Pension Boosting Calculator- PLEASE HELP US TEST!!

Hi folks,

We've put together a quick tool to help people who are considering buying up years of National Insurance Contributions to top up their Basic State Pension entitlement.

This will go into a newly written article explaining a LOT more than this, but we'd love some early feedback, especially from any of you who have experience with pensions.

To be entitled to a Basic State Pension, you need to have paid National Insurance for a sufficient number of years. If you weren't working for any reason and you're short, you can buy extra years. This can boost the level of weekly state pension you get once at retirement age. However, choosing whether to do so is complicated and depends on your circumstances, so this calc gives a rough picture of how long you'd need to live for it to be worth it.

It's based on the current cost of buying up old NI contributions as this is what you'd pay if you bought them now (the price rockets by 50% in April, for some, so don't delay). We have used the weekly State Pension payout, of £95.25, from the start of the next tax year, on 6 April, as that's what you'll get in a few weeks. This rate will undoubtedly rise over the next few years, but we are not going to make any assumptions about this within the calc.

At the moment, this is a work in progress, so any feedback about how the calc works, the actual maths or the functionality, would be fabulous. To see it, go to


Cheers

Dan


Quick Update Note by Martin

Just noting some of the questions and comments below. This calculator is part of a new 4,000 word (which is a lot) detailed guide to the state pension, delaying taking pensions, pension credit & how it all works that we've put serious hours into. So things like the differences between men and womens entitlements are all in there. The calculator is just for a specific task.