Bridging to Retirement – Splitting SIPP & ISA Contributions

Edit 06Dec21: I realized that this is all completely wrong! You can get the same effect, without paying National Insurance, by just putting part of the money to the pension, then taking the 62% hit on the take home cash for an ISA. For example, for £1,000 of pre-tax income, put £475 in your salary

Tax on UK Pension Withdrawals

A relatively quick one today, on a topic I’ve been trying to nail down for a while. Disclosure up front – as always, I’m not a professional. This topic is particularly complex, and I invite discussion and disagreement; I’ll happily update this post if anybody finds any inaccuracies and call out any alternative viewpoints. Just

RMDs vs Lifetime Allowance – Which Alligator Should You Focus On?

Fair warning: this post is for people who have reason to be concerned about both RMDs and the Lifetime Allowance. If you don’t have a Traditional 401k/IRA/etc. balance or you have no concerns about exceeding the LTA, you can skip on past – just focus on the one that affects you. Also – this one

Managing the Lifetime Allowance

We learned a little bit about the Lifetime Allowance in my post on UK Pension Withdrawal Options – mostly by pointing to the excellent Monevator post on the topic. Today, we’ll dig a little bit deeper, to see how we might avoid paying HRMC an extra 25% of our hard earned savings. I’m going to

UK Pension Withdrawal Options

Continuing with our interlude from the Withdrawal Strategies series – this is the second of three posts: Required Minimum Distributions from Traditional IRA, 401(k), etc. and how to manage them UK Pension withdrawal options Managing the Lifetime Allowance (I added this one because it was going to be too long to fit in the others!)

UK Self-Invested Personal Pension (Account Options)

A Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) is a common type of retirement savings vehicle in the UK. It doesn’t have a neat equivalent in the US – it’s kind of like a 401(k) but just for you. Synopsis A SIPP is very similar to a UK employer-provided pension, although won’t typically have employer contributions (it’s allowed,

UK Employer Pension (Account Options)

This is the first in a series of posts, each focusing on one type of account and how it might be useful to an American living in the UK. A full list of all accounts covered is on the Account Options page. These posts will all follow the same general format, and should give you