Who we serve
You have pensions, savings and a date in mind — what you need now is the plan that turns them into a retirement income. We help you work out what retirement will cost, whether the money is enough, and how to draw it as an income designed to last.
How we help
Most people arrive with pensions, ISAs and savings built up over decades — sometimes across two names, sometimes long forgotten. We start by putting them in one picture: what you have, what it is likely to provide, and where the gaps are.
We plan how much to draw, from which accounts, and in what order — making full use of the allowances available to you, and of both sets where you are planning as a couple. The plan is written down, and we explain the reasoning behind it.
Retirement rarely goes exactly to plan — health, family and markets all have a say. We review the plan with you regularly and adjust it as your circumstances change.
The first question
This is what almost everyone wants to know first, and the honest answer is that it depends far more on what you spend than on what you have. Two people with identical pensions can be comfortable and short respectively, and the difference is the cost of the life each of them wants to lead. So that is where we start — not with the pots, but with the spending.
Once the spending is roughly known, the arithmetic becomes tractable. We model your income and capital year by year, allow for inflation, and show you what the pattern looks like — including in the years when a poor run of returns arrives at an inconvenient moment. You get to see how much room the plan has before anything has to change.
A projection of this kind is a way of testing a plan, not a prediction of what will happen. Its value is in what it reveals about the plan's tolerances: whether it survives a bad decade, what a year of care costs would do to it, how much you could give away without regretting it. We would rather show you the honest range than a single reassuring number.
Where the income comes from
Retirement income rarely comes from one place. It is usually assembled from several — a pension or two, ISAs, savings, sometimes a rental property or a share of a business, and the state pension, which starts on a date the rules set rather than one you choose. Where a final-salary pension is part of the picture it already pays an income, and the plan is built around it rather than over it.
Because each of those is taxed differently, the order you draw them in changes how much of your own money you keep. Taking the tax-free cash a pension allows, deciding how much taxable income to take in a given year, using an ISA to top up without adding to that income, and where you are a couple, using both sets of allowances rather than one — these are the levers, and the right combination is specific enough to your circumstances that any rule of thumb would be worth ignoring.
It also matters what is left behind. Pensions and ISAs pass on under different rules from each other, so the account you spend first and the account you preserve are decisions about your estate as much as about your income. We plan the two together rather than in sequence.
Tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances and may change in future, and the Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate tax advice.
Guarantee or flexibility
At some point the choice arrives between buying a guaranteed income and drawing an income from an invested pot. Neither is automatically the right one, and the industry's habit of treating one as modern and the other as old-fashioned has not helped anybody decide.
What you buy with a guaranteed income is certainty: it arrives whatever markets do and however long you live, which are precisely the two things nobody can plan around. What you give up is access to the capital and, usually, most of what would have been left to your family. Drawing from an invested pot reverses both — you keep the flexibility and whatever remains, and you carry the investment risk and the longevity risk yourself.
In practice the answer is often not either, but some of each: enough guaranteed income to cover the bills that must be paid regardless, with the rest invested and drawn flexibly. Where the line falls depends on what your fixed costs are, what other guaranteed income you already have, and how much movement you can live with in the part that is invested.
Investing near retirement
Once you start drawing an income, the order of returns matters as much as the average — a poor run in the early years does damage that a later recovery may not undo. Selling units to fund an income while prices are down converts a fall into a permanent reduction in the pot, which is why the same average return can support one retirement and not another.
That is the reason our portfolios aim for attractive long-term returns with lower volatility, through wider diversification than the typical stocks-and-bonds portfolio. A portfolio that moves less gives an income plan fewer bad years to survive.
Francois, our principal, spent more than twenty years managing money for institutions and ultra-high-net-worth families before founding the firm. That experience sits behind every retirement plan we build.
The value of investments and the income from them can fall as well as rise and you may get back less than you originally invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.