Pension beneficiaries

Herts22

bostonerimus said:

The USS scheme has gone through a lot of changes recently and the type of pension you get depends on when you started work. So the OP will need to find out if it was a USS scheme or TPS DC or DB etc.

If it was a DB scheme there are usually options for single life or joint life that would include your spouse. A scheme might also allow you to nominate another beneficiary to get a lump sum or lifetime benefit if you die early, but you'd have to take a reduced pension for that. Usually a married person will take the joint life option so the surviving spouse keeps getting some pension.

Thanks for this info on the USS scheme. It may not come to anything but I'm going to dig into it just to get some closure.

Albermarle

USS and TPS are far, far better than any private scheme, so unlikely he would have opted out of them.

dunstonh

In parts of East Anglia, teachers are in the LGPS and not the TPS.

MX5huggy

Herts22 said:

Silvertabby said:

Herts22 said:

Silvertabby said:

Teacher's Pensions (TPS), like other public sector pensions, pay a death grant (in the form of one-off tax free lump sum) if the fund member dies before starting to draw their pension or within a set time scale afterwards.  This is in addition to a spouse's pension, if one is due, and may be paid to any nominated beneficiary.

If your father retired at 60 (or earlier) then he would have been in receipt of his teacher's pension for more than 5 years, and so would have been outside the guarantee period for the death grant.

TPS do pay children's pensions, but only under certain circumstances.  The usual being up to age 18, or age 23 if still in full time education.  A disabled child could be awarded a dependant's pension for life, but this is rare.

Many thanks for this. He retired aged 66 and did in fact continue to do some occasional work at the university following retirement. He died around the time of his 67th birthday in March so would have drawn pension for less than 12 months.

He could have been in the USS (University pension scheme) rather than TPS, but they had similar rules re death grants back then.  

Had a death grant been due, then that would have/should have been addressed when TPS/USS were informed of your father's death.

This brings me to believe that your father may have chosen to pay into a private (DC) scheme, and that he may have opted to take an annuity which then died with him.....

Are you able to search through your father's paperwork/bank details to see who exactly paid his pension?

Many thanks for the distinction between USS and TPS. I think he would have gone for one of those schemes rather than private as he wasn't particularly brilliant on the financial management side. Any existing paperwork will be with my sister who lived local to my father at the time of his death. I'll check to see if she's still got documentation.

Let’s correct that:-
I think he would have gone for one of those as an astute analyst of all things financial.