[Closed] Pensions - whos got one?

neither mrsconsequence nor I have a pension. she be public sector, i be ex-public sector.

Yes.

But I have started putting a bit extra away each month in medium/long term savings in light of what's going on at the moment.

had one for 18yrs, been frozen for 11yrs.
dont think i will bother paying into one again in my working life.

I have

But .......... the projections of what it's worth have fallen each time I've had a statement for the last 3 years or so
Which is worrying as I'm in my 50s

I have five (I think) final salary pensions, each worth pretty much nothing.

However, now freelancing so I need to sort out a private pension asap.

Given that pensions attract tax relief, a more efficient use of cash would be difficult to find.

Yes, it's a "money purchase" one i.e. invested in the stock market, no employer obligations once I leave their employment (retirement or otherwise).

I'm not relying on the state pension either a) existing or b) being worth owt for when I'm in retirement so am making my own provision i.e. big company pension AVC payments + maxing out annual ISA allowance each year.

got one (pulic sector scum that i am - i can feel the hate)

honestly don't expect to get anything out of it till i'm 70.

i'll be dead by then.

thinking of cancelling it, and paying off my mortgage faster.

Yep, personal one that I don't really pay enough into at the moment based on it's current performance, but it's just a part of a bigger portfolio to mitigate the long term risk rather then putting all the money on red and rolling the dice just relying on equity in property.

Might work, might not - my crystal ball seems as cloudy as most when making financial projections 30+years into the future, never mind the other side of Xmas 😉

Yes I have one now, will I have one in 20 years time? **** knows it will depend what happens with the economy.

Yes as I work in the NHS I also had a private one that I was miss sold but I stopped paying years ago though but never tried to claim anything back on it.

No pension, I'm collecting houses instead

i've a money purchase one as well, started paying into it at 21, at 15% of my income PA. should leave a pot of around 6-10x my income when I come to retire, depending on how much growth there is in the long term

OP - you might find that, as pension saving is pre-tax, it is better to save into a pension (especially if you're a higher-rate tax payer).

got one from my last job, not from this one, something i'm going to be thinking about soon though, pensions are frozen in my place, but when they start up again(well if, I'll be sorting my self out). Much do youse reckon a 33 yo should be paying into pension?

Public sector scrounger and no pension. Paying off the mortgage and maybe investing in a buy to let is our plan

I have a frozen one, lost a 3rd of its value last year! Not that it bothers me as the the manegment fees should clear it out before I retire anyway!

to mitigate the long term risk rather then putting all the money on red and rolling the dice just relying on equity in property.

I am not looking at [i]making [/i]money, just looking to reduce the amount I would have paid in interest vs net gains against savings/ pension. If i can become mortgage free ASAP the better.

I think the %age is traditionally the age you start paying in, minus 7. So if you start paying in at 33 (with no prior pension, i've no idea how to take that into account) - you should look at putting around 25% of your income in.

note - that's just something I read somewhere. I've not done the maths to figure out how effective it is

i had one with the institute of cancer research
the pension scheme went under, we got some of it back (thanks to our union)
im now on the universies scheme, our contributions have just risen
im not sure that there will be anything left in that if our right wing neo-con governments keep screwing us all over

10 years final salary, since then money purchase paying in 13% of salary and a couple quid in savings.

Not overly worried as yet but I keep trying to save

cheers 5lab.

8 years in the NHS final salary (will pay out £2.5 KPA at current value) and a private pension that I pay 7% salary and the company pays 5% in.

I've got 30 years left to work so I'm sure it will all sort itself out.

2% of final salary for each year worked here, up to a max of 70%.

I didn't have anything until my early 30's, so will have to work until 67 to get a full pension.

I am not looking at making money, just looking to reduce the ammount I would have paied in intrest vs net gains against savings/ pension. If i can become mortage free ASAP the better.

That's fair enough - What I meant was that [i]I'm[/i] not prepared to just sit on property as my long term plan - my natural worrying nature coulnd't take it (didn't mean to come across as having a go at your situation). Generally when the interest rates are high the pension/cash savings does well and the mortgage costs alot and when they are low, the other way round. Having a spread keeps me sane in most situations (barring total economic collapse, when I sahll rely on a shotgun ;-), even if I'm not maximising my investments at any given moment in time.

I'm 40. Didn't have one until my employer started making small contributions which I had to match a few years ago. I paid off my mortgage then started putting money into a SIPP. Not sure on current valuation but must be close to my pre-tax salary. Aiming for a few £100k by retirement as I think that's what's needed for a decent pension.

