This involves you taking up to 25 per cent of your fund as tax free cash, and leaving the remainder of your pension fund invested. In the meantime, you can take income as and when you need it from the fund, subject to certain Inland Revenue limits, but you are not obliged to take income each year. If you want, you can choose to take no income at all for as long as you like until age 75 when you are obliged to either buy an annuity or transfer the fund to an Alternatively Secured Pension or ASP.

The minimum income you can take from an unsecured pension is zero and the maximum is roughly 120 per cent of what a single, level annuity would pay someone of your age. Unsecured pensions replaced “income drawdown” when the new rules for pension simplification came into force on 6 April 2006.