Starting 10 years before your target retirement age – the age you’ve told us you want to retire at – we gradually switch most of your pension savings to our Retirement Countdown Fund. This fund aims to protect the value of your pension savings, reducing the risk of them falling in value when you’re due to turn them into retirement benefits.
This is an investment approach known as lifestyling. It’s designed to:
- grow your pension savings over most of your working life, then
- protect the value of those built-up pension savings as you approach your planned retirement age.
We call this switch from growth to protection investments your ‘lifecycle’.
The lifecycle is designed to protect your pension savings from ups and downs as you approach your planned retirement age. It’s automatic – you don’t have to make any decisions or take any action yourself. We move your savings gradually to protect against them all being moved if markets are low.
The timing of the investment switching may not be appropriate if you want to take your benefits before or after your planned retirement age. So, it’s important that you keep us updated if your planned retirement date changes. Unless you tell us otherwise, we assume your planned retirement date is your State Pension age
We explain this in more detail in our Member Booklet.
You can find out more about our investment strategy in our Statement of Investment Principles.