JeffA:
Most/all stock market pensions are rubbish - my pot was higher 10 years ago than it is now - the ftse 100 has been flatlining for a decade. The final salary ones were the only ones worth having.
FTSE100 is almost 25% up from where it was 10 years ago so clearly you invested in a bad one or one with ridiculous fees - if the fees are even 1% then they’re too high, if they’re knocking on 2% they’d have eaten up most of the last 10 years of FTSE rises if that’s all your pension is invested in… No pension fund worth its salt just invests in the UK stock market solely unless the individual specifically chooses a UK market only. Even the two most popular workplace pension schemes, Nest and Peoples Pension, don’t just invest in the UK market. My SIPP which is invested in nothing more complicated than Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap has 60% of its fund invested in the US. It grew 19.11% in March 2020-21, 9.61% March 2021-22 year, is up 5.29% this last 12 months. The first payment I made in Jan 2016 is up 75%. Any pension fund which didn’t increase in double digit percentages in 2020 is one you shouldn’t be in.
And the returns are pathetic - I think in the last ten years it gained a couple of grand. I wish I could put it on the american stock market rather than the FTSE - the american stock market has gone up four or five times as much as the FTSE 100.
You can. Choice 1 is see if your pension provider has a range of investment options and choose one that you think is better. Option 2 is do it yourself, open up a SIPP, transfer your current pensions as cash into your SIPP, invest the cash in an index fund. You could choose a SP500 tracker fund if you want it all invested in the US markets or something like I have if you want a bit more diversification. If you choose a Vanguard fund open up your SIPP with Vanguard directly for the lowest fees…OTTOMH I don’t think I’m even paying 0.5%.
(Note I am not a financial advisor, this is not advice on what to invest in, merely suggestions to provoke thought.)
Where did you see the FTSE was up 25% in the last ten years? I read it was 10%. Some economist was saying if you’d invested a grand in the FTSE 100 5 years ago you would have £1030 today. Then you have to take the pension fees out of that £30. I think one pension I had was 54 grand when I left the job in 2011 and it’s now 56 grand. 2 grand in 12 years. I’m not going to be water-skiing for long on that.
I might look into changing what it’s invested in - you get the choice of “low, medium or high” risk. I think I chose the medium risk option.
The reason SWEDISH BLUE cannot receive any pension credit or rebate[allowance] from the council for any benefits is 100% his small private pension puts him over the basic weekly earnings from his pensions it does me. my small private pension puts me just out of the range of any benefits, to be honest i would be better of with out it and get a reduction in all we have to pay out i rent etc.
go on the BENIFITS CALCULATORS -GOV.UK it will tell you straight away if you can claim any benefits i am 78 but believe me you still need a fair income to survive.
peggydeckboy:
The reason SWEDISH BLUE cannot receive any pension credit or rebate[allowance] from the council for any benefits is 100% his small private pension puts him over the basic weekly earnings from his pensions it does me. my small private pension puts me just out of the range of any benefits, to be honest i would be better of with out it and get a reduction in all we have to pay out i rent etc.
go on the BENIFITS CALCULATORS -GOV.UK it will tell you straight away if you can claim any benefits i am 78 but believe me you still need a fair income to survive.
I hear quite a few people saying the same thing - they spent decades paying into a stock-market pension but the returns are pathetic. The trouble is that private pension then puts them over the pension credit limit - so they’ve saved all their lives and end up getting less a month than they would have if they had saved nothing and could get pension credit.
Final salary pensions were worth having - stock market pensions are useless unless you are earning a fortune and can afford to put hundreds a month into one.
toonsy:
Unfortunately there’ll be many more in this situation due to auto enrolment pensions being mandated. For instance there was one post on here the other day where a driver grossed £1300 wages for the week but his pension deductions were £33. Obviously this will (or should) get added to by am employee contribution too but its still not a lot.
There’s too many people who pay in the bare minimum without much thought to their future. Or simply stop paying in because they don’t want to lose that £30/40/whatever in the here and now. Likewise there are too many firms who just offer the bare minimum on their part. In that same thread I mentioned that I’m amazed that generous pension terms aren’t viewed as favourably when it comes to looking at employers/jobs.
I’ve been in one work pension or another since I started work pretty much including the very last of the defined benefit “gold plated” Royal Mail pensions, albeit only for a few years, which has terms so beneficial its untransferable so must just stay as it is until (I think) 55.
