Simon Lambert

But what we've seen with interest rates rising is annuity rates have gone up and that's now looking a lot more attractive to people and you're seeing more people taking annuities.

or alternatively seeing a scenario where they remain invested for a period of their retirement and then later on they take an annuity or they take an annuity to provide some of their retirement income.

But even me describing it in the broadest possible terms there will sound really quite confusing to some people, bringing me back to my point of a lot of people just are not set up to be doing this.

And even if they have got the pot, then turning it into retirement income that will last until they die...

is a big ask.

There's a couple of things I'd add to that.

In terms of the finding out where you're at,

Look at your letter from your pension provider when they send it to you, but also look at the date on it.

The date that they've sent it to you might be quite recent, but the date of what that projection is might be a fair distance in the past.

I've seen this before where you get your annual pension statement and you're like, oh God, I thought it'd be better than that.

And then you realise that actually it's based on a value from six months ago or something like that.

Whereas if you log in to your workplace pension scheme...

And everybody should find out how they can do that.

If you don't know how to log into your workplace pension scheme, find that out.

First step, log in, see where you're at.

You can then go use a pension calculator to try to look at the numbers.

And there's a number of them out there.

We've got one on This Is Money.

Go to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash pension calculator.

It uses those Pensions UK amounts that you need each year for a basic, a moderate, a comfortable retirement.