Pension quandry

Eliza_2

Hello all, I would be very grateful for your thoughts and any help you can offer with my query. I'm 55, separated. Until around a year ago I was working in a fairly well paid job in the public sector. I decided to leave to do the usual and spend more time with family and just enjoy myself, rather than work in a job with unpaid extra hours and over 3 hours commuting a day. I have been lucky and found 2 part time jobs nearby which still use the skills I originally went into my profession to use, rather than constant management meetings etc. So it's been really successful and given me the most wonderful quality of life now that I never had before. However, they both pay very poorly. When deciding to do this I worked out how much I needed to earn to live on but now I'm finding myself dipping into my savings more and more just for ordinary unavoidable things rather than luxuries and the savings are running perilously low. So I need to find a way of increasing my income. A higher paid job is the obvious solution but I really don't want to go back to where I was, so have generally discounted that. The other option would be to take my pension early. I have a collection of bits of pension from public sector jobs- local government, the NHS and Civil Service. Would it be a bad idea to do that to increase my income? My mother, who is in her 80s will leave me around 250k when she dies (though this is unlikely to be for a good few years yet fortunately) but that money could then be invested to provide a pension eventually. What would be the best thing to do? Thanks for your time. Liz

EdInvestor

Suggest you write to all the pension schemes you are in and ask what terms they would offer for early retirement ( particularly in reduction of lump sum and actual pension).Then you can see what you would be giving up and judge whether it's worthwhile to get a lower amount paid for a larger number of years.