Denstar, you need to speak to a financial adviser who can cope with talking about death. With an incurable diagnosis, the conversations a FA needs to have with your OH are very different to normal. The first FA we had couldn’t cope with the short life thing and kept glossing over it, telling us the most important considerations were about maximising our income in 20 or 30 years.
Our new FA sought advice from an actuary and has instead advised us on the best financial considerations for the next 15 years. It isn’t just deciding whether to take out the 25% ... they will also need to work out with you how important things like a widow’s pension might be, and how much income you would need have a comfortable retirement.
In our case, based on the advice of the magic money man, John has taken the 25% from two pension pots, has left 75% of one where it is for now, is drawing a pension of about £400 per month from the 75% of other one, and has put all of his little pots from previous employers into one new pension pot. They worked out that the crossover point (where the option we have taken becomes less than we would have got by waiting) is 17 years from now - it was up to J and I to decide whether we were happy with that risk. To be honest, having the 25% tax free plus a small monthly income has been brilliant and if he is still around in 17 years’ time we might lose out financially but will have won the cancer game convincingly :-)