wrapper, which is called this self invested personal pension, and then you have to pick all the stuff that goes inside and I know that some of you are going to be right into that because you're going to love researching all the funds and building your portfolio. So the benefits of that over a done for you service is you're going to get to control what you're invested in a lot more, which means you can also control the cost, too. So you have to make more effort, but you have more control done for you. Zero effort, practically, but very little sort of ways to customize it. Although you can take different portfolios and you can change your risk and tweak it a bit, but it's not as flexible with regards your choices and options for investments as the self invested personal pension route. So we've covered done for you sips self invested personal pension. And then the third option is probably like the one that's been around the longest, it's technically called an insured pension and that's like where you go to someone like a Viva or legal in general or what have you. So it's provided by insurance companies, but once you've got the investment thing sorted out, they all kind of just work the same because a pension, right, it's just a fancy kind of savings account. Okay, so you may be familiar with an ISR. It works the same, the investment works same way as an ISR, it's just got slightly different tax treatment and you can't get at your money for a while.

Michelle Lambell [00:07:09]:

Goes back to my Quality Street, doesn't it?

Julie Flynn [00:07:12]:

Oh. Talk to us about the Quality Street, Michelle. It's that you can't have a pension episode without the Quality Street.

Michelle Lambell [00:07:17]:

So a toffee penny, your actual suite inside is your money, the money you've invested, that would stay the same in any other toffee penny. But that gold wrapper is what gives you that pension wrapper, the tax rules, everything that sits around it.

Jennifer O'Neill [00:07:34]:

So.

Michelle Lambell [00:07:36]:

It is, as you say, it wraps around it, gives it the rules and tells you how it can be dealt with going forward.

Julie Flynn [00:07:42]:

That's it. It's just another investment account that has special tax treatment. So we've explained to you the three options available to you. Go to one of the insurance companies, go to one of the app people, or go to one of the platform people. So once you've decided which route you want to take with that, does this make sense, by the way, so far? Jennifer yeah, absolutely. On behalf of the listeners, do you think they've got any questions about those three options?

Jennifer O'Neill [00:08:08]:

Possibly one, which should be, if you're either a sole trader or a limited company, does it influence what option you're able to go for or is it all the same?

Julie Flynn [00:08:17]:

That's a really good question, actually. All right, because you'd think the answer is no. All right, but I know from experience the answer is yes. But one of them so vanguard, who everybody loves because they're super cheap and they're just packed full of trackers. If you're a limited company. Let's say you're a limited company, you want to put a regular monthly amount into your pension. Vanguard is going to be a bit of a pain in the butt to do that because they will not accept direct debits from limited companies. So you would have to manually diarize and make it happen every month, put your monthly contribution in, but the bulk of them, you find it makes no difference. So I think they're the anomaly there just to be aware of. All right, so we know what your three options are. You've picked one of the options. The next thing you need to do is pick the investment so the money goes into the pension and then what's actually going to be invested in. And the thing is, we're going to use this word and we are doing an episode on it, the dreaded risk word. All right, you are going to take risk with your money, but it's not necessarily that I'm going to lose all my money type risk, it's the how much risk am I prepared to take to make how much more money. So you're going to need to understand that because that's going to help you pick the investment and you're going to be wanting to listen to one of the future episodes where we're going to talk you through how to figure out what your attitude to risk is. So once you know what your risk is, it's then picking the funds. And it's about what you want to do is you want to be diversifying. And the more that you can spread your money across different kinds of stuff, then we're reducing the risk because let's say if we just bought, invested in the UK right now, that would not be working out terribly well for you. The rest of the globe ain't doing quite so bad, but us, not so much. So that's why you're going to invest in the UK, in Europe, in Japan, in the Far East, in America, maybe some of the global emerging markets as well. You're going to invest in, in large cap, small cap bonds. You're going to have a bit of everything because you've got a bit of everything. If one thing's tanking, there'll be something else doing well. And this is the magic diversification, so we need that. So do you want to take a guess that the easiest, simplest way to achieve all this magical diversification?

