47 and no pension

Spreadsheetman

It would be a good idea to work backward from the amount of income and capital you will need in retirement and then see what is needed to create a pension that will support it. I suspect that a LA pension from doing 20 years there will be the easiest way of covering it by far, but you need to do the calculations for yourself so you can make informed decisions.

Mick70

You can still build up a fair amount over 15-20 years and you will get state pension at 68

steampowered

The first thing is to do an honest and detailed stock take of where you are today. Most importantly - what sort of state pension could you expect based on the number of years of NI contributions you have?

You could consider making voluntary national insurance contributions if you are eligible and it makes sense.

You can then start using a pension calculator to plan for what you would need to save and how long you would need to work to achieve an acceptable standard of living in retirement. While it is not ideal to be starting a private pension at 47 you do have another 20 years of work before reaching the state pension age which will become 67.

crv1963

Spreadsheetman said:

It would be a good idea to work backward from the amount of income and capital you will need in retirement and then see what is needed to create a pension that will support it. I suspect that a LA pension from doing 20 years there will be the easiest way of covering it by far, but you need to do the calculations for yourself so you can make informed decisions.

OP I would do as Spreadsheetman suggests. We did this at the start of our journey into retirement planning- we are moving to the next stage (for us and our plan) in the next few month- taking my DB Pension and me then working Agency. I will be salary sacrificing as much as possible into the auto-enroll pension provided by the agency until we get a sum saved that we can draw down at the same rate as my SP, so smoothing my retirement income.

Having previously spent time as an agency worker I know it is easy to let spending rise as income rate is higher than the standard wage for the work. For us it has worked out better my staying in the workplace building the DB pension with a lower wage. It is of course about choices we just view the lower wage as deferred income later in life, which of course it is. The same with the planned SS in our next stage.