I’m a retirement expert and this is why you don’t need to panic if your pension slumps
When we think of investing money long term, for example in a pension, we talk about interest rates and compound growth, with the expectation that our money will increase over time. This isn’t always the case though. As the caveat on financial articles often says: “The value of your investment can rise or fall.” This is a simple concept to grasp in abstract, but what happens when you face this situation in reality? When you check your pension account and find, to your horror, that the value has dropped? The first thing you should probably do is usually quite simple: nothing. Certainly, you shouldn’t immediately panic. © Charlotte Rebecca PhotographyHannah Martin is a pensions expert and the founder of Rich Retiree It might reassure you to know that a temporary drop in your pension value is historically normal. The stock market has always been volatile; in the last six years alone, we’ve seen three big worldwide crashes: 2025 (when Trump announced tariffs), 2022 (stock market decline) and 2020 (Coronavirus lockdowns). And it has bounced back …
