Questions about my State Pension

[HartlandRoad]

Hi everyone. I am a regular but have name changed because of personal details. I'm not completely sure this is the correct board for my thread either...

I am 43 years old. I have worked since I was 20 up until I had my first born almost 9 years ago now. I recently requested my State Pension Summary and it says that I have 23 qualifying years worth £82.38 a week.

My questions are:

1. Does this sound about right or should I try and pay some money to increase my allowance (don't even know if this is possible)

1. When Child Benefit stops, do I need to do anything to keep my pension going? My youngest is 5 yo.

1. I have been in a monogamous committed relationship with the father of my children for the past 13 years but we are not married. We do want to get married, just haven't got round to it. Will being married/unmarried affect anything?

Thank you

Sounds right. You're only 43. You have another 24 years left if work and contributions to state pension to build it up.

But I am confused about Child Benefit. We won't get it on the basis that my partner earns more than 60K. Do I need to do anything to make sure I keep contributing?

Unfortunately I don't think there is any certainty. It was said stay-at-home-parents wouldn't lose out on pension credits because of the reform to Child Benefit but I don't think there has been any detail as how this will happen. I would write to the DWP and ask for clarification.

I think that in order to keep your NI contributions as a SAHP you can either (a) keep claiming CB, and your DP will pay the same amount back to the gov't in additional tax so you don't get any additional money as a household but the fact of you claiming CB contributes towards your state pension or (b) I think there is an option to switch your CB to some kind of "keep me on the register but don't give me any money" option - I'm not sure about this as it doesn't apply to me - which would have the same effect without trasferring any money between you and DP. Which of these options you do depends on how your household finance is organised - if your CB is your only access to spending money and your DP doesn't give you general access to household funds, then (a) may work best for you.

It was said stay-at-home-parents wouldn't lose out on pension credits because of the reform to Child Benefit but I don't think there has been any detail as how this will happen.

There has been lots of detail on how this will happen, for instance here.

In summary, first of all there is no reason not to keep getting child benefit and have the payments clawed back through Self Assessment: the higher earning partner will have to complete a tax return if he or she does not already do so. Secondly, if you do not want to complete a tax return and are prepared to reclaim child benefit if your circumstances change (for instance due to redundancy, separation or bereavement), you need to notify HMRC that you want the payments to stop. Finally if you have a new child the Child Benefit claim form has been amended to make it absolutely clear that you need to claim eligibility for CB to protect your pension position, even if you don't want to claim payments.

With your youngest at 5 you will accrue another 6+ years of pension credit (it accrues up to the 12th birthday), so depending on when the birthday is and when the forecast was dated you will have somewhere between 29 and 31 years built up. You get the full basic pension with 30 years credit, so there is no need to do anything now.

I'm not absolutely certain but I think the most years you can claim through child benefit contributions is 16 in total. But check that up. So even if you have children spanning over this number of years you can only claim for 16 of them. You have ages though to make up the number of years before you are state pension age. You could sign on as available for work and get contributions in that way.

Viviennemary the rules have changed. You can convert a maximum of 22 years of Home Responsibilities Protection accrued prior to 6 April 2010 (when you got it until a child was 16) but there is now no limit on the number of years you can accrue whilst you are eligibile for CB for at least one child under 12.