LGPS - is it a good pension pay out?

[PrettyPleaseXo]

I'm 30 years old and starting to take my pension very seriously mainly because my mum and dad were both self-employed and foolishly never paid into a pension so are now in a right pickle to put it lightly.
I earn £12,000 a year currently and with my LGPS contribution and AVC I put in £120 a month. Is there any way to work out how much pension I will receive based off these contributions should this last over the 30 years. I understand my wage could go up or down so just wanted to try and figure it out off of this.
Thank you.

If you log into the LGPS website, it might give you an estimate somewhere. Have you checked? (Sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs!) You could also ask their support / help team maybe?

My previous pension scheme used to send a letter once or twice a year that said 'if you keep paying in X amount, we calculate you will be entitled to Y when you retire' - it was quite useful, even though of course it depended on how investments perform and wasn't guaranteed.

Do LGPS do something like that?

Ive tried figuring it out and managed to work out how much my employer contributes through the scheme but I will contact them again and ask them (certainly not teaching me to suck eggs, although you would have thought I would have thought of it first! haha)
Thank you :D

Each year you build up 1/49 of your pay as a pension. So in year one if your pay is £12000 you get £244 built up as annual pension. In year 2, if your pay stays the same you get another £244 (so total pension of £488). If your pay has gone up a bit, you’ll get a bit more as pension. Then you repeat that for every year you plan to be in the scheme.

That doesn’t allow for inflation though - each year the amount you’ve built up goes up in line with inflation.

You will get an annual benefit statement t which tells you a projection to state pension age, but they’re issued in the summer. You might be able to do an online projection though - find the website for your LGPs fund and see if you can sign up for online access.

I’m in the LGPS. I get a statement in the post every year which tells me exactly what I’ll get in the future. Do you not get these?

I’m on track for a pension of 48k a year, but have a much higher salary than you. It’s a very good pension scheme though.

Have you got an online portal to log into? I'm in a LGPS and a few years ago we were sent a letter saying that we wouldn't get paper projections any more, you now have to log into the portal to see it. However, once you've logged in, you can see your projections and play around with changing your years of service or AVC or salary and see what difference it makes. Also the depressing changes if you look at how much it drops if you retire early!

Thank you so much everyone.

I've only been a member for the last three months so wouldn't have got a statement yet but its handy to know that I can check on it yearly

:D

What is the AVC doing? Additionally g to service or a DC scheme alongside?

Just taking your salary. Ignoring any payrises or inflation....
If you earn 12,000 every year for 30 years, you would have a pension of (30/49) x 12000. Which is 7346 a year.

If you make it to 35 years, pension is (35/49)x12000 = £8571

The AVC will increase that - but I don't know the mechanism.

You should also get some state pension (assuming that's a thing when you hit retirement age).

There is an online portal you can go on to check pension forecasts. I am not sure if they do paper statements anymore. I am on the LGPS and it is good but my advice is to overpay as it is the most tax efficient way of saving for retirement. Hopefully your salary will increase in time and consequently pension contributions too. You can do AVCs too.

Current forecasts will probably be unhelpful as presumably you're not always going to earn so little - you must be part time on a very low wage for your salary to be £12k.

Best thing to do will to always pay in as much as you can and increase your hours when you can - even if most of your take home goes on childcare, working more will increase your pension.

I was in a lgps for 6 years, earnt a similar amount to you (TA in school on lowest salary band). I've just received my forecast today (as part of divorce proceedings) and it says my pension is currently £1700 a year. Not quite enough to live off but around an extra £140 a month in retirement which for only 6years paying into on a very low wage I'm okay about. Still got 25years until retirement (although now a qualified teacher and paying into teachers pension)

Thank you everyone.

I definitely intend to increase my earnings by going full time in the future. Right now I’m a single mum and my youngest is five so it’s not very feasible at the moment.

Once you are back doing more hours it's a v decent scheme, but even now you are building up 12000/49 a year, so 244 a year (plus your AVCs)

If you stayed at that salary for 10 years you would have a 2440 annual pension (in today's money as it increases with inflation) . Over 30 years that's £7320 on top of any state pension and AVCs.

So you are heading in the right direction and as you increase your hours it will look even healthier

I was where you were at 30 and a decade later, now I am working full time and have a couple of promotions under my belt, have very comfortable looking future predictions and even early retirement feels feasible