Adrian Boulding: Annuity/drawdown mix makes retirement gold blend

One of the major impacts of pension freedoms over the last three and a half years is the increasing percentage of people moving into retirement who have elected to use an income drawdown policy as their primary pension decumulation vehicle, rather than purchasing an annuity which was the default choice for pension savers at retirement age pre-pension freedoms. We saw a dramatic plunge in annuity sales from 89,000 in Q2 2013 - about a year before George Osborne went public on pension freedoms, to 17,000 in Q4 2016 at the notional annuity market bottom. Back in 2014, many predicted a 70% t...