00:00 When it comes to your retirement, you may see the adverts and read the articles, but
00:05 you might not know quite the path to take when working towards your future.
00:10 Now according to new research, 59% of those aged 45 to 54 have already taken action to
00:15 save more for retirement.
00:17 And these findings showed that the most common step this age group has already taken to boost
00:22 their retirement savings is to spend less money on holidays and luxury items.
00:26 Speaking to Head of Research, Analysis and Policy at Phoenix Insights, Patrick Thompson,
00:31 he said he considered that people do seem willing to reprioritise their current spending
00:35 to ensure they can support themselves in the future.
00:39 People on average save £88,000 into their pension pot, but to have a moderate level
00:45 of income in retirement, they'd need to save about another £160,000 by the time they retire.
00:50 So there is a bit of a gap there, but what we found, and I found really reassuring from
00:54 this research in particular, was that 6 out of 10 people in this age group were already
00:59 doing something to save more for their retirement.
01:02 For other people it was bigger things, it was thinking of moving to a higher paid job,
01:06 or it might be about downsizing a home if they no longer needed all the space.
01:10 So a range of things that people were doing, but I think positive in a lot of respects
01:14 that people were taking positive steps.
01:16 Based on Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association estimates, over £22,000 could be the minimum
01:22 standard of living in retirement, and it's thought a retired couple now need £19,900
01:27 a year in order to survive.
01:29 With research finding those aged 45-54 currently have £88,000 in savings, what measures should
01:36 we put in place?
01:37 There's some really good free information, advice and guidance out there.
01:41 So government provide free reviews of your pension, through PensionWise, from the age
01:46 of 50.
01:48 You can also check how much you might have saved up in terms of your National Insurance
01:52 contributions for your state pension as well, because we know the state pension is a really
01:56 important, crucial part of people's retirement savings, and that hopefully supplemented with
02:01 some of your private savings will be a really important thing for your future.
02:05 And then it's actually thinking about, at age 45-55, there's still a fair chunk of your
02:10 working life to go.
02:12 And often we talk to people and we do research and we find that people, they think they've
02:15 done the same job for all this time, that's who they are and that's what they can do.
02:19 We've heard some fantastic stories about how people can change careers, they can retrain,
02:23 upskill, it's definitely never too late to do that.
02:27 It doesn't help to worry about it.
02:29 It's good to think about it, and actually if you can learn a little bit more about where
02:34 your pension is, even how much you've got in it or the type of pension you have, that's
02:38 a fantastic first step.
02:40 But this is something, yeah, definitely across our whole lives that we need to be thinking
02:43 about.
02:44 It comes a bit more, a bit closer to home when you're reaching perhaps your mid-50s
02:49 and you're thinking actually, when I retire, isn't too far away, I've got this long to
02:52 save, I want to work for this much longer or not.
02:56 That's perhaps when it comes home a bit more and people take a lot more attention.
02:59 But thinking about it a little bit throughout your life, I would say certainly is a good
Comments