UK pensions state and private

[Andynb]

Were you heavily tax taking it as a Lump sum from the UK pension if so could you claim it back being a resident in Ireland.

Are you looking to take just the 25% tax free allowance, and the rest into a drawdown or all your pension pot in the UK? I would say the advice your wife got from Aviva was not totally true. You can still get a UK sterling account living in Ireland that this can be paid into.
And as you can see below the state pension can be paid that way, or even into someone elses name, but wouldn't advise against that.

https://www.gov.uk/state-pension-if-you-retire-abroad

What Aviva told your wife, may only be for there policies, but when you "retire" your pension pot, you can take it to other places to get the best return, you would need to speak to these other institutes and make sure they would be happy with this.
Annuity i believe maybe a problem, but drawdown/sipp should still be ok, but things might have changed a little with Brexit.

@mct1 did you just take the pension providers drawdown or shop around, did you have any issues with this, when you said you lived in Ireland?

Think i have abit of studying to do on this myself.

 

[Scoop64]

Have not taken pension yet just seeing what my options are.
My pension provider has a on line calculator which I used, the out come is for 25%tax free then rest over lifetime or whole lump sum in one go but according to them I will.pay 40% tax on it which would be a big no for me unless I can claim tax back as living in Ireland.
And I think your right about Aviva, my wife spoke to one person on a phone call and said you have have to take the lump sum , at the time I said this doesn't seem right, will have to look into this , my wifes pension would be small , my one wouldn't be regarded as a large pension either but still don't want to be taxed to death over it .

 

[mct1]

@mct1 did you just take the pension providers drawdown or shop around, did you have any issues with this, when you said you lived in Ireland?

Up to retirement, I had 3 small UK private pensions funds. My local pensions advisor here liaised with a UK colleague to amalgamate these into one pension with a different UK provider (Canada Life). It's still only a small annual pension but they all add up.

If I'd had only one, I'd probably have stuck with the provider's offer to make life easy. If the amount was higher I might well have shopped around.