Michelle Lambell [00:10:31]:

I would guess multi asset funds. Now, I might have a bit of inside knowledge with that one, but it just allows you, it's a portfolio which is invested in all those different asset classes that Julie spoke about and often they will also be aimed at whatever risk level you are. So you will have what they call a risk targeted multi asset fund.

Julie Flynn [00:10:55]:

Yeah. So that is the simplest, easiest way to do this, right, is pick one of those three things that we said at the start and get yourself a multi asset fund that's at the risk level for you, and you've basically got the bulk of the job done there. If you're one of those people that want to get right into it and be building your own portfolio, then you want the Sip option and you're going to be wanting to do a lot more research on funds. So by now you've established, which route am I going down? Starting to figure out how do I want to invest it? We're going to be picking a multi asset fund, aren't we? Next step is just like, pick an amount you want to save each month. So it's like, what can you commit to? All right, pick a figure that's comfortable right now.

Michelle Lambell [00:11:44]:

Yes.

Julie Flynn [00:11:44]:

You could sit down with one of us and tell us what your long term aspirations are. And I can sit there and I can tell you, okay, well, based on what you want and when you want it, you need to be put in an X this month. No. 20 years of doing this, I haven't met many people that can afford to do that.

Michelle Lambell [00:12:01]:

See, I did that on myself and I was very scared after I read that and decided to choose a very much lower amount.

Julie Flynn [00:12:09]:

So the starting point is just put in what you can afford now, pick a number, commit to it, and have a plan for reviewing it and increasing it. So I think I've mentioned before, and my magic spreadsheet has gone down very well. For those of you that got in touch for it, put a note in your diary. So let's say, Jennifer, if you were going to start a pension today and then you've picked your number that you're going to put in, Jennifer, what we need to do is make a note in your calendar in three months time to ask yourself the question, can I afford to put a bit more in? So even if you start on 100 pound and in three months you go, right, well, actually, I can afford 110, and then just have that quarterly that you're just reviewing and asking yourself, can I afford any more? Even if it's the next time you go, well, you know what, I'm going to go from 310 to 311. It doesn't matter the increments that you do it in, just keep make sure that you put it up a little bit as often as you can and just commit to that. So, Jennifer, do you have any questions? Because Jennifer is playing the part of the listeners today because she's our mortgage expert.

Jennifer O'Neill [00:13:23]:

I would say probably not massively. It's good if you can go back and review it. And it's easy to do so to change every quarter, because if not, people will start with 50 or 100 pounds and then never look at it. And they'll be 20 years in knowing that actually it isn't quite going to get them to where they want to be in retirement. I think the only question I'd have just now is what if you've got one from your previous employer? It's usually something like Aviva. If you become self employed, does it make sense just to keep paying into that one that already exists, or should.

Michelle Lambell [00:13:52]:

You set up something separate?

Julie Flynn [00:13:54]:

Okay, that's a really good question and it depends how involved you want to get. If we need the path of least resistance, because there's a danger that if we send you to do something else, you're going to do nothing, then stick with that one. All right? If you're quite invested, pardon the pun, and getting this right, what you would maybe do is have a look at the Aviva one and the fund choice versus one of the other options, and then have a look at the costs. So if you've got a viva, let's say for argument's sake, charging you 1.5%, and you know, you can go to the market and you can get it for 1%, then go to the market and get it cheaper. All right? So when you're trying to work out if it's cheaper, what you're looking at is all the costs that might be involved, the cost of the fund, and if there's any provider platform type costs as well, add them together.

Jennifer O'Neill [00:14:46]:

Is that easy to find on their website, so they make that quick, transparent.

