My experience of moving from a pension scheme to an ARF may be of interest.
I "retired" in December 2010 ("retirement" from my own business was purely notional; it was driven by tax considerations). My pre-retirement savings vehicle was a small self-administered pension scheme invested mostly in equities held directly, not through unit funds.
The transition to three new accounts: an ARF, an AMRF, and a non-exempt account for the tax-free "cash" was smooth (it helped that the new accounts were with the same stockbroker as had been looking after my pension fund investments on an execution only basis). As I recall (I don't have the details to hand), there was no need to sell shares in the pension fund and buy them again for one of the other three accounts, but there had to be a notional sale at prevailing market value, to create a base price for CGT purposes for the shares in the exempt account. I can't remember whether I had to pay stamp duty (1% for Irish stocks, 0.5% for UK stocks) on the notional purchases in the new account; a stockbroker can probably advise what the situation was here. In general, while I viewed the entire portfolio as a single entity, it was more advisable for tax purposes to hold the "value" stocks (i.e. the high dividend payers) in either the ARF or the AMRF, both to take advantage of the gross-roll-up and to generate a significant portion of the cash needed on a regular basis to fund the required "income" from the ARF, without having to sell shares, probably at an inopportune time, and the "growth" stocks (i.e. those that paid low or no dividends) in the non-exempt account, because CGT is lower than my tax rate on dividends.
The bottom line, referring back to OP's original question, is that there was no need to do any "lifestyle" planning in the run-up to "retirement". It was a seamless transition, with shareholdings simply shifting from one box to three others. As regular readers of my
"Diary of a Private Investor" know, I detest the idea of lifestyling or feeling obliged to move to supposedly lower risk investments shortly before and in retirement. Now, nearly eight years later, I'm still 100% in equities (
actually more than 100%) and very happy that I've taken this particular route.