Multiple Pension Statement Planning Confusion

chris_debian

Hi, all.

Hope somebody more experienced than me, can help.

I have been in the Civil Service for 22 years. Before that, I was in the RAF for 9 years. My Civil Service time has been covered until fairly recently, by the Classic pension, but has recently closed and I now have a second pension, based on a career average salary.

My small RAF pension comes into the mix, and all three pensions have different lump sums and retirement ages. In addition, until recently, I had been making additional savings in a Scottish Widows fund, but this has closed this month, so I transferred the balance into a True Potential Investments SIPP.

As I'm 47, I'd like to start to make annual checks of my retirement situation/ possibilities, but having tried some online calculators, none of them seem to consider lump sums, which are obviously quite important.

I think I'll probably need to pay for some independent advice, but wondered if anyone knows of a way that I can calculate these mismatched pensions, myself? As I say, ideally I'd be able to do this annually.

Any ideas appreciated.

Many thanks,

Chris

Kynthia

For your Classic and Alpha pensions, while you are still an active member you will get an annual benefit statement each year. This will tell you the amount of Classic lump sum and annual pension you'll get at 60 years old, plus what Alpha annual pension you'll get at state pension age. Your Classic pension won't change by much, it will only increase by CPI each year but as it's linked to your final salary it will be affected by any salary changes.

You can probably write to your RAF pension administrators to ask for an up to date statement.

AlanP_2

What are you trying to calculate? Do you get Annual Statements from each? Hopefully you do from the CS at least and at least have a statement from when you left the RAF.

Are you trying to work out what you will get when you start them?

I've built my own spreadsheet(s) as have others on here.

Retireeasy is an option, you can put lump sum payments into that. I used it for a while but prefer to use the s./sheet as I can understand "my logic" and interpret what it is telling me.

xylophone

Have you obtained a state pension statement?

https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pension

https://www.gov.uk/armed-forces-pension-calculator

http://www.civilservicepensionscheme.org.uk/members/member-calculators/

chris_debian

Hi, all.

Thank you so much for the replies. Looking back, I can see that I failed to mention that I have the pension benefit statements, I just can't throw all this info together, without help. I'll have a look at Retireeasy, and I've emailed two IFA's.

Thank you, again.

Chris.

Kynthia

Would your union have anyone who could explain it to you, or recomend an ifa who is familiar with the scheme?

enthusiasticsaver

I built my own spreadsheet showing when all the pensions would come into payment. We have 5 different income streams (3 DB pensions and 2 state pensions) plus DC pots to fill in the gaps. I just did a column for each year and transposed the figures off the annual statements or got the information off the pension websites which often have calculators so you can see what difference taking it a year or two earlier or later can make.

Are you familiar with spreadsheets?

enthusiasticsaver

What you can do about the lumpsum is to add them all together from the pension statements and the common calculation is to work out drawdown at 3-4% per annum. That is a conservative valuation of what you would get if you invested the lumpsum so remove the amount you would use to pay off debt/mortgage or go on holiday, pay for home improvements, car etc and then work out 3% of the rest to add to your annual pensions. You will also need to work out the amount you will need to live off when retired each year taking account of the fact there will be no NI or mortgage hopefully and much less tax.