Julie Flynn [00:14:50]:

So on an Insured pension, the chances are it's just going to be the fund cost. That's probably the only cost you're looking for. Double check with them. There's a plan fee because some of them might have, but the bulk of them don't. If you go to someone like the Done for you services, it will be all in charge. So you've got the Done for you percentage versus the Aviva percentage, or another life company not picking on Aviva, so they're quite easy to compare. If you start going down the self invested personal pension route, it's a little bit more complex to compare because you're going to have to factor in the cost of the fund, the cost of the provider, and then there might be trading charges as well. Well, we have a lot of fun running the cafe. The reason we do it is to reach as many women as possible to empower them around money. So if you know a woman who would benefit from feeling financially empowered, you can help them and us by sharing this episode with them. By the way, if anybody wants the super clever spreadsheet that highly motivates you to increase your pension contribution, drop me a message on Instagram, I will still share it with you. So that's where we're up to so far. I think what would be really helpful is obviously we're talking about just picking them out and start with it. Okay. If you're sitting there going, oh, well, I've got 50,000 pound, I can start with that. No, we need to step back for a second. Okay. Michelle, do you want to talk us through of the maximums that people can put in?

Michelle Lambell [00:16:23]:

So, yeah, unfortunately, there is a maximum that we can pay into our pensions. It's called our annual allowance. And we can put in up to 100% of our earnings, or 60,000 pound, whichever is lower. Now, last year, that was 40,000 pounds. So pre 6 April this year, it was 40,000 pounds, but the Chancellor moved that up to 60,000 pounds in the recent budget. So it does give quite a bit of scope for most people to be able to pay in the equivalent. But you have to also consider whether you're paying into any other pensions. So it could be that something that's been a long standing contributions you've been making that you may have forgotten about because they're small and you didn't increase them. It's just something that sat there. But that is what you can pay into pensions overall, in all of your pensions. And if you're a limited company, you can pay 60,000 pounds, the company pays it on behalf of its employee, which would generally be your sole director of the company. And that has to meet something attest what they call wholly and exclusively. But basically, if it's part of your remuneration as a director of that company, that will pass that test quite easily. And again, it covers all the pensions that go in. So they've been a bit more generous with recently because those limits have increased, which gives you a bit more leeway with that. If you were ever to contribute over your annual allowance, there is a tax charge in that you don't receive tax relief on the excess that has gone into the pension.

Jennifer O'Neill [00:18:08]:

I'd say the only question I would have from that is, what if you are a guest director and the company pays in the 60,000 and then you classing yourself as the employee under the company also paying the money? Would you get the tax break for that or is it only based on that 160,000?

Michelle Lambell [00:18:25]:

It's 160,000, so the employer is making it on the employee's behalf, so it still counts as your contribution.

Julie Flynn [00:18:33]:

Right, fantastic. So just to clarify then, let's say I'm a company director. My earnings are 20,000 pound a year, but my limited company, even though I only earn 20,000 pound, which is 100% of my earnings, the company can pay in the 60,000 for me. Yes, limited company directors, because we don't always have the highest salaries. So this is as a limited company, this is a good way you want the company to make the contribution for you.

Michelle Lambell [00:19:02]:

And the other reason you want the company to make the contribution for you is because it is an allowable expense against corporation tax, so it reduces your profits.

Julie Flynn [00:19:12]:

All right, cool. This is getting us onto the sexy bit. Right, so all you business owners, you're like, I know I'm meant to be doing pension stuff, but I've not done it. Accountant says it's a good idea, but I don't really get why. Michelle, do you want to talk us through why we all bang on about why pensions are so good for the self employed and for company directors?

Michelle Lambell [00:19:33]:

Yeah, because that contribution will reduce your company profits, whatever you so if you make the 60,000 and you have profits in excess of 60,000, it will reduce your corporation tax accordingly. There is something to be aware of that if you don't have company profits in excess of that amount. So if you were to pay in 60,000, you need to have company profits of 60,000 generally in that year. I would always go and say, just speak to your accountant, just to make sure if there's something you're unsure about. But having it as an allowable expense, it's the most tax efficient way of doing it, rather than taking it yourself and you being taxed on that money before you pay it back in because you're getting tax relief for the highest rate.

