Five Years On From COVID - Pension Review

squirrelpie

"The almost three year negative period of dot.com and other events was my first."

I lost a lot of money in that period. I had a lot of money invested in shares issued by my technology employer and my adviser didn't sell them in time despite conversations. After that I took responsibility for my own investments. But otherwise as regards covid "I did nothing different. It was just another market crash".

Sarahspangles

SteveBLFC64 said:

It's just coming up to five years since our first UK lockdown, together with the plummeting share prices at that time - just wondering what everyone's take on it is with respect to their retirement planning/portfolio allocation

As most of our retirement income will be from defined benefit pensions we didn’t need to react immediately. I had a small defined contribution pot which fell 17% in March 2020, but it had recovered by November. I don’t think I even checked it with everything else that was going on at the time.

Our retirement plans were certainly affected. It unravelled OH’s tentative plans, one of the issues being that a couple of colleagues in his age group sadly didn’t survive the first wave. I’m a bit younger and had recently moved into a lower-stress role intending to coast to 60 while taking lots of holidays, but that role ended. So I ‘womaned up’ and went into the NHS.

In the end, OH’s retirement was only delayed by nine months, and I’ve now brought mine forward by two and a half years. I turned my deferred workplace DC pension pot into a SIPP, and have saved hard to fund this.