Over the past several weeks, McCrea Financial Services have highlighted the benefits of ensuring your pension planning is set up and invested most appropriately in line with your personal circumstances.  

By regularly reviewing your retirement provision you can make sure your pensions are set up in the most efficient manner to facilitate a comfortable retirement for you and ensure your family would benefit if you were to pass away in the meantime.

We talked about the importance of an expression of wish and lump sum death benefits of a pension.   For the person who owns the pension, the main advantage of this is that it tells the trustees of the scheme who the benefits should be paid to when the member is no longer around and considers any implications such as inheritance tax. 

One of the other aspects we highlighted recently was that of lost or forgotten pensions which affect 1 in 8 savers. McCrea Financial services offer a full review service where we track these down and provide a detailed summary of activity together with advice on what to do to with forgotten investments, pensions and savings plans.

Finally, we presented a case study looking at the process of pension consolidation for one client, concentrating on how best to utilise the range of benefits his different pensions provided including tax free cash sums and guaranteed annuity rates.  The outcome was quite different to that which our client had envisaged but which has provided a very positive whole life plan going forward.

At McCreas we have specialist Independent Pensions and Investment Advisers.  If you would like to meet with them to review your pension arrangements,  please contact us to make a free no-obligation initial appointment by email or by calling us on 0141 572 1340.