Oh yes ! It’s time to break out that Whitesnake album again and quote “And here I go again on my own, going down the only road I’ve ever known”.
I’m not sure that the next lines would have really worked for David Coverdale if he’d tried “like a personal finance correspondent I was born to bring out the tried and tested “Government to attack/remove/reduce/raid pension tax free cash” trope but I’ve made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time getting it into an article on the run up to a statement by the Chancellor”.
Apart from the fact that they don’t really scan properly, I don’t think that even those of my friends at the time who have gone on to be accountants would have found themselves singing along to that one.
I only have to go back to October to find the last time that we had these sort of rumours running around the press. My main gripe being that every time this happens it scares people into doing things that may not be in their own best interest.
In general, we believe that the point at which you should begin to take money out of a pension is the point at which you need that money to spend to support your lifestyle. That’s the whole point of a pension and, for most people it’s the best way to do it. There are exceptions, such as actually reaching some form of limit, or because you have more than you can ever use and it’s one option when it comes to giving money to your children or grandchildren. However, in principle, you take money out because there is a good reason for doing so.
This is despite the fact that, to date, every time there has been a reduction in one of the pension allowances there has been the opportunity to protect against that reduction. In some cases in the past that protection has meant giving up future pension funding, but there are generally compromises in most things in life and the positives in those instances would have outweighed the negatives.
So my plea to all the Telegraph readers out there is simple, ignore your newspaper and talk to your financial planner instead.