1. Why This Guide Exists

You have built a career that most people would consider remarkable. You have navigated complex organisations, led significant teams, managed large budgets and delivered results in an environment that has not always been designed with you in mind. Yet in our experience, many senior women arrive at the threshold of retirement with a financial picture that does not yet match the weight of what they have achieved.

This guide is written specifically for you: the senior female executive who is financially sophisticated, time-constrained and ready to make this chapter count.

The Gender Pension Gap

The gender pay gap is well documented. What receives less attention is its compounding consequence: the gender pension gap. Research consistently shows that women retire with pension wealth that is, on average, significantly lower than their male counterparts, even at the highest levels of seniority. The reasons are structural as much as behavioural.

Career breaks, part-time working during family formation years, delayed entry to senior roles, and lower base salaries during earlier years all reduce pension accumulation over time. The result is that many executive women in their 50s find themselves needing to compress decades of retirement saving into a shorter window.

This is entirely manageable with the right strategy and the right support. But it requires deliberate, well-structured action which is precisely what this guide sets out to provide.

Factors contributing to the gender pension gap  |  Source: ONS / Pensions Policy Institute[1]

The Complexity of Executive Remuneration

Senior female executives often receive remuneration packages that go well beyond a salary. RSUs, stock options, deferred bonuses, long-term incentive plans, carried interest, and directorship fees can each carry very different tax treatment, vesting profiles, and concentration risk. Without careful coordination, significant value can be lost to tax inefficiency, poor timing, or insufficient diversification.

Layered on top of this are the strategic decisions that surround retirement itself: when to draw on pension funds, how to structure income withdrawals, what to do with executive share schemes that have not yet vested, and how to manage a transition from employed income to a portfolio of activities and assets.

The Moment to Prioritise Is Now

It is remarkably common for highly capable women to have deprioritised their own financial planning throughout their careers. The demands of the role, the responsibilities at home, and the expectation that things will ‘work themselves out’ can push financial clarity firmly to the bottom of the list. This guide is an invitation to change that. The decade before retirement is when decisions matter most and where the difference between a good outcome and a great one is made.

2. Defining Retirement on Your Own Terms

The word ‘retirement’ is itself due a redefinition. For senior women who have operated at the top of their professions, a binary switch from full-time executive to full-time leisure is rarely the right model — and often not the desired one.

A flexible transition, not a hard stop

Many of the women we work with move through a series of transitions rather than a single departure date. This might look like stepping down from an executive role while maintaining one or two non-executive directorships, moving from employed to consulting or reducing hours before exiting entirely.

 

Each of these has different income, tax, and pension implications that need to be planned for in advance.

 

Understanding your own timeline, honestly and specifically, is the first and most important step in building a robust plan.

Portfolio careers and Board roles

Non-executive directorships, advisory board positions, consulting engagements and trusteeships are all meaningful ways to remain professionally engaged while working substantially fewer hours.

 

These roles often provide not just income but purpose, connection, and intellectual stimulation, all of which are important components of wellbeing in later life.

 

Income from these activities needs to sit within a broader financial plan. Depending on the amounts involved and your age, it may affect the timing of when you draw pension benefits, how you structure your tax position, and whether you can continue making pension contributions.

Lifestyle aspirations and what retirement is actually for

Retirement planning is ultimately a lifestyle planning exercise. The financial structures are the means; the life you want to live is the objective. We encourage every client to think concretely about what they want their life to look like. Not in vague terms but in specific ones.

 

Some questions worth sitting with:

• How much time do you want to spend travelling and what does that look like — two or three significant trips a year or extended periods abroad?
• Are there philanthropic causes you wish to support more meaningfully, either through giving or active involvement?
• Do you want to provide financial support to adult children, grandchildren or other family members and over what timeframe?
• Is there a second home, a creative project or an educational ambition that has been deferred and is now within reach?

How much do you want your professional identity to remain part of your life?

Your answers to these questions determine your income requirements, your capital needs and the shape of your financial plan. They are not peripheral to the planning process; they are the centre of it.

