The PLSA’s Retirement Living Standards provide a neat indication of the kind of life a person might want in retirement, by sharing different options and activities which represent minimum, moderate and comfortable lifestyles.

• But what if an individual struggles to choose between the lifestyles?

• And how do they make the link between how much they’re saving today and what they might get in the future?

This is the problem one of our clients recently asked us to help them solve.

They were introducing the Retirement Living Standards as part of a tool, to enable members to model what their spending habits might look like when they plan to access their retirement savings and how much they might need to have saved to achieve this. However, it was clear that members were struggling to choose between the different lifestyle options – people wanted to pick and choose between aspects of each of the lifestyles.

So, we used the principles of a ‘What kind of person are you?’ type quiz, to develop an online quiz which was embedded into an interactive video. Members were able to work through the quiz in real-time, and using simple logic, they were presented with the lifestyle option which most closely matched their personal needs and aspirations. While the quiz was underpinned by the Retirement Living Standards, it felt highly personal, and enabled individuals to build up a picture of what their life might look like when they choose to access their retirement savings.

This approach met our client’s objectives to:

• help members understand how the standards could apply to them, as well as

• educate members on whether their projected income from their pension would be enough – and if not – what they could do to improve it.