A pension is just a way of saving money to significantly improve your chances of enjoying a stress-free retirement.

It is typically viewed as the best type of retirement plan for most people. Unless you are fortunate enough to be really wealthy, it is extremely important to save appropriately for your latter years, particularly as the state pension scheme usually isn’t enough to support your lifestyle.

With people living increasingly longer, the need to have an appropriate pension is more important than its ever been.

The State pension will only do for you if you can live on less than £100 a week.

Benefits:
 
Starting with the obvious, it is important to adequately save for your retirement, particularly as we are living longer. You want to give yourself the best change to comfortably live through the fifteen or so years you are likely to spend in retirement.

Ideally, you want to be saving as soon as you can.

The earlier you start the better. Someone who starts saving at the age of 25 would probably be better off than someone starting at the age of 35 assuming similar income paths. The person starting at 35 would have to make much higher contributions to match the saving of the individual who started at 25.

The different types of pension can be confusing to someone new to the subject. However, in reality there are just four main types of pension. On subsequent pages we go into each type of pension in more detail but is here is a brief overview.