SERPS/Private Pension

MrsG2006

Please forgive me if this is a completely stupid question but pensions completely baffle me.
In 1988 when I was 16, working for a small lawyers office in Scotland, and earning £3120 per year,  a man from the Halifax came and signed me up to a pension with Standard Life opting out of SERPS.  
Over the last 7 years with the auto enrolment thing being introduced I had a couple of small sums in different pension scheme.  The company I work for now uses NEST, so I was transferring all the little pots into my NEST pot so that I could at least see where everything was, being only 12 years away from 60 and hoping to retire then I've been getting pension forecasts etc.  Anyway, to cut a long story short I found the Standard Life policy documents and the letters from the Halifax etc in a box under the bed and I wrote to Standard Life asking for a valuation figure so that I could transfer this amount into NEST.  Apparently my Standard Life pension has nothing in it.  I'm a little confused now, as the government pension forecaster says I was contracted out of SERPS and the additional state pension part would be covered by the private pension I would have signed up to when I contracted out.  Is this correct that there is no money in the Standard Life one?  Where would the contracted out part be?  Any advice would be really appreciated as I said at the beginning of this post, I do not have the slightest clue on pensions.

xylophone

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6114417/tracing-pensions-by-ni-number#latest
post today from Deleted_User

eskbanker

xylophone said:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6114417/tracing-pensions-by-ni-number#latest
post today from Deleted_User

For anyone still getting to grips with the new forum, you can link to any individual post by copying its URL from the date/timestamp in its banner, so in this case https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/76934777/#Comment_76934777

Albermarle

It could be that the pension was set up but the NI contributions were never made to the pension due to admin error.
If this is the case ( and it is just a guess) then you will never have been contracted out of SERPS, which may mean you will get larger state pension than you would have if you had been  contracted out.
Check via the links above what has happened . You could also check your current state pension entitlement. 

JoeCrystal

eskbanker said:

For anyone still getting to grips with the new forum, you can link to any individual post by copying its URL from the date/timestamp in its banner, so in this case https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/76934777/#Comment_76934777

That is handy! Very helpful eskbanker. Still prefer seeing a post number for the ease though! 

xylophone

You could also check your current state pension entitlement. 

At this 

https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pension

MrsG2006

Thanks everyone for your help.  I will use the template and try to get the info.