And in The Times last week ‘How to overcome the fear that ruins retirements’

Jul 19, 2026

In this week’s edition:

Feature story: The mid year financial checkin for those approaching retirement

The Times: How to overcome the fear that ruins retirements

From Bec’s Desk: I’m coming to London later this year

The mid year financial checkin for those approaching retirement

Most of us do this with our diaries, our fitness goals, maybe our finances in a loose “how’s the bank balance and are the bills paid looking” way. There’s a shorter, more useful version of this that’s worth doing this weekend, especially if you’re heading for retirement and it’s the one most people put off until it’s forced on them: an honest look at where your pension actually stands.

I don’t mean a full review. I mean a handful of questions you can answer over one cup of tea.

Start with your State Pension forecast. Not the number you remember from a couple of years ago, the actual current one. It changes as your National Insurance record changes, and gaps are more common than people assume, especially if you’ve had time off work, been self-employed, or worked abroad at any point. It takes about five minutes on gov.uk and it’s genuinely the most useful single number you can have in your head when you’re working out when you can afford to stop.

Then there’s the question of whether you actually know where all your pensions are. If you’ve had more than a couple of jobs over the years, there’s a decent chance you’ve got a pot sitting somewhere you haven’t thought about since you left that role. Those forgotten pots tend to sit in old default funds, racking up fees while doing very little. The government’s pension tracing service is free, and it takes about as long as making that cup of tea.

Worth asking too: are you still contributing what you think you’re contributing? Pay rises happen and contribution rates often just stay where they were set. If you’ve had a pay bump this year and haven’t touched your pension contribution since, this is a good weekend to fix that.

If you’re in your mid-50s, there’s one more thing worth flagging. From April 2028, the earliest age you can access most private pensions moves from 55 to 57. The cutoff runs on your birthday, not your circumstances: turn 55 before 6 April 2028 and you keep access at 55, be born after 5 April 1973 and you’ll need to wait until you’re 57. Worth understanding how this plays into your plans for tax free cash or drawdown.

While you’re checking dates, look at your default fund’s target retirement date too. Most workplace pensions automatically start shifting you out of growth assets and into bonds and cash as you approach that date, a process called lifestyling. It’s meant to protect your pot as you get close to using it. The problem is that date is often whatever you put down years ago, or a default the scheme assumed, and if it doesn’t match when you actually plan to stop working, you can end up sitting in low-growth assets for five or ten years longer than you need to, potentially losing out on growth at exactly the point your pot is at its biggest. Takes two minutes to check what date your scheme has on file and whether it still matches your plan.

And then there’s the bigger, less tidy question: does your plan and vision for retirement still match your life? A lot can shift in a year or two. A parent might need more support than you expected. You might have realised you want to scale work back rather than walk away from it entirely. Your idea of what retirement even looks like might have moved to a slower exit from the workplace with more flexibility – as it is for so many trying to get there with an adequate pot. It might mean a re-do on your plan, or just a few tweaks.

You don’t need an adviser or a big decision to do any of this. You need ten minutes and the willingness to actually look through these difficult-sounding things instead of assuming it’s all going to be fine. Most people who do this find their situation is either better than they feared, or fixable in a way that felt bigger in their head than it turns out to be.

If you only do one thing this weekend, check your State Pension forecast, your pensions and your contributions – see if you can make any extra. It’s the fastest, and it’s the number everything else hangs off.

Happy Sunday. I’ve been busy this week booking my next trip to the UK. I’m coming out for some fun events in mid October in London and online – looking forward to sharing more about it with you soon. If you have any epic things I can squeeze in while I’m there – reply to this email and suggest them. I’m always keen for events and activities that help build retirement confidence.

I hope you caught the news last week that the UK edition of How to Have an Epic Retirement has just been named Kindle’s 99p Book of the Month. For the whole of July you can grab it on Kindle for less than the price of a coffee, so if you’ve been meaning to read it, this is the moment. Get your copy here.

Second, and this one I’m genuinely chuffed about: the pilot of the Epic Retirement UK Course wrapped up two weeks ago and it went so well that we’ve turned it into an on-demand program, which means you can start it whenever suits you rather than waiting for a set intake. You can purchase your ticket and get started here.

It includes:

6 weeks of online retirement lessons (14 modules of lessons)
Access to our recorded online Q&As (3 of them – we recorded them during the pilot)
An invitation to 4 live Q&A events over the year ahead with retirement experts – we will develop a calendar of events for our program attendees – held at least quarterly, if not more frequently.
A digital Conversation Starter workbook
Fully integrated activities that bring the course to life
A digital copy of How to Have an Epic Retirement – The UK Edition

Learn more

We’ve put a dedicated web page together for the course – which you can view here and download a brochure. There’s some great testimonials over there.

Now – enjoy your Sunday. Hope to see you on the course

Bec Xx

Author, podcast host, columnist, retirement educator, and guest speaker

I am the retirement columnist for The Times, UK. You can read my most recent column here or look through all my columns here.

How to overcome the fear that ruins retirements

Foro — the fear of running out of money — affects even those with more than enough savings. Far better to start spending and enjoy a life well lived

Retirement comes with a big problem that we don’t talk about enough. There are people sitting on perfectly good pensions with quite healthy savings and no mortgages who cannot bring themselves to spend their money. They know that the numbers add up and they may even have a financial adviser who has told them they are going to be fine yet still they balk at the idea of spending.

This is called foro — the fear of running out. And it is more widespread, more stubborn and far more costly than most want to admit.

It can mean a life not lived to its fullest: trips not taken, bathrooms and kitchens not renovated, and years of the good stuff put off for the hypothetical “one day” that never seems to arrive. Meanwhile the money sits there doing nothing particularly useful and those who are meant to be enjoying their best years grow older.

The article was published in The Times, on Thursday July 7 and is available for reading here.

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Why do I write a separate newsletter for the UK?

I write a separate newsletter specifically for the UK, because the financial system here is completely different to Australia, where I’m based. Your retirement is shaped by the State Pension, workplace pensions, ISAs and HMRC rules. Not superannuation or the Australian Age Pension.

If I just sent you the Australian version with a few words swapped out, it wouldn’t actually be useful to you. And useful is the whole point.

The big conversations, about when to step back from work, what you want the next chapter to look like, how to make your money last, those are universal. But the practical detail needs to reflect the system you’re actually living in. So that’s what we’ve built here. Tell your friends – we want to help you make your retirement epic – the UK way.