“There are powerful drivers to go either direction, but ideally what you want is to be able to do that without stopping your pension; you want to be able to do it while it’s still running,” Ms Heffron said.

“If your [client’s] trust deed doesn’t allow that, then now is a good time to update [their] trust deed.”

Ms Heffron said while most decent trust deeds will not be affected by legislative changes such as different contribution levels, the trust deed will set out whether the trustee can add or take away the reversionary beneficiary without turning the pension off.

“That’s some housekeeping you can do beforehand [with the client]. That way, when it comes to actually deciding on whether to add or take away a reversionary beneficiary after the legislation has been passed, you can implement it quite quickly,” she said.  

“You won’t need to go through the process of changing the trust deed and having a separate conversation with the client.”