At 57 I have £270,000 in ISAs and pension

Graham Bell, 57, has been saving for retirement for four decades – but he’s still concerned whether he will have enough.

The catering support manager, who lives in Reading, started paying into a pension at 18.

He has spent years trying to make sensible financial decisions, from consolidating old pensions to building up a stocks and shares ISA and investing in property.

Now, with around £200,000 in pensions and £70,000 in ISAs, he has a total retirement pot of around £270,000 – and despite plans to keep growing, he’s still thinking about whether he and his wife, Tina, who is a chef, will have enough when they retire.

“I think we’ll manage okay if we keep going, but I don’t think I can live like I want to yet,” he says.

Graham, who has two grown-up children, earns about £48,000 a year and has around £200,000 saved in pensions and a further £70,000 in a stocks and shares ISA.

Part of his pension savings are held with PensionBee, where he combined several small pots from previous jobs. The rest is in a Nest workplace pension through his current employer.

After changing roles several times over the years – particularly after Covid when he had a number of shorter-term jobs, he found himself with multiple pension pots.

“I’d had a few jobs over the years, all in the same sort of industry, from chef to caterer,” he says.

“Then I had a few jobs after Covid, different lengths of time, and every time I contributed to a pension. I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ I knew the benefit of contributing, but I had lots of little pots, some with £100s in which was just going to annoy me.”

Tracking them all down and putting them in one place was a useful exercise, and Graham says the process uncovered more than £100,000 in old pension savings. But it also forced him to confront a nagging feeling that, despite decades of saving, he may still not have done enough.

His biggest regret is not increasing his pension contributions earlier.

“I took out a pension when I was 18 and I paid in what I could afford which was £25 a month, it started going and that was it,” he says.

“But I never really increased it properly as my salary went up.”

Nowadays, most workers have their pension payments increased automatically when their salaries go up under the government’s auto-enrolment policy, but this was only introduced in 2012, when Graham was in his 40s.

One of the pensions he consolidated had been running for 40 years, but had only reached around £20,000.

Graham admitted that he had always been financially astute, but in younger years he didn’t think enough about the long term.

His concern about retirement only really began to intensify after he turned 50.

“I think it started then,” he says. “I hit 50 in 2018, and something came back from Nest with those projections they do, showing what you might get depending on growth. And I remember thinking, ‘Hang on, that won’t be enough.’”

Graham says the problem is not that he expects luxury. It is that he wants retirement to feel comfortable after a lifetime of work, and he is unsure whether his current pot will stretch far enough once he and his wife stop earning.

That uncertainty is made worse by the fact that retirement planning feels like a moving target. Tax rules change, pension policy shifts, markets move, and inflation can quickly alter what counts as “enough” and this makes it hard to plan for the future.

He added: “I’m reading everything I can and gaining as much knowledge, but it doesn’t help you gain any money.”

Graham and his wife still have a mortgage, although he fixed it at a favourable rate before borrowing costs soared. They have a couple of rental properties, a studio flat in Reading and another property where his in-laws live.

Even with extra income and protection of having additional assets, he says he still feels pressure to keep saving and investing rather than relax.

“That’s why we keep working and plugging it into investments”, he adds.

He now talks regularly to his children about pensions, ISAs and investing, determined to help them avoid some of the mistakes he feels he made.

“I badger them something rotten,” he says, “but I want to make them richer than I am”.

But he knows he is in a better position than many.

Research from the Department for Work and Pensions shows many people are approaching retirement with relatively modest savings, with typical defined contribution pension pots – the most common type in the private sector – often below £100,000.

This is far short of the levels industry bodies such as the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association say are needed for a comfortable retirement.

But that doesn’t stop Graham reflecting on how he wishes he’d done things differently. He adds: “I wish I’d thought earlier. I could’ve tried a bit harder when I was 30, but it didn’t cross my mind.”