..to be slightly concerned at my pension pot age 30?!

[Zara87]

I have just checked and I have a grand total of £3790 in my pension.
I'm 30.
This is really bad isn't it
How does this compare to the rest of you?

With my childcare bills at £1600 a month for the next 18 months, and 2 very young dc, there is no way I can pay any more than I already am!

I have zero OP so count yourself lucky

If you get an annual pay rise (I realise a lot don’t) then pay in half of that to your pension. You need to take a bit home to cover inflation.

You are certainly in the lean years money wise. Once your childcare reduces you’ll have more to play with. We could never have afforded 2 in nursery

At age 30 you will need to find about £340 a month, for a comfortable retirement.

If you earn £20k as I do, that's pretty much impossible.

These threads always depress me. My employer only matches to 4%. It’s a fucking disgrace and reminds me I really should cut the loyalty and go elsewhere.

I’m 31 and mine is at about £20k. I started contributing at 24 but small amounts - I think I paid 2% and so did my employer. I now pay 5% as does my employer but they won’t pay more than that (stingy industry). I have a 2 year old DS and planning to have one more so can’t really afford to put contributions up any higher at the moment.

What are all of you self-employed people doing for pensions?

Pension planning rule of thumb - you need capital of about £300k these days to generate about £10k of annuity income
Why would you even bother? Just keep your cash and spend £10k per year for 30 years? You’re not likely to live for 30 years after retirement anyway, and at least if you die the cash is in your bank account rather than the pension company’s.

I don’t have a pension. I spent 8 years in education and 2 years living at home doing unpaid internships to try to get a job, then I spent 10 years actually working and mostly earning a shitty wage during the recession, which I put towards buying a house. Now I’m a SAHM and trapped at home because childcare costs more than I’d earn. I’ll be in my mid 40s before I can go back to work and even start paying into a pension. I’m not worried about it because there’s no point, there’s nothing I can do about it.

I do wonder what will happen when people my age get old though. Like me, many in my generation spent years in education, unpaid internships became the norm, house prices were high and pensions weren’t mandatory so people kept their cash to afford houses. I doubt I’m the only one with no pension.

Sputnikbear No, I don't have one either. I worked for the NHS for 10 or so years but was told I wasn't eligible for a pension as I was on a work permit (or 2) so never had one. Now I am self-employed but also in my 50's so its a bit late. I am quite worried about it all.

There’s not a huge amount of bonuses for working for the NHS but the pension scheme is one of them. Currently I pay 13.5% and they pay 14.3%, which means my pension pot is growing quickly. I’ve been working for them since I was 22, hoping to be able to retire at 60.

I'm 30, in the past 12 months I've payed in £5.8k into my pension pot. Don't know exactly what it's at as a total now though. I pay about 13% into my pension and of that; 10% is matched by my employer, so in all about £10.2k contributed in the past year. I'm probably going to up it another percent at the end of the year. I have no confidence that a state pension will exist in its current form when I come to reach 67, so need to be secure on my own.

What are all of you self-employed people doing for pensions?

I'm self employed and I've got a SIPP. Other options for self employed people would be a personal pension.

The advice from my parents was that if you have any money left over at the end of the month, even if it's just £5, pay it into your pension. So I've always followed that advice, even when I was barely scraping by. I would transfer all the spare £5s, £10s, etc. to a standard savings account and then once they reached the minimum payment level for my pension, I'd transfer them over. It doesn't sound muc h, but the compounding

SIPP?

Oops, not sure what happened there try again ...

What are all of you self-employed people doing for pensions?

I'm self employed and I've got a SIPP. Other options for self employed people would be a personal pension.

The advice from my parents was that if you have any money left over at the end of the month, even if it's just £5, pay it into your pension. So I've always followed that advice, even when I was barely scraping by. I would transfer all the spare £5s, £10s, etc. to a standard savings account and then once they reached the minimum payment level for my pension, I'd transfer them over. It doesn't sound much, but the compounding over many years has been astonishing.

