State Pension deferment philosophy ....

uk1

Just to sort of round this off with where the thread and observations of others have taken us .....

It occured to me that basically (a) there was no compelling need for us to take our SP now and (b) the philosphical criteria of deciding when to take it would be based on when is our "cash pot" reached a point at which we no longer wish to see it depleted. That means we would have the cash pot for our self-insured emergency health care, our travel which sadly entails the wife always being seated as close to the pointy end as possible, if we needed it all plus the extra buffer of the second home which is pretty valuable. Using that simply criteria we need not bother about thinking of this choice now or taking either of our deferred pension until probably 2022 - or even later.

I had nothing better to do last night having arrived home after a 14 hour flight and body clock was yet to be in sync so I did a far easier deferrment calculator which is more simple and elegant than my earlier one and seems to produce the correct results when I check the calculation manually. That doesn't mean it is right of course ...

This shows that in 2022 my wife should get her SP and roughly 115.6% again in deferrment pension and I will get 68.2% deferrment pension.

If SP continues to increase by 2.5% per year ... and no other assumption seems pertinent today .... then this should give us joint state pensions of around £27.6k to add to our occupational and private pensions and the pittance interest ie almost zero remaining from our cash pot. This will give us it seems more than we need.

I thought I'd share where the thoughts expressed here have provisionally taken us until I come up with a more cunning plan.

Thanks again for all the contributions.