If you’ve been diligently saving into a pension throughout your working life, you should be entitled to feel confident about your retirement. Unfortunately, the best savers sometimes find themselves inadvertently breaching their pension lifetime allowance (LTA) and being charged an additional tax that erodes their savings.
If you are a high-income earner or wealthy individual, you could be putting too much into your pension and risk exceeding the pension lifetime allowance.
The government will maintain the pensions Lifetime Allowance at its current level until April 2026, removing the usual annual incremental rises.
The following questions and answers are intended to help you minimise this tax charge.
A: The lifetime allowance is a limit on the amount you can withdraw in pension benefits in your lifetime before you trigger an additional tax charge. By pension benefits, we mean money you receive from your pension in any form, whether that’s a lump sum, a flexible income, an annuity income, or through any other method.
This allowance applies to your total pension savings, which may be in different pensions.
A: In the 2021/22 tax year, the lifetime allowance is £1,073,100. This allowance has now been frozen until April 2026.
A: Once you have received your full lifetime allowance in pension benefits, you will be required to pay an additional tax charge on any further benefits you receive.
If you take your remaining benefits as a lump sum, you’ll pay a tax charge of 55%. If you take your remaining benefits as income to withdrawals, you’ll pay a tax charge of 25% on each one.
A: Each time you access your pension benefits (for example, by purchasing an annuity, receiving a lump sum, or establishing a flexible income), this is recorded as a ‘benefit crystallisation event’. There may also be an additional benefit crystallisation event when you turn 75, and finally, upon your death.
A: You may be able to protect your pension savings from the 6 April 2016 reduction of the standard lifetime allowance (when it was reduced to £1 million). There are 2 protections you can apply for:
A: If you do not have lifetime allowance protection and you are approaching the limit, there are various actions you can consider. These include stopping your contributions (and, instead, investing your money into an alternative tax-efficient environment), changing your investment strategy, or starting retirement earlier.
A: The lifetime allowance affects high earners and those approaching retirement age the most, including those with defined benefit pensions. As the value of high earners’ pensions rises over the next five years towards a lifetime limit that will remain fixed, more and more individuals may find they need to stop contributing to avoid breaching the limit.
A: The rules around the LTA are very complex and making the right decisions can feel difficult. Receiving professional financial advice will help to identify if you have a problem and offer different solutions to consider, based on a full review of your unique circumstances.
More information on LTA can be found at gov.uk.
To discuss any of the issues raised in more detail please contact your financial adviser directly, or contact Marcus Pilkington on 0161 819 1311.
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