3. Building the Foundations

Before any strategy can be put in place, you need a clear and accurate picture of where you stand today. This sounds obvious but in our experience, it is the step that most people have not properly completed, even those with significant financial assets.

Understanding your current position

A thorough financial review should include:

• All pension schemes: defined benefit, defined contribution and any older legacy schemes from earlier employers
• Current investment portfolios and the tax wrappers holding them
• Property assets and any associated borrowing
• Executive compensation that has not yet vested or been paid
• Business interests or partnership stakes
• Outstanding tax liabilities or planning opportunities

Many senior women we work with are surprised to discover they hold pension entitlements from employers they left decades ago. Tracing and consolidating these is often one of the most straightforward early wins.

Cashflow modelling

Cashflow modelling is the discipline of projecting your financial position across your lifetime under a range of assumptions. It shows you whether your assets, income streams and planned expenditure are in balance and where the risks and opportunities lie.

A well-constructed cashflow model will typically cover:

• Multiple retirement date scenarios and their relative financial outcomes
• The impact of different levels of portfolio growth on long-term sustainability
• Inflation’s effect on purchasing power over a 30-to-40-year retirement
• The sequencing of income: state pension, defined benefit, drawdown and ISA withdrawals
• Legacy and estate planning objectives

Cashflow modelling is not a prediction of the future. It is a tool for structured decision-making under uncertainty — one that allows you to test your plan against a range of scenarios and understand the levers you can pull.

Pension strategy: maximising allowances

The pension annual allowance (currently £60,000 per tax year, subject to your income level) represents one of the most tax-efficient vehicles available to you. If you have not maximised your contributions in recent years, carry forward provisions allow you to use unused allowance from the three preceding tax years — potentially allowing a contribution of up to £180,000 in a single year.

For high earners, the tapered annual allowance reduces the amount that can be contributed once adjusted income exceeds £260,000. This requires careful management, particularly in years where bonus payments or equity vesting push total income above the threshold.

The Lifetime Allowance was abolished in April 2024, removing what had been a significant constraint on pension accumulation for many executive women. This makes pension funding a more attractive proposition than it has been for some years. Although two new allowances, the Lump Sum Allowance (LSA) and Lump Sum & Death Benefit Allowance (LSDBA), were introduced and these need to be taken into account with any pension funding.

Bridging the pension gap

Where a shortfall in pension provision is identified, there are several ways to address it. These include maximising remaining working-life contributions, making use of employer contributions through salary sacrifice arrangements, considering whether defined benefit top-up options are available, and exploring whether a SIPP or workplace pension is the more appropriate vehicle for your circumstances.

The key point is that identifying a gap is not a cause for alarm. It is information that allows you to act deliberately.

 

 

4. Executive-Specific Wealth Complexities

Executive compensation packages at senior levels are typically structured to align your interests with those of shareholders over time. This creates significant wealth but also significant complexity that requires expert navigation.

Equity compensation: RSUs, stock options, and deferred shares

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), share options, and deferred share awards each vest according to performance conditions and time-based schedules. Understanding the tax treatment at each stage — award, vesting and sale — is essential to optimising the outcome.

RSUs are typically subject to income tax and National Insurance at the point of vesting. If these vesting events are not managed proactively, you may face a significant tax charge at a point when you have not yet received the cash to fund it. Coordinating equity vesting with other income events such as bonus payments, pension withdrawals, property disposals is often where the most meaningful tax planning value is found.

Stock options, whether approved or unapproved, have different tax profiles and require consideration of the optimal point of exercise in relation to your marginal rate and anticipated changes to capital gains tax legislation.

Deferred compensation and tax timing

Many executive roles include deferred bonus arrangements, long-term incentive plans (LTIPs), or contractual deferred compensation. These arrangements are designed to retain talent over time, but from a financial planning perspective they represent future income that needs to sit within your overall tax and retirement strategy.

The timing of when deferred income is received can make a material difference to the tax you pay. Where you have flexibility, coordinating payment with other income events, or with years of lower income during transition, can substantially reduce the overall tax burden.

