What you do now, could make a big impact on what you’ll get in the future
How recent do these things feel?
1990: The first Home Alone film comes out
1991: The world wide web became a thing and the first ever website went live
1992: A referendum to end apartheid took place in South Africa
1995: Everton win the FA Cup
1996: The Spice Girls become a phenomenon
1997: Tony Blair’s New Labour wins the election
2000: The Harry Potter books blew up, with people queuing overnight for The Goblet of Fire
2001: Apple launches the iPod, marking the end for the poor, old Walkman
2002: The Euro goes into circulation
2004: We get to share on Facebook for the first time
2006: We get to overshare on Twitter for the first time
2007: Apple launches the iPhone
2008: Obama wins the US election
2010: The Tories and Liberal Democrats form a coalition government, following the first Hung Parliament since the seventies
2012: The London Olympics takes place
2014: The Ice Bucket Challenge sweeps the world
2017: Trump’s first inauguration
2019: Greggs launch vegan sausage rolls
2022: Elon Musk buys Twitter
Some of them probably still feel pretty fresh, right? Recent ones might even feel like yesterday. That’s because time flies, the older we get, so all those things, that you think you can put off for a bit, like your pension and planning for retirement, well… maybe, you should look at sooner because time’s ticking faster than you might think.
Here’s our top four tips on where to start:
- Think about when you want to retire
- Check how much you’ll need, using the Pension UK retirement living standards.
- Think about the different pensions that you have paid into over the course of your working life and do a pension tracing exercise to uncover any you may have forgotten about.
- Use the Benefit Calculator in My USS to see what you might get from your USS pension and think about that in the context of any other savings and pensions you have. How does it match up to what income you’re aiming to have in retirement? If you’re not on target think about what you can do to get there, whether that’s paying more into a pension, rejoining USS, if you’re still eligible or looking at other savings vehicles to help build what you need in retirement.
Published: 15 January 2026