Civil service pension help

Shytorque

Hi Everyone,
Wow! Thank you so much, I did not expect such an enormous response. It is very enlightening and informative. I never knew about the 1/80 vs 1/60 calculations and I feel much better now. Hey you've also been bothered to do the math for me.
To answer Silvertabby's question, No I do understand basic arithmetic, 1/80 is a smaller fraction than 1/60. I just hadn't done the math yet.
Seeing a freebie 3x pension lump sum I assumed I had been the poorer. so not missed the boat, but.... my ship has come in, lol.
Once again thankyou , It has been very rewarding coming on here. Just wait til I send my colleague the link to this forum.

Kynthia

There are other differences too. Classic had a lower contribution level but only paid a surviver pension to a spouse. Premium would pay a survivers pension to an unmarried partner too, as long as you were both free to marry (e.g. not married to anyone else). Plus the Classic survivers pension would stop if they cohabited or remarried whereas the Premium one wouldn't and I think the partner and dependant age children would get a slightly higher pension with Premium. Classic would refund most of your widows pension contributions on retirement if you had never been married since you joined the scheme but lots of people didn't realise their unmarried partner would get nothing when they died. I think Classic had the benefit of being able to retire from 50, but that would obviously be with a significant reduction and no indexation of the final salary used.

All of this is from memory so apologies if any of it is incorrect. It does show you they are schemes with a lot of differences so you can't just compare one aspect of them. I had the benefit of being able to choose which scheme due to joining in September 2002 and I picked Premium.