Julie Flynn [00:20:20]:

Yeah. So I think that's the thing in all the textbooks that we've had to read and all the exams we've had to set through all the years, there's always a question about what is the most efficient way to extract profit from a limited company? And you sit down there and we do revisit this question every so often because tax changes. Right. But if you're sitting there as a limited company director and you can see the profit in the business and you're like, how do I get that? To me, paying as little tax as possible. Well, if I take it as a salary, I've got to pay income tax and I've got to pay national insurance. If I take out as a dividend, I've got to pay income tax, I've got to pay corporation tax. If you send into the pension, no national insurance, no corporation tax, no income tax. In fact, you've reduced your corporation tax bill. Happy days.

Michelle Lambell [00:21:10]:

Oh, definitely. And there is another rule which goes alongside this called carry forward. So as long as you are a member of any registered pension scheme, so it could be an old employer scheme you've got sat there, you haven't paid into for years and you haven't used your annual allowance in those years. You can carry that forward three years and make a lump sum contribution. The only caveat to that is you must have earnings of the same level to make that contribution. So if you carried forward and you want to make 100,000 pound contribution because you haven't used your annual allowance, you must have earnings or profits generally. To make that again, you need to check with your accountant, but it's a very valuable tool that allows you to use past unused allowances.

Julie Flynn [00:22:03]:

Nice. Okay, so that's us. We've talked about limited company directors and how the tax works for them and pension. What about someone that's self employed, a sole trader? What are the tax benefits for them of putting money in the pension so.

Michelle Lambell [00:22:18]:

They would get tax relief on the money that goes into the pension. And it also has the benefit of reducing so you can bring your earnings down from a higher rate tax band to a basic rate tax band by making a pension contribution.

Julie Flynn [00:22:35]:

All right, so all of this is basically reducing the amount of tax we have to pay. Yes, these are the reasons we do it. Jennifer, what are you thinking? You're sitting there thinking, God, these pensions are damn sexy, I'm going to get me one of them.

Jennifer O'Neill [00:22:51]:

Well, I think if you're able to if you're a limited company and you are able to use some of the apps or go through advice and set things up and save the corporation tax and everything on it, then that's got to be appealing. And certainly if you can get into the habit of doing it whenever you're a sole trader, from whenever you first start out, it can make all the difference to how much you're actually going to have in your pension.

Julie Flynn [00:23:10]:

Bot I have a sneaky suspicion that this is although you don't get involved with pensioners, this is something that comes up in conversation for you, because when you're having the conversation with people and they're getting the mortgages sorted out, do they sometimes ask you about pensions? Absolutely.

Jennifer O'Neill [00:23:25]:

We'll get a lot of people because as part of our budget planner, we've got to see if they've got any private pensions and what they're paying in. So we make sure that things are affordable for them. And we get a lot of people that are self employed that don't have anything. And they've maybe been clients for years and they still don't have anything. And they come back and they still don't have anything. And I think it's been on that big, huge to do list and just keeps getting pushed down because they actually don't really know how to do it or the costs involved with doing it. And I think they also find that I know there comes a point whenever people should be seeking advice, but for people who are just maybe starting off a pension of 100 pounds a month, they'll tend to find that most financial advisors won't hugely entertain what they're able to do and how they set it up.

Julie Flynn [00:24:07]:

Right, so what else do you think those people would like to know?

Jennifer O'Neill [00:24:11]:

Probably a bit of a pretty much this a good step by step on how to do it. Should they be speaking to their accountant first? How much should they be putting in and probably at what point should they be seeking advice?