All the rest of my pensions have been normal savings type things, and I’ve transferred them as I change employers so they’re all in one pot and all held in my current job which I add to. Using the pensions providers calculator I’m looking at a pot of around £650,000 aged 68 if i carry on doing as now, plus the RM one, plus my state one so hopefully I’ll be battering the saga holidays for a bit [emoji38]
I know pensions and that are boring and they’re also not at tge same level they once were, but there’s still some decent offers out there. I get paid lunar pay (every four weeks, or 13 times a year) and my contribution is normally around £330 give or take, but my employer matches it so I’m getting £660 or so into my pot every four weeks which is costing me less than half that as its taken off my top line before tax and NI etc.
I think its important for people to think about pension provision and to actively save towards it because, for me anyway, I couldn’t think of anything worse than working all my life only to retire to just about scrape by.
Most/all stock market pensions are rubbish - my pot was higher 10 years ago than it is now - the ftse 100 has been flatlining for a decade. The final salary ones were the only ones worth having.
Yer ballix!!!
I’ve a SIPP from 2009 that is doing REALLY well and I contribute £120/month into it and Gov tops up £30/month.
Has more/less TRIPLED in value compared to amount of contributions!!!
Will leave hopefully until 65yrs as have a nice public sector deferred pension sitting that I will “lift” when turn 60yrs in 2025 and cut back to couple days/week purely for holidays and beer tokens!!! Lol.
JeffA:
Most/all stock market pensions are rubbish - my pot was higher 10 years ago than it is now - the ftse 100 has been flatlining for a decade. The final salary ones were the only ones worth having.
FTSE100 is almost 25% up from where it was 10 years ago so clearly you invested in a bad one or one with ridiculous fees - if the fees are even 1% then they’re too high, if they’re knocking on 2% they’d have eaten up most of the last 10 years of FTSE rises if that’s all your pension is invested in… No pension fund worth its salt just invests in the UK stock market solely unless the individual specifically chooses a UK market only. Even the two most popular workplace pension schemes, Nest and Peoples Pension, don’t just invest in the UK market. My SIPP which is invested in nothing more complicated than Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap has 60% of its fund invested in the US. It grew 19.11% in March 2020-21, 9.61% March 2021-22 year, is up 5.29% this last 12 months. The first payment I made in Jan 2016 is up 75%. Any pension fund which didn’t increase in double digit percentages in 2020 is one you shouldn’t be in.
And the returns are pathetic - I think in the last ten years it gained a couple of grand. I wish I could put it on the american stock market rather than the FTSE - the american stock market has gone up four or five times as much as the FTSE 100.
You can. Choice 1 is see if your pension provider has a range of investment options and choose one that you think is better. Option 2 is do it yourself, open up a SIPP, transfer your current pensions as cash into your SIPP, invest the cash in an index fund. You could choose a SP500 tracker fund if you want it all invested in the US markets or something like I have if you want a bit more diversification. If you choose a Vanguard fund open up your SIPP with Vanguard directly for the lowest fees…OTTOMH I don’t think I’m even paying 0.5%.
(Note I am not a financial advisor, this is not advice on what to invest in, merely suggestions to provoke thought.)
My SIPP has a spread of investment trusts all over the world.
Think about it:
Even on Xmas day there’s somebody in an office in India/China/Japan etc etc working for an investment trust trying their best to make me money 24/7 365!!!
“HargreavesLandsdown” investment brokers are who I deal with and they’ve multi £BILLIONS invested by ordinary “working Joe” who doesn’t want to WORK until he’s near done!!!
SWEDISH BLUE:
Did not have a “Game Plan”. I was just trying to help others, based on my experience.
After all the negatives I have had, i think I will just “Lurk”
IF I can be bothered to stay
Sorry for not acknowledging your point. I’ve always found it odd that there’s all these rudimentary cut off points for this and that, it makes no sense. Surely a taper type system, or a window for applying both before AND after an event such as retirement is a fairer way?
I’m going through similar this coming year where I’ll be losing a proportion of my kids child benefit because I’ve earned over 50k but less than 60k so I’ll have to fill in a self assessment and then lose a percentage of what was formally family allowance.
I dont have issue with it other than the fact that I have to to do it all myself or end up potentially in trouble, and also by the fact that the rules are stupid because it takes no account of my mrs working only part time, so we get penalised because I’ll be just over the threshold while my wife earns not a great wage, yet another couple elsewhere both earning just under 50k, ie a greater household income than me, gets left untouched.
