If you have always wanted to know how savers manage to stuff their pension pots with a million pounds, here is the inspiration you have been looking for.
The current maximum pension savings over a lifetime is 31.055 million, which rises to £1.073 million in April 2020.
After that, the lifetime allowance rises in line with the cost of living each year.
But how do you get more than £1 million in pension savings?
Research by money mag Interactive Investor has profiled these £1 million self-invested pensions and uncovered some interesting facts about the big savers.
Contrary to popular opinion, the savers like actively managed funds and investment trusts, when populist investors suggest passive investing in tracker funds is the way to go.
Shares pay dividends
The theory is few fund managers can consistently outperform the markets, and placing cash in a tracker is cheaper.
The typical £1 million SIPP pension is 35% active managed funds, 29% investment trusts, 15% stocks, 13% cash and 8% exchange traded funds.
And those ETFs are interesting – two of the five are gold centric trackers WisdomTree Physical Gold and ishares Physical Gold ETC
Shares paying high dividends are also popular.
The top five are Royal Dutch Shell, Lloyds Banking Group, GlaxoSmithKline, BP and Vodafone.
What does this tell us? Pension millionaires don’t take punts on speculative stocks. They tend to lock into classy bluechips.
Spotting opportunities
These experienced investors tend to turn cash into income producing assets rather than hold money that loses value as inflation takes a bite.
Interactive Investor also shares some more info about self-made SIPP millionaires.
With an average age of 61 years old, the favourite funds are Fundsmith Equity and Lindsell Train Global Equity. The top investment trust is Scottish Mortgage, followed by Alliance Trust.
That hands-on management also shines through with 82% investing in the past year, 45% investing each month and 23% twice a month.
Moira O’Neill, head of personal finance at Interactive Investor, said: “Our most successful customers enjoy investing and looking after their portfolio, so will buy and sell investments when they spot an opportunity. What unites them is diversification, spreading their investments across different assets, markets and sectors to ensure that all their eggs are not in one basket. The importance of diversification is true to every saver – regardless of if you have a seven-figured pension pot.”