Concentration risk

One of the most common and serious risks we see among senior executives is significant over-exposure to a single company: their employer. This arises naturally through share scheme accumulation but it creates a portfolio that is highly correlated with a single business’s fortunes.

A disciplined, tax-efficient programme of diversification is one of the most important things you can do to protect the wealth you have built. This does not mean exiting your employer’s shares in a disorderly or poorly timed way — it means having a structured plan to reduce concentration over time while managing the tax consequences carefully.

5. Lifetime Planning: Specific Considerations for Women

Planning for retirement requires planning for the full arc of life. For women, that arc is statistically longer than for men — a fact with significant financial implications that are rarely given sufficient weight.

Longevity and the planning horizon

A woman aged 60 today can expect, on average, to live into her late eighties. A significant proportion will reach their nineties. This means a retirement of 25 to 35 years is entirely realistic and must be planned for accordingly.

The implication is not simply that you need more money. It is that your money must work harder for longer, that inflation compounds over a much longer period and that the risks of cognitive decline or health-related dependency are real planning considerations rather than remote hypotheticals.

We build plans that are explicitly designed for a long retirement with sufficient investment growth in the early years, appropriate de-risking as the decades progress, and liquid capital held in reserve for later-life needs.

Planning for long-term care

Long-term care is one of the least discussed and most significant financial risks in retirement. The cost of residential or nursing care in the UK is substantial, often exceeding £70,000 to £100,000 per year in many parts of the country and can persist for several years.

For women who have spent their careers building financial independence, the prospect of that independence being eroded by care costs is a particularly important consideration. There are several strategies available:

• Maintaining a specific long-term care reserve within your investment portfolio
• Considering long-term care insurance products where appropriate and available
• Structuring asset ownership to maximise state support options without undermining your overall position
• Engaging in early conversations with family members about expectations and preferences

None of these conversations are easy. All of them are important.

 

6. Life Interruptions and Dual Roles

The financial planning industry has historically been designed around a continuous, linear career. The lived experience of most senior women is rather different and a good financial plan must reflect that.

Career breaks and their financial legacy

Time taken out of the workforce whether for maternity, family caregiving, relocation in support of a partner’s career, or health reasons, leaves financial footprints that are often still visible decades later. Reduced pension contributions during those periods, lost employer matching, interrupted National Insurance records and lower salary trajectories in the years that followed all compound over time.

 

Understanding how these interruptions have shaped your current position is an important part of the planning process. It is not about regret; it is about clarity. Once you understand the gap, you can address it.

Balancing leadership with family dynamics

Many senior women continue to carry significant responsibilities at home even as they reach the peak of their professional careers. Adult children who need support, ageing parents who require care and the complex dynamics of blended families all create financial and emotional demands that sit alongside the demands of a senior role.

 

Retirement planning in this context is not a purely individual exercise. It requires an honest assessment of likely calls on your capital and income from family members and a plan that can accommodate those calls without compromising your own long-term security.

Recognising and valuing lived experience

The non-linear career of many women with its portfolio of roles, its interruptions, and its breadth of experience often produces transferable skills and networks that have real financial value in a portfolio retirement. Board roles, advisory positions and mentoring opportunities frequently arise from the relationships and reputation built over a career, even one that did not follow a conventional trajectory.

 

We take time to understand your full professional and personal story, because it is often the foundation on which the most successful retirement transitions are built.

7. Protection, Security and Contingent Planning

Building wealth is one dimension of financial security. Protecting it is another, and often a neglected one.

Life insurance and income protection

At senior executive level, it is common to have significant life cover in place through employer-provided schemes. This cover typically ceases on leaving employment. A thorough review of your protection needs, for example, who depends on you financially, what obligations you carry and what liabilities you hold should form part of any pre-retirement planning exercise.

 

Where a mortgage or other debt remains outstanding, where there are dependent family members, or where significant financial commitments are in place, appropriate insurance cover should be maintained independently of your employer.

