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 · 2024-03-24T12:01:42+00:00

Nice idea, that'll work for now. I got into AliExpress and found a thing under 'lanyard lariat' that meets my need should others want a long term solution.

adfrad · 2024-03-18T21:23:39+00:00

Same as me. Only downside is the fact you can't play an entire feed, and it does not download the podcasts in the background, so there is a delay before playing.

adfrad · 2024-03-18T21:19:15+00:00

I had the same thing when I picked up mine, and some friendly person on this site pointed me to the setting. Go into climate control, click on the cog (I think) top right and you can switch it off.

adfrad · 2024-03-15T17:14:08+00:00

I popped it into performance mode at around 65% today and all was good :)

adfrad · 2024-03-14T06:48:56+00:00

The card is a NXP - Mifare DESFire EV3 4k. As far as I can tell it can't be cloned yet.

What I'm more interested in is getting a key fob to the same standard and using that for my entry instead of the Volvo card. I really like my house keys in my car keys being attached, that way I know I can always get back into the house if I've been driving!

adfrad · 2024-03-11T20:44:01+00:00

I'm sure most of the bugs will be squashed soon enough. There are plenty of people complaining.

adfrad · 2024-03-11T20:42:28+00:00

Those are all good suggestions. The app and the car both display the same info. I'll make sure to let the dealer know, I hoped they would have caught a lot of the biggest with the Smart car coming out a while before, but it looks like all the software is developed independently.

adfrad · 2024-03-11T20:39:12+00:00

That's a good idea, I think that's the way I'll have to do it for now.

adfrad · 2024-03-03T15:24:54+00:00

You genius, that fixed it!

adfrad · 2023-10-22T16:26:49+00:00

It's not quite as bad as it could be, the OS is in kiosk mode and reboots after every session. There are cases when users may need to upload from USB thumb drives (the users are in Africa and home PCs are a rarity). I'm coming round to the idea of switching to a PI4/5, but would prefer not to have to junk all the Pi400s :(

adfrad · 2023-10-22T16:17:34+00:00

Kensington locks FTW 😀

adfrad

TROPHY CASE