Mike reflects on his professional working life and talks about how he sought professional advice to understand the intricacies of pensions from a tax perspective, Mike also touches on how he is managing his pension in retirement. Produced in partnership with Steps to Investing.

My name’s Mike Wilson. I am a 62-year-old married man. I live in Hertfordshire. In my working life, I worked for a financial services company selling, heading a sales team that sold to professional investors.

I guess in the early years, I didn’t give that too much thought. I had my company schemes behind me. I was mindful of the savings that were required for the long term. But later on, as you grow older, I think you become more aware of impending retirement and the need to structure your savings and your investments in such a way that you’ll be catered for in retirement.

Because of my working life, I’ve always had a knowledge of financial services and have managed my own investments generally throughout my life. However, as I approached retirement in my late 50s, early 60s, I recognized there was elements of the pension market I didn’t understand, and so I did decide to take professional financial advice to help me in terms of taxation matters, some of the complications of the pension marketplace, which helped me a lot.

It gives you freedom to be busy when you want to be busy, and to be busy doing things you want to do, which is slightly different from my work experience.

I have my assets in principally a SIPP. That’s a type of pension that has consolidated all the various pensions I’ve collected across the years. It is invested pretty much fully into the stock market, and I intend that to be the case going forward. I, in addition to that, do use some ISAs. I view very much pension and ISAs, that is Individual Savings Accounts, tax free savings, I regard those two vehicles as being hand in glove really when it comes to making a provision for pension.

Thus far into my retirement career, it is in fact, I would say that my pension fund is slightly larger than it was when I retired and yet I’ve taken income from it. That really is thanks to the returns that have been made available through that active investment, that risking of my assets. In terms of concerns for the future, obviously investing in stock market is never a straightforward path; there will be times when it goes up and times when it goes down. And I guess one of my concerns is that I remain committed to keeping my assets invested and working for me in the bad times as well as the good.

I guess advice for people thinking about retirement now is start early and invest riskier assets and let them work for you for as long period as possible.