workplace pension vs private pension or both

BigTerryWogan

bang on Al, however she is tied in for a fixed term, once that period has gone she/we will look at other option.

Not to mention the possibility of trading myself in for a younger model. _pale_

Terron

AlanP wrote: »

I used to work for a computer company in the early 90s when they had almost a 100k employees across the globe and share price had been on an upward trajectory.

So did I . My employer's name began with D.
I was in the company share scheme, but sold them after my job was sold. I also got some shares in my new employer, until their share scheme was stopped. I held on to them until I lost my job with them, by which time the share price had almost recovered from the dot com crash. I sold most but still have some, which have increased by 25% since I sold the others.

AlanP_2

Terron wrote: »

So did I . My employer's name began with D.
I was in the company share scheme, but sold them after my job was sold. I also got some shares in my new employer, until their share scheme was stopped. I held on to them until I lost my job with them, by which time the share price had almost recovered from the dot com crash. I sold most but still have some, which have increased by 25% since I sold the others.

Mine began with a D as well :beer:

I had a small amount in ShareSave scheme but always sold out when time was up. Young family, wife at home needed the money so no conscious decision around taking on too much risk associated with one company.

Some of the guy who were in their 50's then had a fortune tied up in the shares and lost heavily as it went down the pan. That, coupled with the way the pension scheme has been run over the last 15 or so years, has put them into a very different retirement scenario than they envisaged.

SouthLondonUser

As others have said, you haven't given a lot of information, and at your age you are significantly behind in terms of pension savings. Some thoughts:

Get whatever you can from your employer. Some employers match your contributions up to a certain %.

Once you have maxed out what your employer will contribute, if you can still contribute more, doing so via your company pension has the advantage of saving you national insurance via salary sacrifice. If you were to invest the same money in another pension, you'd get tax relief but you wouldn't get relief on national insurance. It has the disadvantages of more limited choices and typically higher fees than you can get in a SIPP, but the NI saving may easily offset these. Also, you should be able to transfer at least part of your money away from the company scheme and into a SIPP even when you are still employed by them. Of course salary sacrifice means you commit to contributing the same every month; if you want to do one-off contributions at the end of the year, depending on how much you have spent and saved in the year, then you cannot do salary sacrifice.

greenglide

Mine began with a D as well

Compaq, HP, etc involved then?

So the pension scheme is now with HP, having been left behind when they split into HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise which then merged with CSC to become DXC technology.