The Golden Decade for Retirement Planning

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According to the magazine that arrived in the post for me today (Money Matters by Armstrong Watson accountants) your 40's is the golden decade for retirement planning. That's when you should be putting as much as possible into your pensions to give them a chance to grow before you retire.
Well it didn't work for me.
In the first half of that decade I got caught by the collapse of Equitable Life. Then I got very disillusioned with the returns on the fund transferred and invested in other schemes and probably didn't contribute as much as was prudent. Finally, right at the end of that ten year period, recession struck and decreased again the value of my pension fund. I'm afraid it was at that point that I began to look at the mattress on my bed and appreciate why in days gone by people would hoard their funds under one!
Fortunately Mister E is one of the dwindling number of people with access to a final salary pension scheme (albeit deferred many years ago) and I'm hoping, with a bit of help from the financial adviser tomorrow, that we've still managed to get the sums right.

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