Reduce Employer NICs: Salary Sacrifice Pensions
Lifetime pension plans
Our smart Lifetime plans automatically adjust investments to maximise early growth before protecting savings when approaching retirement.
We’re excited to announce we’re launching a new investment option in February 2025. Learn more about the Penfold Plan.
As with all investments, your capital is at risk.
Standard Lifetime
Our default fund balances returns with risk, reflecting different stages of life.
Sustainable Lifetime
Similar to Standard Lifetime, with more consideration given to ethical (ESG) investing.
Standard Lifetime is suitable for the majority of our customers who do not want to make their own investment or fund risk decisions. It aims to take customers through to retirement, delivering a low-cost and good value outcome.
Pension plans that manage themselves
The great thing about our Lifetime plans are their simplicity. Rather than sticking with one investment plan throughout your life, they move the money inside your pension around as you approach retirement.
Your pension will gradually shift from high-growth investments like stocks and shares to ones that will help safeguard your savings when it comes to time to cash your pot in. The best part is that this is managed automatically, first notifying you and then changing investments when the time comes.
The Lifetime plans have one simple all-in fee. You'll only pay an annual fee of 0.75% for savings under £100,000, and 0.4% for any amount over £100,000.
How does it work?
Stage 1: Growth
Pension contributions are invested in a higher proportion of 'riskier' investments, such as stocks and shares, to maximise return on investment. Inevitably, this stage involves more volatility but in the long-term there's more time to 'correct' any drops in the markets. The end result should be a larger gain than loss.
Stage 2: Preparation
Investments are adjusted when approaching retirement, switching to a less risky approach. Savings are still growing, but investments will start to move away from things like stocks and shares to more stable investments like bonds and government gilts. It’s a slight change in approach that starts to preserve the value of savings. There should be far less ups and downs in pension value than before.
Stage 3: Protection
It normally isn't wise to immediately withdraw an entire pot for tax reasons - this means some money will stay invested in our pension, even after retirement. With that in mind, the final stage of our Lifetime plans try to preserve pot value with safe, less volatile investments. Of course, part of each pot will remain invested in to make sure there's still some growth. This also helps to protect from losing value as the cost of living rises with inflation.
In collaboration with BlackRock
We're proud to collaborate with the world's largest investment manager, BlackRock, to protect and grow our customers' pension savings with our Lifetime plans.
Our shared philosophy on the principles of passive investing, diversification and managed risk at a low cost led us to work with BlackRock to offer their MyMap investment options.
Investments are spread across a wide range of BlackRock’s iShares passive tracker funds using advanced technology to balance growth and risk. These funds correspond to a mix of stocks, bonds and alternative assets across the world.
Lifetime plan FAQs
BlackRock's website has more information about the funds invested in at each stage of our Lifetime plans:
- Standard lifetime plan, Stage 1 - BlackRock MyMap 6
- Standard lifetime plan, Stage 2 - BlackRock MyMap 5
- Standard lifetime plan, Stage 3 - BlackRock MyMap 4
- Sustainable lifetime plan, Stage 1 - BlackRock MyMap 7 Select ESG Fund
- Sustainable lifetime plan, Stage 2 - BlackRock MyMap 5 Select ESG Fund
- Sustainable lifetime plan, Stage 3 - BlackRock MyMap 3 Select ESG Fund
During Stage 1 our Lifetime plans use funds with a higher proportion of your money invested in stocks, which generally means more growth potential as well as ups and downs. During Stage 3 our Lifetime plans use funds with a higher proportion of your money invested in bonds, which is generally a more stable investment type:
- Standard and Sustainable lifetime plan, Stage 1: Level 5 out of 7 on the risk and potential reward scale.
- Standard and Sustainable lifetime plan, Stage 2: Level 5 out of 7 on the risk and potential reward scale.
- Standard and Sustainable lifetime plan, Stage 3: Level 4 out of 7 on the risk and potential reward scale.
Customers are allocated to one of three risk stages depending on whether they have nine or more years until their planned retirement, between eight and four years, or three years or less. Explore the details in our the summary of the Standard Lifetime, our default plan.
Once your Penfold pension has been set up, tap 'Your Plan' on the dashboard. There you can switch your pension investment option to our Sustainable or Lifetime plans, or one of four of our Standard plans.
Find out more about our other pension plans.
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