The answer to this, of course, depends on your aspirations - what will you want to do? What will be the costs of day-to-day living for you (and your partner) in retirement? What else will you want to do now you have time on your hands? What expenses will disappear, for example children or mortgage repayments.

Once you come up with a figure, add in an amount as a buffer against the unforeseen and unexpected. Now you will have arrived at the amount of pension that you should ideally be planning for. Also, bear in mind that pensions are taxable, so you will need to allow for payment of Income Tax when arriving at your final pension figure.

It is very important that you review the benefits of your scheme and the status of your personal plan, to establish if it is on track to give you the pension you want.

If you are in an employer's scheme you should be able to obtain a statement from your employer outlining the scheme benefits. Alternatively, contact us and we can analyse your current provisions and make any recommendations with the aim of achieving your goals.

For a personal pension, the level of contributions you have been making to your scheme, investment performance and charges will determine the size of your pension, however, as the years go by, your fund should increase and could eventually get to a size where the investment returns come into play. The larger your fund, the more advice you may need on managing the fund for optimum performance, because every percentage point increase or decrease could potentially represent thousands of pounds.

We will be pleased to regularly assess your benefits to establish whether they still have the potential to meet your objectives, and make appropriate recommendations to you.

There is no simple answer as this depends on your employment status, e.g. self-employed, employed or director, and the benefits that are available through your employer's scheme, if there is one.

An annuity is a contract between an insurance company and a pension scheme member, where the member uses some or all of their pension savings to purchase a regular and guaranteed income for the rest of his or her life or for a predetermined number of years.

The factors that determine the amount of income you can expect to receive include (but are not limited to) your age, state of health, your postcode, prevailing annuity rates, the type of annuity you buy and the size of your pension fund.

Rather than exchanging your pension savings for an annuity (a fixed and regular income for life paid by the pension provider) the pension fund is left invested and you draw income directly from the fund. As the bulk of your pension remains invested the fund is still able to benefit from any growth (or not!) in the value of its investments. There’s no limit to the amount of income you can withdraw — you can draw as much (or as little) as you like, even the entire fund if you want.

And unlike an annuity, in a drawdown arrangement the pension saver keeps their pension pot.

An LOA is a letter signed by you that is sent to your Pension Provider to allow us the authority to obtain requested information about your pensions.

We request details on the type of pension contact you hold and the associated values, charges and fund selection. In addition we also request information on the amount of Tax Free Cash you may be entitled to together with any guarantees or enhancements that your current plan(s) may contain.

Following the Pension Freedom Rules that came into force in April 2015, we also establish the flexibility of your current contract(s) to establish whether or not they allow you to take advantage of the new rules.

We also request projections from current provider to a selected retirement age and this enables us to undertake a cost comparison on your behalf.

Depending on response time of your current provider, there can be delays of up to 6 weeks to obtain all the relevant information. We work with the providers to ensure the information is received in a timely fashion.

We cannot review your pension provision until we have fully appraised your current plan(s) and the LOA is required to enable to us to obtain this information.

Once all the information is received from your existing providers one of our qualified advisers will analyse and review the details, undertake the cost comparison and formulate personalised recommendations based on your current circumstances, future objectives, attitude to risk and capacity for loss.