Transcript
Martin Upton
It's a very important starting point, when it comes to pension planning, which is, do some budgeting, first of all. You've got to work out, how much reasonably, you need to have per week, per month and per year, in retirement,to have a satisfactory, and hopefully, a good retirement and a good lifestyle in retirement. That's what you've got to do, first of all, some budgeting. Any tips when you're going about that budgeting process? Budgeting for life and retirement.
Jonquil Lowe
Yes. There's some interesting research that's put out, every year, by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in conjunction with Loughbrough and York Universities. They publish something called the mimimum income standard, and what they do is go to real people and they so ok, what are the things that you think are needed to have a basic lifestyle in the sense of not uncomfortable, but not extravagant, either. What they came out with, for a single pensioner, is that they need to spend about £260 per week, so that's what? £13,000 a year basically, so you might take that as ok thats a kind of starting point, but if you've got interesting hobbies or other needs, then you'd probably want more than that, but that gives a baseline to start working from.
Martin Upton
Yeah. That's the baseline you need to start working from, but then you really need to ask yourself the question, 'What are my essential non-essentials'? 'What would make it a miserable retirement, for me, if I couldn't do...?' even if by doing that thing, it doesn't really stop me living reasonably comfortably, eating well, being warm, etc. For example, if you couldn't afford to pay for your golf club fees, in retirement, would that really wreck your retirement? Similarly, if you couldn't afford to pay for gym fees, or a season ticket for football club, do those sorts of things really tell you, 'I can't really retire without doing those things without my retirement actually being not the retirement which I want?' so, you've got to add on those non-essentials to those essentials to work out what your base income is in retirement, and work back from there.