Salary Sacrifice

jamesd

For B you should take the payment into a bank account of your own and give to your wife into a bank account of her own from which she then makes the contribution. You are not restricted to £7,500 for gifts from you to her because done this way it is not recycling into the scheme of the person taking the lump sum and that is what the rules govern. Similarly, she can take tax free lump sums and give you money that you can use for pension contributions.

The 7%, 14% and <15% of pots values aren't a factor in any of the rues relating to recycling. Those are based on a percentage of the tax free lump sum that is taken, not a percentage of the whole pot.

C is efficient but not as efficient as taking more tax free lump sum and giving it to your wife, depends in part on her earnings. You can do C and also give her tax free lump sum money if that is desirable. With C it's clear that the tax free lump sum for you is going into the ISA and not funding the ongoing contributions so that's fine.

For wife you can do give her money, she makes pension contribution and gets tax relief, she takes tax free lump sum. So you boost the value by the extra tax relief. She couldn't take it all out without triggering a reduced money purchase annual allowance from 40k to 10k for her.

You can also just take a tax free lump sum and give your wife money that she then uses to fund half of shared expenses as a way to subsidise salary sacrifice if you need to do that.

agent69

Salary sacrifice = no brainer.

Put as much in as you can afford.The only issue is you are probably starting a bit late in life.