A lot of you are telling the OP how much cash youvr got in your pensions and how well they are doing.Theres a time for talking about that but its not very helpful on this thread
Sploom:
A lot of you are telling the OP how much cash youvr got in your pensions and how well they are doing.Theres a time for talking about that but its not very helpful on this thread
The horse has already bolted, there’s nothing they can do now in regards to their pension because they’ve retired so what is there is what they have. And whilst there are options to top it up a bit, for example even though you’re in pension drawdown you can contribute £2880 which the govt will top up to £3600, that requires you to have spare money to do so.
Sploom:
A lot of you are telling the OP how much cash youvr got in your pensions and how well they are doing.Theres a time for talking about that but its not very helpful on this thread
It’s more about highlighting the risks to others by not saving enough, or by having ‘just’ too much in the OPs case.
The reality as Connor says is that it’s too late for the OP to do much about it now unfortunately, but at least his warning can be put to good use by making others aware which then goes hand in hand with showing that decent retirement planning to put a person theoretically of the danger zone - ie just too much to get help but probably not enough to have a good lifestyle - is achievable.
Sadly I fear with auto enrolment being at the current contribution levels for both employer and employee, and with many employers particularly in this industry but not exclusively in this industry, willing to contribute the minimum they’re legally obliged to, many pots won’t he big enough to sustain much of a lifestyle beyond retirement but will also be large enough to exclude someone from any state help such as pension credits etc as is the case with the OP.
So you may see people stating how well they’re doing (I guess you’re including myself in that) which I can see it looks that way, but the reality is that my intention was to highlight that its possible to not fall foul like the OP has sadly done and to try and get people to think about retirement plans and the importance of a decent pension being a job perk worth looking at now (much better than a cycle to work scheme or on site car parking etc ), the earlier the better, because it might seem ages away but it soon creeps up on us all!
I wasnt mentioning names!
But I agree,its creeping up like nobodies business!
Its funny ,my mom never had any pensions or savings or anything,but she never seemed short of cash.She had benefit,pension credit,other stuff I cant remember now,oh,and £200 at Christmas.
Putting things in perspective slightly, even the royalty of yesteryear would have been glad of the sanitation available to all now. If you have a roof over your head, food on the table and a bed to sleep in (as well as the aforementioned), things ain’t that bad.
If you don’t have the money to go on cruises or ski trips in the first place, picking where to go is one worry taken away from you.
retirement is creeping up for me…well,i’m still working into my retirement,part time,and still enjoy it,but when i don’t,i’ll be packing it in.
i haven’t got stacks of money,but have a fleet of vintage m/c’s and cars to keep me occupied,or to sell when/if required! mortgage paid off and not into skiing or cruises (apart from over the Solent),and help my daughter out with cash when needed…but i’ll look into the Pension Credit link to see if i’m eligible
cav551:
You probably can’t get it because your weekly income exceeds the threshold. The full rate for the state pension is £185.15. You are not mentioning whether your partner has also reached state pension age.
In my case, if I had applied for it before I retired, I probabley would have got it. Now the horse has bolted.
Just saying to others, to apply Before, Not afterwards.
That’s a very strange situation to be in. Because you can’t get Pension Credit until after state retirement age. (And also not be entitled to full state pension)
So I’m guessing you retired sometime after state pension age and your private/company pension has (together with the partial state pension) taken you over the full state pension amount? So you would have been better with no additional pension rather than a small one?
toonsy:
Unfortunately there’ll be many more in this situation due to auto enrolment pensions being mandated. For instance there was one post on here the other day where a driver grossed £1300 wages for the week but his pension deductions were £33. Obviously this will (or should) get added to by am employee contribution too but its still not a lot.
There’s too many people who pay in the bare minimum without much thought to their future. Or simply stop paying in because they don’t want to lose that £30/40/whatever in the here and now. Likewise there are too many firms who just offer the bare minimum on their part. In that same thread I mentioned that I’m amazed that generous pension terms aren’t viewed as favourably when it comes to looking at employers/jobs.
I’ve been in one work pension or another since I started work pretty much including the very last of the defined benefit “gold plated” Royal Mail pensions, albeit only for a few years, which has terms so beneficial its untransferable so must just stay as it is until (I think) 55.
