What happened to my SERPS?

jimbo3172

Hi
Either in the late 80's or early 90's I remember opting out of SERPS.

I can't remember why I did, someone will have advised me to. I had a small private pension with Barclays Life from about 1993 - 1997 when I joined the Police and transferred my private pension into the police one.

A colleague recently told me he had found paperwork recently about when he opted out of SERPS and when he made enquiries it was worth about £8000 and he was able to transfer that into his police pension.

Will I have a similar pot of money somewhere I can transfer and how would I find it. I have moved numerous times since opting out.

Regards

jamesd

Phone the HMRC Contracted Out Pensions Helpline and they will be able to tell you for each tax year which pension scheme received your contracted out rebate. You can then contact that firm. Company name changes may mean that you'll need to ask for more details to work out where the money is today.

Because today is the last day for on time online tax return submissions you'll probably have a better experience with HMRC wait times if you wait until the middle of next week before calling. Today is probably the worst possible day of the year to call HMRC.

If it was a company pension you'd instead use the free Pension Tracing Service.

Since you paid in, all of the past restrictions on contracted out money have been removed and contracted out pension pots are now the same as all other personal pension pots. You can freely combine this with any other personal pension pots that you hold.

If you're in the police or any defined benefits pension you might consider that a personal pension can be taken from age 55. This can be useful in conjunction with schemes that have later ages for pension payment, allowing earlier retirement and using the personal pension to provide income until the work pension starts. It's also quite common for those in such pensions to have at least £20,000 of work, annuity and state pensions combined. If so, Flexible Drawdown can be used and this allows the taking of any amount out of a personal pension at any time from age 55 provided the income threshold has been met. Beyond the 25% tax free lump sum any extra taken is added to normal taxable income in the year in which it is taken.

atush

Besides which, if you joined the police in 1997, you only had a limited time to transfer in pensions which has passed.


Keeping it once found, to a PP that can be taken from age 55 will help you retire earlier than your scheme age.