My first pension

mjp101

Hi,

I recently started full time work (21 years old) and have been enrolled into a company pension. I'm living at home and saving hard trying to move out in 3-5 years. Should I look at opening an individual private pension? What kinds of providers are good and what kind of figure a month would be suitable - I would view maybe £100-150 monthly would be a start?

Thank you

xylophone

You are contributing as much to the pension as gets you the maximum employer contribution?

As you hope to buy a home, had you considered saving as much as possible into a LISA?

https://www.newcastle.co.uk/savings/savings-types/cash-isas/newcastle-cash-lifetime-isa/

mjp101

Have a LISA and I think I contribute as much as I can with company.

xylophone

Do you contribute as much as gets you the maximum employer contribution?

You contribute the maximum to the LISA.

You will still need money to furnish the house and will need an emergency fund.

Have you ever had a Nationwide Flexdirect account?

k6chris

Check out the exact T&Cs from your company pension, looking for things like 'matched contributions' where (for example) if you put in an extra 5% they will match that. The aim here is to extract the maximum payments from your employer. The next stage is to look at 'tax efficient' options, such as LISA etc, where the aim is to minimise the tax you will need to pay and maximise payments / funding from government offerings (which is what at least 50% of this forum discusses!). Good luck and well done for starting so early, your future self will thank you!

Albermarle

If you want to make extra pension contributions the easiest route is normally just to increase your contributions to your workplace pension. Either by increasing your monthly contributions from salary ( which as already mentioned may result in higher contributions from your employer). Alternatively you can make lump sum contributions to the pension.
Normally nowadays although the pension is organised by the company , you can usually get direct access to the pension provider via their website and a password . So it is pretty much the same as having your personal pension .