All the rest of my pensions have been normal savings type things, and I’ve transferred them as I change employers so they’re all in one pot and all held in my current job which I add to. Using the pensions providers calculator I’m looking at a pot of around £650,000 aged 68 if i carry on doing as now, plus the RM one, plus my state one so hopefully I’ll be battering the saga holidays for a bit [emoji38]
I know pensions and that are boring and they’re also not at tge same level they once were, but there’s still some decent offers out there. I get paid lunar pay (every four weeks, or 13 times a year) and my contribution is normally around £330 give or take, but my employer matches it so I’m getting £660 or so into my pot every four weeks which is costing me less than half that as its taken off my top line before tax and NI etc.
I think its important for people to think about pension provision and to actively save towards it because, for me anyway, I couldn’t think of anything worse than working all my life only to retire to just about scrape by.
Most/all stock market pensions are rubbish - my pot was higher 10 years ago than it is now - the ftse 100 has been flatlining for a decade. The final salary ones were the only ones worth having.
You’re in a really bad pension scheme.
Dow Jones over past 10 years. (You don’t want to follow the tiny UK market, rather a world market
Its worth checking for anyone that has retired, government figures show that over 1.7 billion is unclaimed, and swedishblue…if you meet the eligibility criteria then you too can also claim it, even if you are in your 70s and been retired for years.
toonsy:
Unfortunately there’ll be many more in this situation due to auto enrolment pensions being mandated. For instance there was one post on here the other day where a driver grossed £1300 wages for the week but his pension deductions were £33. Obviously this will (or should) get added to by am employee contribution too but its still not a lot.
There’s too many people who pay in the bare minimum without much thought to their future. Or simply stop paying in because they don’t want to lose that £30/40/whatever in the here and now. Likewise there are too many firms who just offer the bare minimum on their part. In that same thread I mentioned that I’m amazed that generous pension terms aren’t viewed as favourably when it comes to looking at employers/jobs.
I’ve been in one work pension or another since I started work pretty much including the very last of the defined benefit “gold plated” Royal Mail pensions, albeit only for a few years, which has terms so beneficial its untransferable so must just stay as it is until (I think) 55.
All the rest of my pensions have been normal savings type things, and I’ve transferred them as I change employers so they’re all in one pot and all held in my current job which I add to. Using the pensions providers calculator I’m looking at a pot of around £650,000 aged 68 if i carry on doing as now, plus the RM one, plus my state one so hopefully I’ll be battering the saga holidays for a bit [emoji38]
I know pensions and that are boring and they’re also not at tge same level they once were, but there’s still some decent offers out there. I get paid lunar pay (every four weeks, or 13 times a year) and my contribution is normally around £330 give or take, but my employer matches it so I’m getting £660 or so into my pot every four weeks which is costing me less than half that as its taken off my top line before tax and NI etc.
I think its important for people to think about pension provision and to actively save towards it because, for me anyway, I couldn’t think of anything worse than working all my life only to retire to just about scrape by.
Most/all stock market pensions are rubbish - my pot was higher 10 years ago than it is now - the ftse 100 has been flatlining for a decade. The final salary ones were the only ones worth having.
But therein lay the benefit of a decent matched contribution. I agree they’ve not performed fantastically well but my pot has still grown compared to what has been paid into it and as said earlier out of my pocket I’m only paying half of what is going in so I’m not losing.
I’m not planning on using it for an annuity, favouring drawdown, so it may be called a pension but ultimately its just a pot of money.
It depends how much money you have spare I suppose - the problem with pensions I found was when I was out of work for a few months I had thousands sitting in a pension that I can’t touch while I was absolutely skint. If you’re loaded then yeah pensions are worth it - for anyone struggling you are locking money away that you may need.
And the returns are pathetic - I think in the last ten years it gained a couple of grand. I wish I could put it on the american stock market rather than the FTSE - the american stock market has gone up four or five times as much as the FTSE 100.
Why do you not have a choice of investment?
Have you been with the same employer a long time?
JeffA:
. Some economist was saying if you’d invested a grand in the FTSE 100 5 years ago you would have £1030 today. Then you have to take the pension fees out of that £30
What about dividends that the companies paid? Wouldn’t that be on top of FTSE growth?
Final salary pensions were worth having - stock market pensions are useless unless you are earning a fortune and can afford to put hundreds a month into one.
That’s just not true, unfortunately you’ve found a bad one, mine is up about 50% in 4 years without any contributions.
I hope you do something with yours going forward.
), the earlier the better, because it might seem ages away but it soon creeps up on us all!
