When to drawdown?

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Monthly - makes the tax easier and smooths out volatility. Investing a lump sum works out better than drip feeding 2/3 of the time. Inversely, taking annual drawdown is likely to do better than monthly drawdown about 1/3 of the time.
That said, I can see why you would want to have the cash you'll need for the year ahead and maybe that peace of mind is worth risking probably slightly lower growth.

Audaxer

squirrelpie said:

Audaxer said:

 is it not better to make one sale of investments for income for the whole year, £12k in this case, when the values are high, even if you only want to draw out £1,000 from the SIPP each month if the tax is going to be a problem? 

But how do you know whether the value is going to be lower or higher later? If you can identify when values are 'high' then you have a great career as a pundit in your future.

I would have thought some people would want to draw out income once a year, but might delay that withdrawal and take from a cash buffer instead if values had recently fallen. So if the plan was to withdraw once a year at the start of the year, it would make sense to go ahead with the planned annual withdrawal in January as last year saw most portfolios make good gains. If however the plan was to take withdrawals every March, then I would have thought it would have made sense to use the cash buffer from March until values had risen again. I just thought that might be a better way to take income from total return on investments, rather than selling every month?