Planning for the future 

Do you know how much you’ll need when you retire?

A national campaign called Pay Your Pension Some Attention launched this autumn and it focuses on getting “financially fit” for your future.

Linking up with this we’ve been talking to members who are retired and getting closer to retirement to get their thoughts on what they’d say to younger members.

We spoke to Jon, who used to work in Estates, at Manchester University, who recently retired early aged 62 and Harriet aged, 55 who through some effective retirement planning, is on the cusp of early retirement. She’s currently working in HR at Cranfield University.

We asked both members about retirement planning, where to start and what to think about and both discussed thinking about how much you’ll need.

To this Harriet said: “The starting point for working out how much you're going to spend is how much you're actually spending at the moment."

She added you should then be “Looking forward, are any of those expenses going to change in the future like children leaving home? At what point are those going to change?”

Both discussed the Pensions UK estimates, which suggest a single person would need £31,700 for a moderate lifestyle and £13,400 for a frugal retirement.

Jon, who is now experiencing retirement felt the lower end would mean you’d need to rely more on savings, particularly if you’ve retired before the state pension starts. He said: “I think if you're looking at the lower end. I would say you're going to need some money behind you just to bridge up, certainly until you get your state pension.”

When it comes to other planning guidance they’d offer other younger members Jon said: “You need to get into it a little bit deeper and think about your own finances, what USS will offer, when are you thinking of going…the planning for me…is really, really critical.

“USS is really good at having reasonably accurate modelling tools - so you can get a good forward position in terms of your ongoing contributions and potential retirement dates.”

From that planning stage Jon talked about working out what you might need and then saving to get where you need to be. Jon said: “Making additional voluntary contributions, I think that's definitely something to consider. So, what I did in the latter years, I put some extra money in because I was working out the maximum lump sum that you can take out based on your contributions.”

He said: “So for me, you know, it was making early decisions about saving some cash.”