Nope

and working on the "%age is traditionally the age you start paying in, minus 7." rule there's no way on earth I can afford to, unless I moved into a cardboard box! 🙁

(Not that I can see myself ever reaching retirement age anyway - I'm sure it'll keep moving just a few years further up the line than I am at any one point)

Another rule of thumb for how much to contribute is half your age as a percentage. So at 34 you'd be paying 17%. This will of course rise as you get older, it depends at what age you start etc etc. Professional advice needed, there are plenty of armchair pension experts (including me)

Got a variety of personal pensions with investment firms.
Wish i hadn't bothered.Only advantage at the time was the tax benefit,but with the way the stock markets gone growth has been negligible.Should've bought a couple of cheap houses in the early nineties instead.

Yeh got a couple of pensions, one I pay very little into every month that I may cash in in a couple of years. Another is a % of salary matched by my employer. But I've got a couple of properties, one currently gives a great monthly return with the other will when its free of the current free loading tenant (my mum). My father in law will leaves us a fair whack when his time is up and my wife has a decent pension so we'll be alright.

No pension here.

Equitable Life wandered off with mine.

My father in law will leaves us a fair whack when his time is up

It's a terrible time when you've got to figure in your dead parents wealth in order to retire but I have the same thoughts

[i]Pensions - whos got one?[/i]

😆 LMFAO !

Private sector worker here !.

I don't have a chocolate tea pot either.

Had one, in fact several, since I was 19. Next year the Govt will make all private workers have a compulsory pension deducted from wages at source, and about time.

Can you imagine the cost to those of us who do have pensions, and have sacrificed all there working lives to paying in to, if the "others" never bother with a private pension ?

[i]It's a terrible time when you've got to figure in your dead parents wealth in order to retire but I have the same thoughts[/i]

True but we could manage without if he decides to blow it all on drugs and hookers.

dumb question time, cos i'm dumb about these things 🙂

Had one, in fact several, since I was 19. Next year the Govt will make all private workers have a compulsory pension deducted from wages at source, and about time.

Can you imagine the cost to those of us who do have pensions, and have sacrificed all there working lives to paying in to, if the "others" never bother with a private pension ?

what if i dont want a pension? what if the employer goes under and collapses as a business, what if the manager steals all the money and leaves the country?

how do people not having pensions cost people who do have pensions? do your pension funds get depleted paying for other people, and how comes they've got access to those funds but you dont? i'm confused 😳

yep! got a final salary pension, i was transferred from the civil service to a private sector position on EXACTLY the same terms and conditions!! i pay £63 a month, my employer pays about 10 times that each month! Projected to be worth £10k a year and a minty lump sum!
I can see why people are on strike, as it is a great deal, however i can also see why the government want to change it as it must cost an absolute fortune to cover all those payments, and is completely unsustainable!!
Got a military pension too, but it's not worth a great deal!

Final salary pension.

@mudshark - you may be surprised how little money 100k gets you. if you're single and retire at 65, that will get you under 6 grand a year (fixed) or [b]4,000[/b] which increases in line with RPI at current rates - those rates will probably drop as time continues (and people live longer)

http://www.hl.co.uk/pensions/annuities/annuity-best-buy-rates

[i]one I pay very little into every month that I may cash in in a couple of years.[/i]

You can't cash a pension in, unless you retire. And even then you don't 'cash it in' you buy an annuity.

[i]what if i dont want a pension? what if the employer goes under and collapses as a business, what if the manager steals all the money and leaves the country?[/i]

a) Tough.
b) Pension funds are very separate from business funds now and are protected by an insurance scheme (after the Robert Maxwell debacle).
c) See b)

A nice 1/35 final salary pension for me

I have one which both I and the company contribute to. I have no idea how much it will provide me with on retirement though, probably not that much as it is only seven years old.

cheers IHN 🙂

i'm still a bit confused as to how people not having a pension will effect those that do? doesn't everyone get a state pension and if you have a private one thats in addition to the basic government one? (please note i have already mentioned i'm not exactly clued up on this subject so apologies for being supremely stooopid)

what if i dont want a pension? what if the employer goes under and collapses as a business, what if the manager steals all the money and leaves the country?

Read up before you rant... its a personal pension that is not employer owned. So it moves with you all your life.

how do people not having pensions cost people who do have pensions?

Because, there are a large number of people who have made NO provision for their retirement. (Not sure if you have or not). So come retirement age, there are those of us who have sacrificed salary all our lives, and those who have made no provision. We can't just toss those people out in the street come retirement age. So they either live off the state pension.. which is inadequate, or other government benefits. Both of which are a cost to all tax payers.
Now, more than ever, fewer people are making any provision for a pension.
Its no different to the argument that the public sector are demonstrating today.

that's my understanding - however state pension is only £100/week at the moment, which might be enough for you to live on, but if you want a more comfortable lifestyle, you may want a bit more cash.

incidentally, that's the approx equivilent of a £120k pension pot..

