A Wake-Up Call: Secure a Better Retirement for Care Professionals
How can care professionals build a pension pot that ensures financial security in retirement? This isn’t just a question for our amazing workforce; it is question for all our members as well. As an employer, you have the opportunity to play a very important role in shaping the retirement outcomes of your employees, who are dedicating their working lives to providing care and support to others. We would like to introduce you to Guiide, a relatively new NCF partner who offer a straightforward, accessible retirement planning tool.
The Challenge: Retirement Planning Is Daunting
Many care professionals, like many workers more generally across other sectors, struggle to understand how much they’ll need to live comfortably in retirement. Even if they have some idea, the picture is often incomplete. They may have:
- A current workplace pension
- Other pension pots from previous employers
- A company Final Salary Scheme
- Savings and investments outside pensions
- The State Pension
Piecing all of this together to create a coherent retirement plan can seem overwhelming. Research shows that 80% of people receive little to no help from their expected sources of advice, leaving them to navigate these complexities alone.
The Solution: Guiide – A Powerful Planning Tool
Guiide is an easy-to-use retirement planning tool that empowers care professionals to take control of their retirement planning. Here’s why over 10,000 people use Guiide every month:
- Clear Understanding of Needs: Guiide helps users determine how much they’ll need in retirement and how to align their current resources with their future goals.
- Tax-Smart Strategies: It shows how to reduce tax liabilities, ensuring more of their hard-earned money stays in their pockets.
- Ongoing Support: Guiide offers access to financial advisers and other resources for those needing additional guidance.
- Sustainability: Users can track, adjust, and refine their plans over time to ensure they don’t run out of money in retirement.
A Stark Reality: The Cost of Retirement
To stay above the poverty line in retirement, our workforce will need a pension pot of at least £80,000 to £100,000. Without a clear, sustainable plan, this target becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.
The Bigger Picture: A Crisis in Care
Recent findings from the Care Provider Alliance (CPA) underscore the gravity of the situation. A survey of over 1,180 care providers following the Autumn Budget in October 2024 revealed that:
- 86% cannot maintain wage differentials, stalling career progression.
- 64% will step back from paying the Real Living Wage.
These are more than statistics; they are warning signs. The combined impact of Employer National Insurance changes and National Living Wage increases has left the care workforce more financially vulnerable than ever.
Why It’s Time to Act
Our care professionals have spent decades caring for our communities and in return, we want to help them to achieve financial stability in retirement. One of the ways you can make a tangible difference to helping them to do this is by helping your staff to have access to tools like Guiide and supporting financial education, confidence and resilience for their futures.
What Can You Do Today?
Please do explore how you might benefit from access to Guiide and share more information with your teams about this powerful retirement planning tool and how it might be able to smooth the way for their retirement planning.
Bringing Guiide to partner with NCF is one of the ways we hope we can help you to help your employees to plan for a secure, dignified retirement – please do check out what they offer with their straightforward, accessible retirement planning tool.
Find out more here.
