When to claim EEA state pensions via DWP IPC CFN901?

FatherAbraham

The UK's DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) has an International Pensions Centre, which offers a route for UK residents to claiming state pensions whose benefits were earned in EEA (European Economic Area) countries plus Switzerland.

This convenient-sounding process starts with summiting form CFN901, found on the GOV.UK website.

However, CFN901 is a remarkably simple form, considering that it's designed to accommodate claims in 32 distinct jurisdictions, and I'm wondering about the consequences of some of the dates it asks for.

For those who are still working, it asks for the future date when one plans to retire (technically: to stop working).

Another field asks for the date from which one wants to claims one's foreign state pensions, and this is a field whose consequences I'm unclear about.

Since, for example, (I believe that) my Italian state-pension age is 65, while my Danish state pension age is 69, it seems unlikely that a single claim date will work well for me. Furthermore, my planned retirement date is at the age of 62.

Some state pension systems (for example the Danish) do not entertain retrospective claims, so failure to claim in time results in income loss. 

There's also a tick-box choice about whether the claimant wants to get the pension "from the earliest date of eligibility", which sounds good, might backfire if a foreign pension has flexibility which has punitive costs for early retirees: In those cases, it might be financially beneficial to wait until the normal pension age for that country, but the form does not capture such subtleties. 

What I can't understand are the consequences of the dates I enter. 

Since I plan to stop working at 62, I can put this onto the form.  It would make sense, perhaps, to to claim all pensions from that date, even though I would expect such claims to fail in all cases, just in case my understanding of my state retirement age in each country where I've contributed is wrong. 

In any case, since firm CFN901 only permits one claim date, there are bound to be claims that fail, since not all countries have the same state-pension entitlement date. 

So, my questions are: 

• Should I put my (early) retirement date (age 62) as my claim date for EEA+S pensions?

• What are the consequences of choosing to claim from the earliest possible eligibility date, and how does that interact with the stated pension claim date?

• At what point in time  should I actually submit the form to DWP? Are there bad consequences of submitting it several years before the planned retirement date?

Any clues welcome.