Hmmmm. I have one that's with my first job after graduating. It was paid into for 3.5 yrs or so & is now just sat there.
I have a second one that is pretty much the same. I think I can pay into that one if I want to and once Christmas is out of the way, I think I will start making a small regular payment into that one.

Neither of those are currently worth very much at all.

Finally I have a pension with my current employer that again isn't gonna be worth very much unless I jack up the payments.
I'd rather hedge my bets a bit and put some into one of my other pensions and some into this one, than paying lots into this one.

Start the other way round and ask how much do you think you will need at retirement, then add up at whatever percentage returns you are likely to make, ie if you want to retire on £21k pa you will need £700,000 saved at 3 percent (at present returns) (this is above all house costs as usually you will need somewhere to live). or enough Buy to lets that will return £1750 per month gross ex all maintenance, mortgage, default payments, poor occupancy ect.
Now most people in the private sector may not be able to achieve this level of saving and therefore pension, yet the public sector expects it to be funded in part by them? Realistic probably not!

Just who is going to be managing these "compulsory "pensions.
If you have no choice that the money is deducted from your wage then on retirement you should be given a GUARANTEED figure.Otherwise your money will go down a black hole of commissions, costs and stock market falls.

cheers simonm, please dont read my question as a rant... i did try and make a point of saying i'm not exactly clued up on the subject 🙂

i'm 27, 40years to go until i retire... i fully expect that during those 40years the retirement age will be moved to 85 or something silly. i've been paying tax and working 2-3 jobs at a time since i could legally work so i don't think i'm a bad egg and i'm saving hard for my future.

If you want £20k p.a for your retirement the payments are something like £1000 per month given a growth of 5% over its life.....
[url= http://www.hl.co.uk/pensions/interactive-calculators/pension-calculator ]Calculate and fear ![/url]

Yes - Final salary, however accrual rate has been capped at CPI up to 2% and I doubt it will be open for more than 5 more years. Fortunatley I have a crystalised pension from a lower grade job that increases with pay inflation at the company and that is worth £7K a year in todays money when I retire, so even if I leave today I'll have something to live on when I retire. Aim is to build to about 20K. My old fella seems to live a very lavish lifestyle with his 20K pension, so thats all I'm basing that on.

http://www.employeebenefits.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=8415

Pensions Act 2008
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/30/contents

Property

@simonm - thanks for that link ( http://www.hl.co.uk/pensions/interactive-calculators/pension-calculator ) - very handy and good to use, interesting assumptions too (7% average growth - I guess this is normal but sounds high!)

[i]You can't cash a pension in, unless you retire. And even then you don't 'cash it in' you buy an annuity.[/i]

Sell it then, whatever.

7% Growth! Show that to the muppets running my with-profits endowment mortgage.

you can't do that either iirc. Money in a pension is there for good

[i]Sell it then, whatever.[/i]

I'm not entirely sure you can do that either. Everything in there has been put in there tax free, so if you can sell them, I'd imagine it'd come with a hefty CGT/NI bill. Could be wrong though.

7% Growth!

Lol, that was a calculator created before 2009 !

I have a defined contribution pot that I've been paying into since my first proper job 5 years ago.

I put in the maximum that the employer will match. The rest is not going in a pension as I would like to be able to get at the money as and when I want.

You can do various things at retirement, you can take a cash lump sum (25%?) and then buy an annuity or do and "income drawdown", you might be able to do a combination of both.

At present I'm able to afford to save so I may as well. I get an equivalent of 10% more pay from my employer if I put it in a pension. In the 40 or more years before I retire who knows what will happen. The only thing I'd put money on is that it's not going to get any better and that everybody will live out a wealthy retirement funded by the government.

Took mine at 51, just over a year ago. It was a 60th final salary pension and I made AVC's over the last 20+ years as well. Took a bit of a hit on what I would get at 60 (~20%)but with a buy-to-let income will be fine. (Former public sector that got privatised by John Major)

I was lucky, wouldn't like to be starting out now. My daughter is probably waiting for me to keel over while all I do is eat healthily and keep exercising!

Private sector pension. I pay 12.5%, my company pays 10%. Over £1000 a month goes into the pot, but ive only been contributing the last 18 months or so.

Over £1000 a month goes into the pot

That's an awful lot of money to waste 🙁

I sometimes do struggle with people in their 20s putting loads away for when they're old and looking forward to having a good time then

It sort of seems a bit negative, I dunno

rkk01..tell me about it, but the alternative is a lose 40% of it in tax. I can only hope its worth something when i eventually retire in 34 years time!