Emergency funds and liquid capital

The principle of holding three to six months of expenditure in accessible cash applies at every level of wealth. At executive level, the specific application may differ. The reserve may be larger and the form it takes may be more sophisticated but the underlying logic is the same: liquid capital insulates you from the need to sell long-term investments at an unfavourable time.

During a retirement transition, when income may be temporarily reduced and the pattern of expenditure is changing, a robust cash reserve is particularly important.

Planning for Vulnerability and Dependency

Two scenarios that deserve explicit attention in any financial plan are loss of capacity and financial vulnerability. Lasting Powers of Attorney (LPA) for both property and financial affairs and health and welfare should be in place before they are needed. Trusts and appropriate legal structures can protect assets in the event of cognitive decline, serious illness, or relationship breakdown.

These are not morbid considerations. They are practical ones — and attending to them early, when decisions can be made clearly and without urgency, is one of the most meaningful things you can do for yourself and for those who matter to you.

 

8. Tax and Structuring Strategies

Tax efficiency is about ensuring that the wealth you have built is structured in the most intelligent way available to you within the law so that more of it serves your objectives and less of it is lost to unnecessary liability.

Tax wrappers: using the right vehicles

The four principal vehicles for holding investments are:

A well-structured plan will typically use a combination of all four, sequenced to draw income in the most tax-efficient order over time.

Income withdrawal strategy

The order in which you draw income from different sources in retirement is one of the most consequential decisions in the planning process. A poorly sequenced withdrawal strategy can result in unnecessary higher-rate tax, loss of personal allowance, or premature depletion of tax-sheltered assets.

A typical sequencing framework might prioritise ISA withdrawals and GIA income in earlier years to preserve pension assets, with pension drawdown increasing as state pension and defined benefit income begin. The exact sequence depends on your individual position, your total income and your estate planning objectives.

Capital Gains Tax planning

With changes to CGT rates in recent years, the planning environment has shifted. Making use of the annual CGT exemption (£3,000 in 2026/27), Bed & ISA transactions and careful timing of asset disposals remains important. Transfers between spouses or civil partners take place at no gain, making use of lower-rate band allowances within a household a legitimate and valuable strategy.

Trusts and Gifting Over Time

Trusts serve a number of legitimate planning purposes, from protecting assets for children or grandchildren to managing the IHT implications of accumulated wealth. Discretionary trusts, loan trusts and discounted gift schemes each have specific applications that may be relevant depending on your circumstances.

Regular and planned gifting from income, using the normal expenditure from income exemption, can also be a powerful way to reduce your estate over time without triggering an immediate IHT charge, provided it can be demonstrated to be habitual and from surplus income rather than capital.

9. Legacy and Intergenerational Wealth

For many senior women, the question of what their wealth achieves beyond their own lifetime is an important one. Inheritance tax planning, structured wealth transfer, and charitable giving are the three principal tools through which legacy is shaped.

Inheritance tax planning

Inheritance tax is charged at 40% on estates above the nil-rate band (currently £325,000, with an additional £175,000 residence nil-rate band where a family home passes to direct descendants, subject to tapering for larger estates). For estates above these thresholds, which includes many of the women we work with, proactive planning is essential.

Pension funds have historically passed outside the estate for IHT purposes, making them an efficient vehicle for intergenerational wealth transfer. Changes announced in the Autumn 2024 Budget propose to bring undrawn pension funds within the scope of IHT from April 2027. This is a significant shift that will require many clients to revisit their estate planning strategies.

Other reliefs and exemptions worth understanding include business property relief, annual gifting exemptions and the seven-year rule for potentially exempt transfers.

Wealth transfer to the next generation

Transferring wealth to children or grandchildren in a structured, tax-efficient way requires careful coordination between gifting strategy, trust structures, and your own income and capital needs. The goal is to give what you can afford to give, when it will make the most difference to the recipients, without compromising your own financial independence.

Charitable giving and philanthropy

Charitable giving through Gift Aid is immediately tax-effective for higher and additional rate taxpayers, who can reclaim the difference between the basic rate and their marginal rate through their tax return. Charitable contributions also reduce the value of the estate for IHT purposes; leaving 10% or more of the net estate to charity reduces the IHT rate on the remainder from 40% to 36%.

