You’ve worked for years, looked forward to retirement, but you still have one final hurdle to overcome before you can stop work; you need to turn your pension into an income.

The prospect can be daunting.

A few weeks before the all important day you will get a retirement pack from your pension provider, which tells you how much you have in your pension and helpfully how much income they will give you if you buy an Annuity from them.

How helpful of them to provide such comprehensive information?

There is another way of looking at it.

Your pension provider will want to keep your business. They would be delighted if you simply signed the forms and bought an Annuity from them. In fact, although figures vary, many people do exactly that and do not compare the Annuity offered by their current pension provider with other options.

There are at least 10 ways of turning your pension into an income, we don’t have time here to deal with all 10, so let’s just focus on comparing Annuities. Afterall an Annuity is the most popular option.

The importance of shopping around is shown by one single statistic; of those people who did shop about and took the time to compare Annuities, around 50% ended up buying their Annuity from someone other than their current pension provider.

So why should you look around and compare Annuities? There are three very simple reasons: Read more →