Been stuffing 7% a month away into a final salary for the last 5 years and work has been doing the same only with 22% so Im putting myself firmly into the lucky category. Probably wont be worth much in the long run as Im not planning on sticking around here for another 40 years but every little helps and not to be sniffed at in this day and age.

Plan a) Die before I hit retirement age ...

Plan b) erm ...

the alternative is to lose all of it in a room full of smoke and mirrors

FTFY

Between 1992/3?? and 2000 myself and my employer contributed to a scheme with Equitable Life - one of the most respected providers at the time.

I considerably overpaid - as young professional people with an eye to "looking after themselves" and not being reliant on the state were advised to do.

When Equitable went tits up my pension pot was worth about 17k. as one of my equally bitter colleagues had said at the time:

- we might as well have taken the ****in lot out in to the garden and set fire to it... at least we would have had a bloody good bonfire party.

And that it, really - IMO. Personal pension = a very good way to feed fat financiers 👿

Probably wont be worth much in the long run as Im not planning on sticking around here for another 40 years but every little helps and not to be sniffed at in this day and age.

We can only hope in 40 years that the money and you are still available to spend
The amount of hard working peoples pension money that gets stolen on a daily basis is staggering

Hmm, hold on so any contributuons I make will be deducted before tax? So maybe it does make sense to do then as I loose a fortune in tax each month .... wherebe these calculator things?

rkk01 - I thought equitable life compensation had now been paid, so you're not out of pocket?

toby1 - yeah that's true - so you essentially save 40% more than you could otherwise. In addition, there's no tax on the amount in the pension pot growing (unlike a savings account) so you win that way too

I'm a nurse so have one of the gold plated super duper ones.

The stuff the NHS send me says I'll get £9127 pa if I live long enough to get it, although around £1500 of that will be taxable I believe, as will any other income.

Gonna be living the high life, me.

rkk01 - that’s really shit.. My old man got Maxwell.
However, the issues Pensions face are that people still believe they will get maxwelled or same as you.. and then in the last 10 years everyone went into property making pretty big returns.
The upshot was that pension got a bad name, so even those with no other form of income at retirement said so it, what’s the point...
Which leaves a pretty big problem looming in the future..the non-pensioned.

It’s got so bad, our company offers a pension contribution, and despite it being part of their package, several younger people have said don't bother with it...

I'm already drawing my pension.

A few times I was looking at other jobs which seemed to pay a lot more but I'd have had to make my own pension arrangements. I thought it was sensible to accept the lower salary for the benefit of a decent pension.

Didn't stop me from getting screwed over (twice) as a result of out-sourcing and in-sourcing, and then accepting a lower monthly pension for the benefit of retiring early in order to avoid constantly applying for my own job in various reshuffles and rationalisations.

However, the issues Pensions face are that people still believe they will get maxwelled or same as you.. and then in the last 10 years everyone went into property making pretty big returns.

This sort of thing puts people off

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11452857

I've got 3 Defined contributions (2 frozen), currently I pay 5% the company pays 10%. It's a way to get another 10% from the company, plus payments get tax relief.

I'm under the impression that things are requlated a lot more tightly after the Maxwell & Equitable life things?

They might be better regulated - but look at the stock markets. The returns aren't there....

I can't see that money purchase schemes are anything other than a wheeze for the finacial sector to make money out of Joe Public.

Alhough I'm not public sector, never have been, I can very much sympathise with their efforts to protect their pension rights. They have paid in to them, after all.

I have a gold plated fire service one with ten years worth of £300 every four weeks paid in to it and its going up by 3.6% I also transferred ten years army pension into it , I currently have 16 years left to get my full quota in but that's soon to be 23 years and probably more in the future. And for all that I'll get less 😉 nice one

I'm a nurse so have one of the gold plated super duper ones.

The stuff the NHS send me says I'll get £9127 pa if I live long enough to get it, although around £1500 of that will be taxable I believe, as will any other income.

Gonna be living the high life, me.

I know it's not bad but I am a full time nurse at the top of my banding: nursing assistants, clerical and ancillary staff will get a lot less.

They certainly wont be going loco down in Acapulco whatever the Govt tell you.

Blimey, anjs must be an MP if he's on a 1/35th scheme!

Why do people claim they have 'frozen' pensions when it's usually not the case. If like trb you have some old Defined Contributions scheme you may be better off transferring them to a low-cost SIPP (do your own research etc etc).

Your invested money is not going to build up into a useful pot unless you put some effort into managing it.