Julie Flynn [00:24:23]:

Okay, well, I think when should you seek advice is if it's getting more complicated, if everything we've said you're like, okay, I can do that, then just do it. If there's larger sums of money involved, then speaking to one of us is without a doubt going to end up saving you a shed load of tax. So whatever we charge you, and let's say we charge you a couple of thousand pounds for whatever we're going to do, all right? If we're charging that amount of money, it probably means we're going to end up saving you double treble quadruple that in tax. So the savings that we deliver really dwarf whatever we charge for what we do, I think. Is that fair to say, Michelle?

Michelle Lambell [00:25:05]:

Yeah, I would definitely say that's fair to say. And I've had clients who've come across and what seems to be a relatively simple thing that they would like to solve, actually, once you delve deeper, there's lots of other things that a pension can help with and I think it is the most tax efficient thing we can recommend to a client. There is nothing else which beats that. And the other thing I was going to mention as well is if you are claiming child benefit, once you go over 50,000 pound, you start to reduce or lose your child benefit. And once you get to 60,000, you've lost your child benefit and that generally comes back to you in the form of a tax charge. Once you've done your self assessment return or whatever, by making a pension contribution as same way as you can go from higher rate down to basic rate, if you make a contribution to bring your earnings under 50,000 pound, you get rid of that tax charge. You can then cleat the child benefit. So I think it's a very valuable tool and it's one that I've used with many clients who, as you were saying, Jennifer, they feel that it's a very small they only make small contributions to their pension and their circumstances are quite normal and ordinary. They don't earn extraordinary amounts of money. But this child benefit tax trap actually captures an awful lot of people, and people don't know about it either. So the ability to bring your income under that 50,000 level is so valuable for many people because one, you are saving for your retirement, you're getting tax efficient growth on that money, but you're also getting rid of that tax charge again. So it's another tax saving. Yeah.

Julie Flynn [00:26:44]:

And I'd say that I think that's basically what a pension is to somebody that's run their own business. It's a way of moving your profit around to somewhere else, but you get to benefit from it.

Michelle Lambell [00:26:54]:

Yeah, if we leave it where it.

Julie Flynn [00:26:56]:

Is, the tax man's coming for it. If we move it into a pension, tax man's not coming and you get to keep up. Okay, all right, you can't have it today because you're still working. But I think the thing about pensions is they are so incredibly flexible. You know what, I know that some of the stories I hear sometimes from people that they are suspicious of pensions and it might be that their parents had a bad experience. With a pension, all right? And quite often, these bad experiences you can track back to annuities and the choices that were made with annuities. Annuities are not a compulsion anymore with a pension. You can just treat it almost a bit like your ISO when you come to retirement in that you can dip in and out of it. It will be taxable, unlike an Isa, but it's so incredibly flexible and it'll give you so many options. And let's say you start out with one of the done for you pensions and later on you want something else, you can move them around. Or you start with one provider and you're like, I don't like them. Or something new and shiny comes to market, you can move it. You're not stuck with the one company, right? You can't access it until later in life. So I think you're 55 right now, but that shift into 67, it's 57.

Michelle Lambell [00:28:12]:

And then it will be going 57.

Julie Flynn [00:28:14]:

58, and that's from 2028, I think, hasn't her. Yeah.

Michelle Lambell [00:28:19]:

So I've just encouraged is the right way of putting it, my daughter to sign up to her workplace pension scheme. So she's 18. So she sort of looked at me and she was very excited that she had 50 pound in her pension pot and it had gone up by 20 p overnight. And we were sort of having a joke and she said, so when can I have that money, Mum? And I went, so you'll be 58. And she just looked at me and went, that's 40 years. I said, I know, but think how much it will grow between now and then. See, I get very excited about that because clearly that's what I do day in, day out. But she just looked at me and went, I'm going now.

Julie Flynn [00:28:57]:

All right, well done her for setting up a fast pension. That's super exciting. Hopefully we've kind of given you some of the simple steps that you need to be able to go and set up your pension. Jennifer, is there anything else that you would add or that you would ask?

