Never held a penison...worried...

MallyGirl

It does as long as you have kept all those former employers up to date with your changes of address etc. Spend some time to make sure you have all the details for any trailing pensions all in one place. Easier to do now rather than 30 years time when you have forgotten some companies may have changed address/name/pension provider.

RedfordML

That's what completely throws me. Had I taken a pension at the many jobs ive held, bar my current one, not one would know my address. Some would have closed and no longer trade. I would have zero idea on any provider.

lisyloo

RedfordML wrote: »

Still not 100% on how it works, if I transfer across jobs and companies at the end but see the value and importance.

The basic idea is quite simple.
You put some money into an account, the government helps by giving you some taxes back and your employer helps by putting in money also (they have to by law).
That money stays tied up until you retire but gets invested so it increases.

If you change company then you Can either transfer the money to your new pension or if there was a good reason you could leave it where it was and have a few pensions.
I have 5 at the moment and I have them listed in a spreadsheet.

lisyloo

RedfordML wrote: »

That's what completely throws me. Had I taken a pension at the many jobs ive held, bar my current one, not one would know my address. Some would have closed and no longer trade. I would have zero idea on any provider.

Your pension company is separate to your employer, so if your employer has shut down, the pension company is probably still in business.

If you had a valuable investment then why wouldn’t you keep track of it? And why wouldn’t you provide them with your new address?

If you had say £200k with a pension company why wouldn’t you bother to tell them your new address? Seems really odd to me that you wouldn’t tell them and would jut lose track of it.

Mostly people who’ve made the effort to invest, make the small administrative effort to keep track of their money. It only needs one note on your phone.

RedfordML

100% As soon as I enter FT work, I 100% will enroll, keep contact and details correct.

Thanks for your advice.

bowlhead99

RedfordML wrote: »

Thank you so much JoeCrystal!

Its definitely now on my agenda!

Still not 100% on how it works, if I transfer across jobs and companies at the end but see the value and importance.

If you change jobs and start another pension pot (no. 2) with the new employer, you have the choice of having the old pension pot (no. 1) continue to grow with its investment returns - but no more employer money coming into it and no more contributions from you, so that when you get to retirement age you'll have two separate pots. Or 3, or 4 etc, depending on how many jobs you have . Or instead you can transfer the value of pot No1 into the new No2 to be one bigger pot, and so on, so you only ever have one (bigger) pot

If you end up with 10 jobs it's perfectly allowable to have 10 pension pots, but often you pay higher fees to have the older pots administered by the pension company if you're no longer an active member, which means you will end up with lower returns as the higher charges eat into the investment profits. And if you have 10 pots, you might forget all the details of some of them.

So it often makes sense to transfer a pension from the old job into the one you're using for the next job. Or, have one private pension which holds the money from all of your old schemes together, and one current workplace pension into which you and your current employer are contributing at a point in time, so you never have more than two to keep track of.

Im in a very low paid job right now, had to go PT (14k) but hopefully within the next 12-18months that will improve. I will definitely get into a pension scheme when I do

Sadly, this is quite common behaviour among people who don't know better. But the way to think of it is, even though you are low paid ... Your employer is willing to give you FREE MONEY and put it into your pension scheme and by choosing to opt out of the pension scheme, you are SAYING NO to the FREE MONEY. You need this money for retirement, and as you are on a low salary with nothing put away for retirement you SHOULD NOT TURN DOWN FREE MONEY.

That's right, the employer is literally saying this job pays X (which includes Y per year invested into a pension for you), but if you don't want to join the pension scheme we will just pay you X minus Y instead - which is fine by us because we will have lower staff costs and make more profit for ourselves. And you are agreeing you want to opt out and leave them the Y to spend on better bonuses for the executives and more profit for the shareholders. That doesn't sound like a very sensible thing to do if you are complaining you don't earn as much money as you'd like.


On top of turning down the employer free money, you are also paying more tax than you need to, because the government are quite happy to *not* charge you tax if you put the money into a pension, but you are choosing to voluntarily turn down the free money from the employer, and have whatever is left of your salary, all be taxed. Madness really.

I know it is hard to save for the future when you are on a low-ish salary. But taking less from your employer than he is willing to pay, is not the best way (in the long term) to avoid poverty. You are saying you'll definitely look at it when your salary goes up. But unfortunately lots of people *say* that, and then their salary goes up, and they think of all the other things they could buy with that money if they just took the cash and paid tax now.

You've already ignored pension for a couple of decades and been turning down free money by not understanding it. Now you have the opportunity to not turn it down any more. Embrace it and get as much money from your employer (and pay as little to the tax man) as possible.

dunstonh

RedfordML wrote: »

That's what completely throws me. Had I taken a pension at the many jobs ive held, bar my current one, not one would know my address. Some would have closed and no longer trade. I would have zero idea on any provider.

So, when you change address, you have never notified anyone that you moved?

No pension providers have closed and no longer trade. They can merge and be taken over but the pensions continue.

Morata_

Brilliant, post above. Relateable for me to!

Morata_

Sorry to jump on this. If I had worked at school for 4 years and want to check if I had paid any contributions, how do I check who the pension provider was? Call the school? Or it linked to the trust in charge at the time? I worked in school 2009 - 2013 and may have contributed???

JoeCrystal

Morata_ wrote: »

Sorry to jump on this. If I had worked at school for 4 years and want to check if I had paid any contributions, how do I check who the pension provider was? Call the school? Or it linked to the trust in charge at the time? I worked in school 2009 - 2013 and may have contributed???

Check your payslip first to see if you did contribute into a pension scheme. Depending on the type of school, it is likely you would be paying into the LGPS for the staffs or the TPS for teachers. Worth checking with the school in this case.