This is a timely thread for me. In mid-November 2022 I bought an extra two years. A few days ago I checked online to find that my record has not yet been updated. They had warned me that it would take a few weeks. I will take your advice and call them.
I don’t hold out much hope though. When I made the payment the process was tortuous and flawed. I needed some reference number that they assumed I had from correspondence from them but this didn’t exist as they have never contacted me. Apparently this is a common problem. I did get a number when they eventually picked up the phone.
When I called them a couple of days back, they gave me a sort code, an account number and an 18 digit reference number that I need to put on the payment
It would have been around the same time that I also was invited to opt out of SERPS. I declined.
My “Protected Pension” (aka SERPS pension) is currently £120 per week.
Enough said.
I also declined the “salary sacrifice” scheme that my company was offering.
In both cases, I took the view that if some person/organisation were pushing “something” that hard then there must be a benefit to them - and possibly detrimental to me.
We were virtually told to opt-out of SERPS from memory of going along to an induction session when I started or the organisation.
If you take endowment mis-selling as an example, I honestly feel that many of us did not make properly informed decisions when we opted out decades ago.
To be fair, we were briefed by someone who probably didn’t know much better themselves.
I remember being sat round in a semi-circle in the mid-80s and told we were being entered into the company pension scheme. OK, I thought, and that was that…
If you had a unit linked fund with Equitable Life. You would have been fine, the only change would be that your statement said Halifax at the top thereafter. If you were in W/profits funds (as most EL investors were) you would have had an mvr applied reducing it’s sale value for some time but that’s more an indictment of With Profit funds than Equitable Life at the time.
Of course some of us enjoyed the Schadenfreude of EL going pop after years of telling anyone who would listen that they were the gold standard, when in fact they were clearly anything but, however it may be unkind to bring that up…
Gawd alone knows. I just remember AVC’s were with EL, and I neither contributed, profited or lost. I do remember being annoyed when my employers took a “pension holiday”: I believe now this was to a suspicion that the government was eyeing up a pensions raid.
When all us said and done, I did have c20 years in a DB pension, so not all bad.
As long as the DB fund itself remained in surplus or at least with only a small deficit, then the payment holiday won’t have directly impacted on your pension income.
Indirectly, unwillingness to fund these things (and the desire by trustees and members to see large profits from ‘low’ risk exposure (lol)) will have influenced the asset mix to an extent such that the assets owned may not look quite as you may expect if you dig around inside.
My wife was a teacher and the Prudential came to the school and persuaded several of them to buy AVCs through the Pru (rather than by buying added years from the Teachers Pensions scheme). As it turned out the Pru AVCs are worth nearly nothing, whereas added years through the Teachers Pension scheme (which is inflation-linked) would have paid back well.
We later joined a nascent Class action to sue the Prudential for mis-selling, but it couldn’t get traction with enough Prudential teacher AVC members to make it happen. Very annoying. In retrospect, I should have taken more of an interest at the time she made the choice.
There was a lot of that by Prudential and Aviva advisers visiting teachers.
Every single one I’ve seen and politely suggested is revisited has resulted in a significant sum being added to the AVC.
It’s extremely unlikely that buying added years is not going to be the ‘best’ option in many circumstances, not all, but many. Yet most restricted advice processes felt they could ignore that option, after all it’s restricted (or tied) advice right…? Generally it’s the fact that it wasn’t considered as an option in the advice process or, if it was, being dismissed without sufficient justification, which is getting them pinged.
Specific employer which didn’t have their own scheme and encouraged you to sign up to a personal pension which simply wasn’t needed given the other options available.
Just been looking at the pension forecasts for me and my wife, mine seems a little strange.
Last January I received a forecast of my total pension which was £47 more than the state pension. So presumable £47 is SERPS. It also stated I can not improve the forecast.
Now, for the past 18 years I’ve only been working 15 hours a week. So, if I worked full time until I retire, I will obviously ear more, therefore SERPS should increase.
