Where do you start planning for retirement?

The easy layer: allowances and wrappers

Some planning takes little time. The allowances are set in law and cost nothing to use, though the accounts that hold them can carry charges. An adult can save up to £20,000 a year tax-free across their individual savings accounts (ISAs).

A workplace pension usually adds an employer’s money. Under automatic enrolment the minimum paid in is 8% of a band of earnings, including tax relief, with at least 3% from the employer. The standard annual allowance, £60,000, is the most that can usually go into pensions in a year before a tax charge. It is lower for some people on high incomes or who have already drawn flexibly from a pension, and allowance unused in the previous three years can sometimes be carried forward.

Pension money can usually be reached only from a minimum age, and most of what is drawn is taxed as income. These allowances are in force this tax year and are the same across the UK. None of them necessarily needs a model or an adviser to benefit from them. That being said, the working years might be when details are missed that accumulate to become significant down the line.

The modelling layer: seeing how it adds up

Allowances are used one decision at a time. They do not answer the bigger questions: whether the money will last, when work could stop, and which pot is drawn first. Those turn on everything at once.

That is what a retirement plan is for. It joins the pieces up: what there is, what will be spent, when each income starts and what tax takes along the way. A planning tool such as Landfall draws it year by year, so a change to one piece shows what it does to the rest.

It works from the rules in law, with stated assumptions where future rules are not yet set. A projection is an illustration, not a forecast.

It also makes advice go further. A regulated adviser cannot recommend anything until they understand a person’s finances, what they know about investing and what they want the money to do. Much of a first meeting goes on learning that.

Someone who arrives with a plan already drawn, and their own questions already tried, has done much of that groundwork before the meeting starts.

The steadying layer: your intentions

A plan tells you what the numbers do. It cannot tell you what you would do about them. Within Landfall +, Intentions is where you write that down, in your own words, while nothing is going wrong. Each sample plan comes with a record already written, so you can see what one looks like.

The questions ask when you will draw on the money, what it is for, and how you intend to respond to a large fall. They go on to spending, temptation, what would change your mind and what you would do before acting. They end with a note from the calm author of the plan to its frightened reader.

The decisions then exist before a fall arrives, and whoever reads them in a downturn hears from themselves at their steadiest.

The advice layer: what a tool cannot do

Rules do change. For example, the Finance Act 2026 brings most unspent pension money into the value of the estate for inheritance tax across the UK, for deaths from 6 April 2027. The same Act keeps the nil-rate band, the threshold below which an estate normally pays no inheritance tax, frozen at £325,000 to 5 April 2031.

A tool such as Landfall + can model different scenarios side by side and keep pace as the rules change. But some choices, such as how wealth passes within a family, cannot be undone, or are costly if they turn out wrong for you. A regulated financial adviser can help weigh those, and for some questions a solicitor or tax adviser can too.

This guide informs. It is not advice, and it does not say which layers to use or whether to take advice. What suits you turns on your own circumstances. MoneyHelper gives free, impartial guidance, and a financial adviser regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) can advise on your own case.