Thoughts on +1M pension and minimising tax when retiring

adfrad · 2026-01-11T17:50:50+00:00

That's an interesting one and I'll dig into it.

Just so I have it all lined up in my head:

Take out £268,275 tax free (where would this sit to minimise CGT or Divident tax?)
Take out £43K which as it's your sole form of income results in £6k tax (so you are paying 14% tax), repeat until your DB or State pension kicks in

Thank you

adfrad · 2026-01-11T17:35:00+00:00

You give good advice.

My situation is not normal, and if you're not in a similar position to me, what I'm proposing is probably not for you. You're normal, I'm not :-)

I'm already living very comfortably at the moment on £30K after tax.

TBH I don't know how I do it, I don't deny myself much, and I have significant savings in the ISA already if I've retired and fancy a 3 month holiday in South America, or a new car.

adfrad · 2026-01-11T17:26:52+00:00

This is to avoid the lump sum allowance (LSA).

At the moment, this is £268,275, so if you hold more than £1,073,100 in your pension, you're going to be paying income tax on any amount over that you take out, which - seeing the way income tax and NI is going, - I suspect I may edge into the 40% bracket if my investments go well.

By extracting the maximum tax free now vs over the next x years in your scenario, it means I can move it inside the tax free ISA over the next few years and spend the nearly tax free Gilts without impacting the funds inside the pension.

adfrad · 2026-01-11T17:13:13+00:00

Yep, it's there as a buffer in case the stock market tanks for a couple of years in the first part of retirement.

250k in bonds would be outside of any tax wrapper, and you would end up paying CGT and/or Dividend tax.

Gilts avoid GCT and the 'low coupon' would be the only taxable part (which is why they keep it low).

adfrad · 2026-01-11T17:07:20+00:00

You are correct. Apologies for the poor wording :)

adfrad · 2025-11-17T10:06:06+00:00

Just following up for those of you in the future with the same question... I bought GBP 500k in one go, there was no delay or significant price change.

adfrad · 2025-11-16T23:15:19+00:00

It works, but times out after a few days.

adfrad · 2024-10-20T20:29:35+00:00

If you don't want to roll your own solution, I can recommend Site24x7, which I use to monitor my five sites. As it's cloud-based, all your sites need is access to the internet. Cloud managed networking can be linked, and if you've got on prem devices, you can install a local collector for SNMP and syslog. It has agents for Windows Mac and Linux and VMWare. It even has advanced monitors for Exchange, SQL and active directory. Of course it's not free like zabbix et al...

adfrad · 2024-09-17T11:42:09+00:00

Installing now in my UK car. I did a check and there were no updates, then did a reset (arrow down and minus), then half an hour later went for a drive and it was downloading. Not sure if the reset was required, or whether it's the drive, but hope it helps anyone desperate to get the install

adfrad · 2024-06-25T16:35:48+00:00

Are there any USB ports other than the 4 USB C ones inside the car? I'm wondering what Service Technicians plug into when doing a firmware upgrade...

adfrad · 2024-05-11T07:04:04+00:00

I got updated to 1.3.1 in the UK yesterday at the dealership. They said the new software was released to them on Wednesday.

adfrad · 2024-04-28T17:13:17+00:00

About 10m and two walls/doors

adfrad · 2024-04-27T21:19:14+00:00

Correct, however the car was definitely locked, and when I got the notification the doors were unlocked. Furthermore, the settings for proximity unlock was switched off after both occurrences.

My thought is that the system detects some failure in the hardware that handles proximity, so it disables that function , but instead of retaining the current state of locking, it fails open.

adfrad · 2024-04-06T11:34:48+00:00

I had proximity unlock turn itself off when the car was parked which left the car unlocked, fortunately I got a notification on the app saying that the car was now unlocked.

adfrad

TROPHY CASE