With 2026 just a couple of days away, you may be thinking about your New Year’s resolutions. It’s easy to become overambitious, designing complex plans around diet, fitness and money that ultimately prove too difficult to fit into a busy life.
You can achieve much more success by committing to relatively quick steps that can really pay off in the long term. Setting aside the time to check in on your retirement savings is a resolution you will be very glad you kept. Here’s are some of the things you should think about.
If you don’t know how much you’ve got in your pension, then you don’t know if you are on track. This can lead to overconfidence as you assume you are saving enough, or you might worry unnecessarily about a gap that doesn’t exist.
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Recent data from Hargreaves Lansdown’s Savings and Resilience Barometer shows that only 43% of households are on track for an adequate retirement income, with higher earners at particular risk of under-saving and being unable to maintain their lifestyle when they finish work. Taking the time to periodically check how much you’ve got and using online calculators to see how much income that will give you, will empower you to take the next steps.
It can be easy to just contribute at auto-enrolment minimum levels, but is this enough for the retirement you want? Online calculators can help you model the impact of paying in extra contributions. If money is tight and you can’t afford to do it now, then making a resolution to boost your contributions every time you get a pay increase or new role is a good approach.
Tax relief is an enormous incentive to save into a pension, but you might not be getting all you are entitled to. If you are a higher or additional rate taxpayer paying into what is known as a relief-at-source pension arrangement, then you will only have basic rate relief taken automatically and you will need to reclaim the rest.
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Many private pensions, such as SIPPs and some workplace pensions, are set up under relief-at-source with contributions deducted from your salary after tax. The employer takes 80% of the contribution from the employee’s salary and then reclaims the extra 20% from HMRC.
This means if you are entitled to tax relief at a higher rate, then you need to reclaim it, which you can do via online self-assessment.
If your pension is set up as a net pay arrangement, where your contribution is deducted from your salary before income tax is paid, then your scheme claims back tax relief at your marginal rate of income tax. This means you don’t need to do anything further. Similarly, if your pension is set up as a salary sacrifice arrangement, you won’t need to reclaim extra relief.
