When somebody has several pensions and investments, our first job is usually to get what we sometimes call a ‘lay of the land.’ With our client’s authority, we contacted the various providers and gathered detailed information about each arrangement.

We looked at the values, how much was already in drawdown, where the money was invested, what was being held in cash, the charges being paid and what options were available within each existing plan. We also considered the tax treatment of the different pots and whether there were restrictions or penalties if anything were changed.

One thing the exercise identified was that a significant proportion of one of her late husband’s pensions was sitting in cash rather than invested. It wasn’t immediately clear why, and one of her children had independently noticed the same thing. Rather than making assumptions, we simply included it in the overall picture we needed to understand.

We then summarised everything so that instead of having a collection of different policies and pieces of paperwork, our client could see much more clearly what she had and what each pot of money could potentially do for her.

Before recommending anything, Dan reviewed the company’s existing pension and spent time understanding what the employer wanted the new arrangement to achieve. He then carried out research across the market and considered the different options available.

The scheme ultimately recommended offered several features the employer felt would be valuable to its workforce. These included a considerably wider investment range, with more than 200 additional fund options available compared with their previous arrangement.

Employees also gained access to a modern app where they could:

• See the current value of their workplace pension;
• Monitor how it was performing;
• View projections of what it could potentially provide in the future;
• Consider their forecast retirement position; and
• Manage information such as their beneficiary nominations.

Employees didn’t have to become investment experts or choose their own funds. But for those who wanted to engage more closely with their pension, there were considerably more options available to them. That was important to the employer. They wanted their pension to feel less like something that simply happened on a payslip each month and more like a benefit employees could actually see and engage with.

There are often several ways of approaching protection planning.

Rather than assuming that adding more cover to their existing policy was the right answer, we went back to the beginning.

What did they actually want their protection to achieve?

Paying off the mortgage was important, but that wasn’t the only financial consequence the family could face if either parent died.

There were two children to think about too.

So we explored the different ways their protection needs could potentially be met and compared appropriate options available to them.

The solution they ultimately chose included:

• Decreasing term life insurance designed to provide cover alongside their repayment mortgage, with the level of cover reducing over time.
• Family income benefit designed to provide a regular income if either parent died during the policy term, helping the surviving family with their ongoing expenditure until their youngest child reached 21.

Rather than simply asking “How much life insurance do we need?”, we were able to have a broader conversation about what the family might actually need financially if one of them was no longer there.

When we brought everything together, the modelling indicated that they might not need to wait until he was 65 to retire. Based on the assumptions we’d made, retiring at their current ages appeared possible.

That wasn’t something we’d set out to prove. The purpose of the exercise was simply to help them understand what their existing financial arrangements were on track to provide. Sometimes that exercise identifies a potential shortfall and gives us an opportunity to build a plan to address it. Sometimes it provides reassurance that things appear to be on track.

In this case, it presented them with an option they hadn’t previously realised they had. They now had something quite significant to think about.