58 years old. Any point in starting to save for a pension now?

jamesd

NEST is spectacularly unsuitable for this. Use it only for money that gets employer matching and use a different personal pension for the rest. The reasons are:

1. they use low growth investments in a person's early years with them
2. they use low growth investments in the years before specified retirement date
3. they don't offer any really good equity investments, Sharia looks least bad

You can work around the first two by hand selecting the Sharia fund and setting the oldest retirement age they will allow but that still leaves you with limited investment choices.

sevenhills

Say for instance you wanted to save for a new car. So, in 5 years you save £5,000

If you put that £5,000 in a pension(SIPP) then u will get 25% tax relief.

So when you draw the money when you are 63, instead of having £5,000 for a car, u will have £6,250

Dazed_and_C0nfused

Pedant alert.

You get a 25% uplift.

The tax relief is 20% (of the gross contribution).

msallen

... and it's taxable.

steampowered

Why do you think you have "lost" all of your pension contributions in earlier years? 

Pensions are generally not included as an asset within bankruptcy.

ronaldadio

Thanks for all of your responses.

I'll look at putting more in, I'll check it out.

One of my concerns is, due to the state the economy will be in, if I lost my job in 12 months for whatever reason, what happens to the money I've put in?

Also, if I carry on with this for 10 years, will I get this pension on top of a State pension?
As you can see from these last two questions, I'm WAY out of my depth here

Dazed_and_C0nfused

Also, if I carry on with this for 10 years, will I get this pension on top of a State pension?

If you didn't why would you be making these contributions?

You will end up with a pot of money and you can use this in a variety of ways, for example you could,

1.  Purchase an annuity (pension) payable for the rest of your life.

2.  Drawdown money as you wish until the pot is gone.

3.  Take it all in one go.

4.  Do nothing and just leave it to (hopefully) grow.

You would be well advised to check your State Pension forecast on gov.uk.  It is important you read the whole forecast, the likely headline of £175.20 can be misleading for some people.

We've got ourselves back on track & I've a job that offers a pension scheme (Company is called Nest, if that makes a difference?)
Simple question really, is there any point in me using this scheme? The amount is only around £20 a week, so if I kept doing that, I'd have paid in around £10,000 when I hit retirement (roughly)

Don't forget that if the £20 is what you see going out of your wages in total that some of it will be your contribution and that element will get 25% uplift so if it is split say £12 from you and £8 from your employer the actual gross contribution with tax relief would be £23.  Not much extra on a single payment but over a number of years it will make a difference.

MovingForwards

Money stays in Nest.
Yes, this is a pension separate to the state pension and you get both, plus any other old pensions you've had over the years.

Marcon

jamesd said:

NEST is spectacularly unsuitable for this. Use it only for money that gets employer matching and use a different personal pension for the rest. The reasons are:

1. they use low growth investments in a person's early years with them
2. they use low growth investments in the years before specified retirement date
3. they don't offer any really good equity investments, Sharia looks least bad

You can work around the first two by hand selecting the Sharia fund and setting the oldest retirement age they will allow but that still leaves you with limited investment choices.

Plus there is a 1.8% 'contribution charge' each time you/your employer pay in, so unless your contributions are going to have a long time to grow, that's a hefty deduction at the outset.

Leaffall

Hi I did it because I knew my work place employers who weren't fair with people would have to put money into my pension. I knew I won't get much back but I treated it as a pay increase and a savings account.  as I'm not at the moment a taxpayer I cashed it in and got the whole amount back not a lot but no money taken by the Taxman!