Now that I'm in my forties and I'm earning more, I can afford to pay more into it, but I still have that mindset of saving those odd bits of spare money up.

My parents were also very frugal and I've taken that on board. The MSE boards are terrific for ideas to save money - I follow the debt free wannabe boards (even though I don't have debt) for ideas. I also read Mr Money Moustache blog for ideas to save money. Every penny saved goes into my pension or S&S ISA.

SIPP: self invested personal pension.

It means that you get a wider range of investment choices to go in your pension than you would in a standard personal pension. The downside to that is that the fees tend to be higher for a SIPP.

I feel like crying. I can't be alone in being completely ignorant about financial terms, can I? I don't even know what annuity means.

37, don't have a pension pot at all. But I do have a 2nd house which will be paid off in the next 10 years and so will give me rental income (it gives me a little atm). I am hoping to be able to afford another rental before I'm 45.

This is interesting reading.

I had around 25k in pension at age 30. I have no idea if this is good or bad.

My current workplace pension is a SIPP, I have no idea what to do with it though, I was reading through the website yesterday funnily enough and I am non the wiser.

Sipp's - there's a guide on MSE. Low cost ones need £5k to start 

necromumda I personally think pensions, investing and the associated terminology are unnecessarily complicated. I've done a ton of reading and research into investing, and I think I'm fairly well informed, but I read the posts on the pensions board on MSE and some of them make my head spin

An annuity is a product you can buy when you retire - you sell your pension pot to an insurance company who in return will pay you a guaranteed income for life.

They are increasingly unpopular these days as the annuity rates are appalling. With the pension reforms a few years ago, many people now are opting to leave their pension pot invested when they retire and instead choose something called 'income drawdown', which means they withdraw an amount from their pension pot to spend, but leave the rest of the pot invested to (hopefully) carry on growing. This makes much more sense these days as we're all living so much longer and retirement can last for 30-odd years.

I didn't start until I joined the police in my early 30s but am fortunate in that the scheme is a good one so I will be comfortable in retirement. But it's not too late. I know a lot of colleagues who are putting their money into a second property instead so that may be an alternative option for some.

Just the way we've always done it. We've always earned similar amnts and so it just made sense

It only makes sense if

1. You are legally married and bought the house jointly after you were married ie it’s not his from before

1. He stopped paying into his pension for the duration of your maternity leave OR you buy back these years

Otherwise you have lost out .

Sorry to bang on about this, I know it’s very tedious and no one cares about it. Until they split up and discover that he has a pension with more than the house . And for some women and children , that he has the pension AND the house while they have a pile of paid bills.

Like a pp I am in Australia and we all contribute from the first day of work. People are actively interested in their pension (called superannuation) all through their lives. I saved a few K in my teens at McDonald's!
It's a good early discipline. I'm 42 now with a decent pot in Australia and in the UK from 10 years there. Pity I can't move it due to some awful tax issues between the two countries.

I'm 42 and have £320,000 in my pot. And a couple of rental properties that I have huge mortgages on so don't make anything out of them now but eventually I will.

I've built it up by always having at least 10% and often more automatically taken out of my pay - so I've never noticed it missing because I never had. And ALWAYS putting in as much as I needed to get max contributions from employer.

I worked somewhere once where if you put in 5% they matched it with 10%. Taking into account tax advantages it's an extraordinary investment return. I was one of the few who did this. I was gobsmacked that people didn't do this (and they weren't on minimum income so it was achievable for almost all people on that salary).

30 far from too late - but now is the time to get serious about it.

Someone upthread said they didn't have any pension but they did wonder what would happen when they get older.

I think there is a real sense of complacency in this country that the state will look after people when they get old. It won't. This generation of pensioners is the last who will get such a generous state support (and it really isn't that generous!).

I'm from Australia though. We are obsessed with our superannuation. We have a great system. Many thanks Mr Paul Keating.

I'm in my 40's and mine is around £3k a year I think. I'm currently working on it.
But I'm very lucky and will be mortgage free before I'm 50 so I have plans to squirrel away more and maybe get a lodger when the dc's are at uni.