The fourth area you need to conquer if you are going to create a financially free future is your pension. So, what does that actually mean? As and when you reach the point where you want to stop work, we need to find ways to turn the capital you’ve saved into an income you can live off for the rest of your life. That is your pension. The choices you have available to you at this stage can be confusing and daunting, but also can make the difference between a broke or a brilliant retirement. You could of course hand all those savings over to one company in exchange for a low but guaranteed income for the rest of your life, but these annuities assume you are as likely to climb Kilimanjaro at 95, as you are at 65. We all know that is unlikely to be the case, and most people want to spend more at the start of retirement than they do towards the end. The old way of creating a pension also meant that if you don’t live long into retirement, you would miss out on your hard-earned savings. That just doesn’t seem right. In order to help our clients at this stage in their life, we created The DREAM Income Strategy to ensure that they maximise their hard-fought savings and turn them into a flexible, dynamic income that can deliver what they want, when they want it. As an example, I had a client who had been forced to retire early. He was extremely upset when we first met him, because, whilst forced early retirement was not his fault, he was sure he had let his family down. He had not saved enough or in the right way to create the retirement he had promised his family. He was upset that their retirement would not be the later life had envisaged and he was worried that they would run out of money as they grew older. Using the tools and systems in The DREAM Income Strategy we were able to show him how to maximise his savings, so that he could create the later life he wanted, he could deliver on the promises he had made, and he and his family would have the confidence to enjoy that later life. The DREAM income strategy can give you the choice of how much income you need for that particular year, which means you can draw what you need without paying more tax than you need to, and still do all those amazing things you’ve dreamed of. Most of our industry tries to create a flat and rigid income strategy, which leaves you unable to do what you want when you want to. The DREAM income strategy will help you turn your hard-earned savings into fluid and accessible pension, which will facilitate your own ‘dream retirement’.
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