Now should you buy an annuity?
Or just draw down cash.
£1,000,000 at £35,000 a year would last you 28 years. You could use your state pension to pay your monthly bills.
Drawdown but you are missing one crucial point in that the £1 Million can remain invested and therefore go up in value so it should last way longer than 28 years
I believe the pension people use the rule of thumb that you should aim to withdraw no more than 4% of your pension fund each year to make sure it lasts well into retirement plus then part of the return you get on the investment also factors in the devaluation of the pot due to inflation
I've long thought that annuities are a rip off and their popularity dropped when the Govt changed the rules to say you could get your hands on the money from age 50 by doing drawdown etc (obviously now 55 and soon to rise to 57 or 58)
What always annoyed me was the fact that you could hand over your pension pot to them in exchange for an annuity on the Monday then drop down dead on Tuesday and they then keep the fucking lot

Yes you can opt for a spouses pension but then the amount you get reduces considerably
The thing is that they take a pot of money then pay you what I consider to be an amount far smaller than what they should, they will be investing that money and getting a good return but paying you back less than the return on the investment and then keeping the pot of money when you die
Annuity rates are actually quite high at the moment compared to a few years ago due to high inflation etc but it's still not enough
Looking at the figures in the link and assuming a retirement age 60 for a single person pension (and this is the market leading rate so perhaps more than simply sticking with the people who your pension is invested with) they are giving you back less than 6.5% of your money, i'd expect to get a better return than that investing it myself
And that's all you will ever get so it doesn't go up with inflation etc, if you want one linked to RPI then you only get back 3.77%

At least with drawdown when you peg it the pot of money is part of your estate and gets passed on
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