Jennifer O'Neill [00:29:12]:

I think the last thing I would ask is are there any sort of calculators or anything that you could recommend that are able to kind of forecast if someone put in 100 pounds now and they left it for the next 30 years with kind of pension taxes, it is now what that would look like. Because for someone putting in 100 pounds a month, they maybe don't actually know what that could look like for retirement.

Julie Flynn [00:29:32]:

Right, tell you what I'm going to do then. In the show notes, I'm going to add some quick calculations for you. I'm also going to add a link to the compound interest calculator, which will help you turbocharge and sort of fast forward a hundred pounds 20 years in the future. And as I said before, drop me a message on Instagram if you want a copy of my spreadsheet that does do this. And what it will do is it'll let you play with the figures as well. What if I did put it up a little bit each year? Because I think anybody's listened regularly knows that mine goes up by 10% each year and that just means that it just turbocharges that you'll be blown away. So it's good for motivating you at the start of the journey when you're putting in 50 pound a month and you're like, well, what's the point in that? I'm never going to get anywhere. So this is an essential bit to get you to buy into the whole process and to stick with it. So hopefully that helps. Okay. I think we've covered everything there, haven't we?

Michelle Lambell [00:30:25]:

I think so, yeah. There's nothing else that we've got on here. I think the only other thing I would say is if you're a sole trader and you're contributing, when that money goes into the pension, you're going to get basic rate tax relief. It's really important that if you are a higher rate taxpayer that you do claim that back and you make sure that you tell them all about your pension contributions because you would be able to get higher rate tax relief at 40%.

Julie Flynn [00:30:55]:

Yeah, absolutely. You're asking the question when get a financial advisor involved. The other thing as well is if you've got lots of old pensions knocking about, all right, they can have some weird and wacky stuff bolted onto them. That's probably the time to call one of us and to have a look at what you've got. And it might make sense to consolidate it, it might make sense to leave it alone. But really, truthfully, it's only us that can figure that out. Otherwise you risk either giving up valuable benefits or making a mistake. So just do a quick summary, then figure out which route you want to go down. Do you want to go with an insured pension? Do you want a done for you service or do you want a self invested personal pension? Pick a fund, pick an investment thing, figure out your risk, get one of those multi asset things, figure out how much you can save each month, commit to it, do it monthly. By the way, I know that you're sitting there thinking, oh, well, I'll wait till near my year end and I'll see what kind of year I've had, okay? Years of working with business owners tells me, do it monthly, commit to it monthly. So do that. Commit to it and put in place some kind of review so that you're looking at it and you're thinking, how much can I put it up by? And as Michelle said, make sure you're claiming back all the tax that you're due. All right? That is our whistle stop tour of pensions for business owners. We hope you found it useful if you have. If you do, go and set up a pension as a result of this. Do me a favour, drop us a message and let us know because we love hearing stories like that. So you can get me on Instagram. So just drop me a message if you want the spreadsheet. Other thing I would say as well, if this has been useful, you know what's coming, go and leave us a review, please. It really does make a difference and helps us reach other people, but I think that's everything. So Michelle, thank you for your expert contribution as our expert pension person.

Michelle Lambell [00:32:53]:

No, you're welcome. It's nice to be able to share it with other people and spread the pension love.

Julie Flynn [00:32:59]:

Jennifer, are you feeling the pension love?

Jennifer O'Neill [00:33:01]:

I am, yeah. A lot of clarity and a lot of love.

Julie Flynn [00:33:04]:

All right. So hopefully everybody else is getting it now that these things don't have to be complicated and you feel empowered that you can go and do it. So it just remains for me to say thank you to Jennifer and Michelle for joining me. Thank you for listening, and until next time, take care of yourself. Thanks for listening to the women of Money Cafe. If you've enjoyed it, please leave us a review. It really does help. And also, please note the podcast is for education and information only and doesn't constitute personal financial advice. Please reach out to one of us or any of the other fantastic financial advisors in the UK for that kind of help. You close.