Cheery's country living adventure
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Ha greenbee - I'm at least trying to avoid doing that!
Certainly is all food for thought though. I'm trying not to think of what I've potentially diddled us out of by not sorting this sooner. Mr Cheery has been on about taking his pension for the last couple of years and I've just kept saying it was pointless while i was still working... if we'd checked when he was 55, that was around the time we were buying this house and we could have avoided a lot of the mortgage fiasco!! Aarrgghh!
Hey ho. I'm not taking sole responsibility for that one! And jo use crying over spilt milk now...10 -
You're not the only one - if I'd realised the impact on my pension of not paying in more sooner, I'd have upped my contributions and not worried about the mortgage quite so much at the last house. It might have meant that I didn't move when I did... but then who knows, that might have been a good thing. Anyway, it's done now, and I've just got to work out how to make sure I do the right thing now. I did look at my ISA earlier, but ignored it again. I'm not going to be making any regular payments into it until the pension stuff is sorted - it'll get a lump sum this year, and possibly next. It should cost less to run, but the difference is I can now see the costs!10
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I suppose we all just make the best decision we can at the time don't we? I know sometimes I just can't handle any more info going into my head, and that's just the way it is. And actually if we'd been able to draw the pension earlier we may have got sucked into buying somewhere even more expensive... at least this way we're currently managing and this will be a lovely bonus!
Also, I have a confession to make. House insurance is due on 14th, but they'd previously emailed to say they'd take payment early, which I'd forgotten about. Had another email today to say payment has already been taken now.
Quite annoying- clearly they do this so people like me will get caught out by an automatic renewal. But on this occasion, I'm not going to argue, and instead will just get on with putting renewed effort into the car insurance instead. House insurance has renewed at £290 - cheapest quote was £221 but I hadn't done the comparison to include the extras (bikes, instruments etc) so it may not have come out that much different anyway... 🙄6 -
Another here who wishes I'd started paying into a pension pot earlier - absolutely NO chance of any sort of early retirement for me! Hindsight is a wonderful thing and all that though, so I refuse to let it worry me too much allowing that there is a limited amount I can do to change things now!
On YOUR pension wranglings, the only thing I'd throw into the mix is that allowing for the extra £8k per year income, if it were me I'd be ring-fencing the remaining lump-sum to pay another chunk off the mortgage at the earliest possible moment next year.
Automatic renewals on insurance really annoy me - and even more so when they take the payment early when as you say the only reason for doing that is to make it less likely that people will then change to somewhere cheaper once the payment has already gone. Fiends!
Oh - also part of the furniture although they're obviously playing about with things at the moment as earlier my badge for that wasn't showing, and I've just noticed that it now is and also I seem to have been given my 10k posts one, which is odd as I thought I was still a few posts off that! (And bizarrely I have a "6 year anniversary" one showing - when I've been here over 10 now...!)🎉 MORTGAGE FREE (First time!) 30/09/2016 🎉 And now we go again…New mortgage taken 01/09/23 🏡
Balance as at 01/09/23 = £115,000.00
Balance as at 31/12/23 = £112,000.00SOA CALCULATOR (for DFW newbies): SOA Calculatorshe/her6 -
Fiends indeed!
Yes, it's likely we will do that EH if it comes to it. But I confess I've been feeling rather too close to the bone with our current emergency fund... at the minute it would only take one new car, a broken boiler, and something hefty wrong with the septic tank for it to be gone, and I don't like that feeling, so I think we'll keep a reasonable amount back, but we'll see...6 -
I am both impressed and surprised at those figures. Depends whose DB scheme obviously but in my experience of trying to explain three different DB schemes as part of my job, it is usually a 4 or 5% reduction per year for every year you go early. USS was 5% for example, so going voluntarily at 60 instead of 65 lost you 25% of the annual pension. I'd be interested to see what he would get at 60? If they are guaranteed figures then I would be biting their hand off.
It also depends who it is with. My DB took a hit when it transferred to the government rescue scheme, but that hit did not impact existing retirees, just those with deferred benefits. The other thing I know of is that local gov schemes have a 'discretion's' policy which covers discretionary payments such as making up part of the shortfall when members retire early. That policy can change, and it is the kind of thing that is under scrutiny when finances are difficult. If you think back about ten years part of the reason for the original uni strikes was that they quietly removed the early retirement rights on redundancy for the over 55s in the USS scheme.
Hope this helps.My mortgage free diary: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6498069/whoops-here-comes-the-cheese7 -
Yes @Cheery_Daff I absolutely get your thinking around that side of things - as you know we have been feeling much the same after the works at home and then the replacement for my car decimated ours. MrEH was reluctant to be focusing so much on paying money back into there but I want to know that it's back in the "comfort zone" again.🎉 MORTGAGE FREE (First time!) 30/09/2016 🎉 And now we go again…New mortgage taken 01/09/23 🏡
Balance as at 01/09/23 = £115,000.00
Balance as at 31/12/23 = £112,000.00SOA CALCULATOR (for DFW newbies): SOA Calculatorshe/her5 -
Thanks redo, that's helpful. It's the Local Govt Pension Scheme - their early reduction percentages are listed here
https://www.lgpsmember.org/more/reductions.php
I worked it out manually based on the figures they send each year, and then discovered you could request a quote based on retirement date from their website, so the figures I posted yesterday were from their own quotes.
I was surprised too - but I wonder whether it's because he actually left work in 2008, whereas normally if people were considering taking pension early it would involve them stopping paying in. He's not paid in for 11 years anyway so maybe that's why it doesn't make any difference.
Having said that, the lump sums from the quote were different to what I worked out manually - £19K using their reduction percentage, and £27k on their quote (for taking the full annual amount so a lesser lump). Not sure what the deal is there - maybe there is some discretion about not taking the whole percentage?
He's going to ring them today to check their quote figures and see what the deal is.6 -
@Cheery_Daff I think you’re right about why there is less reduction is because he left in 2008 so they don’t have to calculate the ‘lost opportunity’ of not paying in between now and original retirement age. Sounds fab if you can do it and don’t worry at all about not doing it sooner. Hindsight is a wonderful thing (we’d never have signed up for 5 year 5.34% mortgage in mid 2000s if we’d known it was going to crash....)
as you say say you might have been tempted by somewhere more expensive but actually by paying of some of the mortgage with the lump sum and saving interest it’s worth more to you the face value of the ££ - does that make sense 😜
As for comparison sites, don’t get me started price always looks ok to you put the extras in or get an excess that’s half reasonable. As long as it’s in the ball park and not stressful, it’s not going to be the end of the world.6 -
How annoying about auto-renewal on insurance taking payment early (and that we now have to use words in place of emojis to express feelings! ) - I don't blame you for leaving the home insurance as it is in that instance. But very naughty of them. Home insurance is such a nightmare to get quotes for anyway - so many variables!Mortgage free 16/06/2023! £132,500 cleared in 11 years, 3 months and 7 days
'Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.' Ernest Hemingway5
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