Drawdown Strategy

£10,000 a year from £150,000 is 6.7% ... there's no safe way to get that as income, so I'd suggest splitting the pot in two: one part cash (or similar), which is to be spent steadily over the next 8 years; and the other part to be invested, which will both generate some income and hopefully grow.

E.g. keep £70,000 in cash, and spend that over 8 years, i.e. £8,750 per year; and invest the other £80,000, which needs to generate an income of £1,250 per year, which is only 1.6% — which is the sort of level of income you might get by picking investments without aiming for a high income at all.

After 8 years, hopefully the £80,000 invested would have grown (as well as producing an income); though you'd be lucky for it to have grown all the way back to £150,000.

Or you could push for a bit more income from investments. E.g. keep £50,000 as cash, spending £6,250 of it each year; and invest the other £100,000, which needs to generate £3,750 income a year, which is 3.75% — which is not outrageously high for income-oriented investments.

To get an idea of realistic income levels, compare the Legal & General Multi Index Fund range, which is not income-oriented, with the (less frequently mentioned) Legal & General Multi Index Income Fund range, which is.

What kind of risk level would be suitable for the invested part of the capital would depend (among other things) on how long-term it is. E.g. how likely are you to spend a lot of it soon after SPA? How much of it is more for long-term contingency?

To make it practical to cash it all in and reinvest in NZ, put as much as possible of the invested part in S&S ISAs, and keep putting more of it in each year by Bed&ISA-ing the unwrapped investments, while also realizing capital gains (when you have them) up to just under the annual CGT allowance. Then probably you'd be able to cash the lot in after 8 years without paying any CGT. (You'd only end up paying CGT if your investments had done very well.)

All this assumes you don't have other investments using your future ISA & CGT allowances — which may be 100% wrong.

I've no idea what vehicles are available for investing in NZ, but broadly you'd look for something equivalent to what you had in the UK at that point (assuming the latter still seemed appropriate). The way to look at it is that it doesn't matter if markets are down at that point, because you'd be selling at a low price but then buying back something very similar also at a low price, so there is no real loss from the switch to NZ.

I've also no idea whether you should be using pensions instead of ISAs/unwrapped. Partly because I don't know how that would work with NZ.

As as rule of thumb, equities might fall up to about 50% in a crash. So if you can stomach up to a 30% fall, then Vanguard Lifestrategy 60% would be the best fit of the VLS range. That's if it's held by itself; if combined with a US tech investment, you'd need a lower-risk VLS fund to compensate for the higher-risk tech (the latter could fall well over 50% in a crash, since it's not just 100% equities but also a single sector).

I'm not a big fan of overweighting (US) tech when it's this far into a bull run. It's not so much that it could end badly (though it could) as that there's plenty of tech already in tracker funds (since the bull run has been dominated by a few mega caps). But opinions can differ on this.

VLS is not income-oriented, and yields something like 1.6%. (US tech will often yield less, or even 0%.) If you invest as much as £100,000 in something with that relatively low yield, you will be about £2,000 a year short on target income. Now, if you're happy to harvest capital gains if they happen, and if they don't, choose between trimming spending and selling some investments at a loss, that's up to you. But do think about what you'd do if there's a crash and the recovery doesn't come quickly.

Staging investments over up to a year is perfectly OK. Logically, since we expect markets to go up generally, and can't predict the ups and downs along the way, it will more often than not be better to get fully invested as soon as possible. But that can be psychologically hard to do. So a bit of staging may give you a plan that you can more comfortably carry out.

For cash, a mixture of some instant access and some fixed term accounts (of different durations) is the obvious place to start. If you want to push for a little more return, you could look at corporate bond funds/ETFs, but stick to investment-grade (or nearly all investment-grade), because the high-yield/junk bonds behave too similarly to equities. Investment-grade corporate bonds can fall in value (unlike cash), but not nearly as dramatically as equities can.