For those with more substantial philanthropic ambitions, donor advised funds, charitable incorporated organisations, and private foundations each offer different levels of involvement, governance and tax efficiency.

 

 

10. Confidence, Behaviour and the Advice Gap

Financial planning is not only a technical exercise. It is also a human one. The numbers matter, but so does your relationship with them.

The advice gap for senior women

Research consistently shows that women, including highly educated, financially experienced women, are less likely than men to seek financial advice and when they do, they are more likely to report feeling that the advice they received did not fully address their circumstances. This is not a deficit of financial capability; it is a structural failure of an industry that has historically been designed by and for men.

We have built our practice specifically to address this gap. Every aspect of how we work, from the questions we ask to the way we present information, is designed to support women in taking genuine ownership of their financial lives.

Investment confidence

There is a well-documented tendency for women to express lower confidence in investment decisions than men, even when their actual investment outcomes are comparable or superior. Confidence is not the same as competence but a lack of confidence can lead to overly conservative investment positioning that materially undermines long-term outcomes.

We take time to ensure that our clients understand not just what we are recommending but why. Understanding the logic behind an investment strategy is one of the most effective ways to build the confidence to stay invested through periods of market volatility which is, in turn, one of the most important determinants of long-term investment returns.

Clarity and control

The single most common thing we hear from senior women at the start of a planning relationship is not that they lack money. It is that they lack clarity. They are not sure exactly what they have, they are not sure it is structured well and they are not sure whether it will be enough.

Our role is to replace that uncertainty with informed confidence. When you understand your position clearly, when your assets are structured intelligently and when you have a plan that reflects your values and your goals, the experience of managing your financial life changes fundamentally.

Financial empowerment is not about complexity. It is about clarity, structure and the confidence to make decisions that are genuinely your own.

 

11. Your Action Plan

The ten-year retirement readiness checklist

Ten years before your target retirement date is the point at which planning decisions have the greatest impact. The following checklist is designed to ensure that nothing important is left unaddressed.

Financial Foundations

• Trace and consolidate all pension schemes, including legacy schemes from former employers
• Obtain a State Pension forecast from HMRC and check your National Insurance record
• Commission a comprehensive cashflow model covering multiple retirement scenarios
• Review and maximise pension contributions, using carry forward allowance where available
• Ensure salary sacrifice arrangements are in place and optimised

Executive Compensation

• Map all unvested equity awards with vesting dates, conditions, and tax treatment
• Develop a structured employer share diversification programme
• Review deferred compensation arrangements and plan for tax-efficient receipt

Tax and Structuring

• Review the distribution of assets across pensions, ISAs, bonds and GIA
• Design a tax-efficient income withdrawal sequence for retirement
• Consider trust structures and gifting programmes in light of IHT position

 

Protection and Legal

• Ensure Lasting Powers of Attorney are in place and registered
• Review and update wills and beneficiary nominations on all policies and pensions
• Arrange independent protection cover to replace employer-provided life and income protection

Lifestyle and Legacy

• Define your retirement lifestyle in specific terms and cost it
• Articulate your legacy and philanthropic objectives
• Consider your long-term care preferences and ensure provision is made

Our Signature Process

The Executive Women’s Retirement Process™

 

 

Financial Empowerment for Women  ·  Complex Remuneration Planning  ·  Retirement Transitions

Helping senior women take control of significant wealth and design retirement on their terms.

 

This is issued by IPS Capital LLP of 4 Eastcheap, London EC3M 1AE; a limited Liability Partnership registered in England OC328405 and authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.   It is issued in the UK only. This publication does not constitute advice and you should not make any investment decision based on it. The information contained herein is correct to the best of our knowledge and we may not be held liable for any errors or omissions. This information is based on current information in respect of UK Pensions. IPS Capital LLP does not offer tax advice and you should seek professional tax advice for your own circumstances.