Teaching pensions: advice please

[Americansmoothie]

My DP (63) and me (64) have been together for 19 years and jointly (50:50) own our own home outright. DP was a teacher for 21 years from 1982 to 2003. He left teaching in 2003 and started his own business, which unfortunately went bust after the 2008 crash.

We've been talking about retirement for the last five years. I have, in the last 20 years, worked really hard to ensure I have a decent pension on top of the full State pension. I've always been clear that I want the first ten years of our retirement, while we're still fit and active, to involve a lot of travel and some adventures. For various reasons I missed out on the travelling opportunities that lots of my contemporaries enjoyed and I want to catch up. My partner's teaching pension has always been factored into our calculations. He's used online calculators that indicate that his pension should be in the region of £12+k pa, with a £35+k lump sum. Combined with the pension he's accrued since 2009, and his savings, it was looking as if we should be able to retire and splash out next year.

BUT... before Christmas he contacted the teachers pension scheme for precise details — and they reminded him that he'd apparently taken his entire pension fund when he left teaching in 2003. He now says that he thought he'd taken some of it to start the business that went bust in 2008, but not everything. Were you, 20 years ago, able to take everything from a teaching pension fund and walk away with it?

You sound like you have a good head on your shoulders OP, I'm sure you'll figure something out. If the TP are telling him he did indeed transfer all of it out, you can do that as a cash lump sum within the first couple of years of joining the scheme. Given what you say about his financial situation in the 80's, I'd be surprised if that isn't what he's done, as it's the only way he could have legitimately taken money out. He made a bad choice to not pay into the TP and he's either forgotten or has not been truthful. I don't think I'd be very willing to bankroll my partner if they had lied, which tbh, it sounds like he did. Can he do something that earns him some money in retirement? What did he teach? Tutoring can be very lucrative, and he could do it between travelling. If he was a secondary teacher, and in a core subject, he should be able to pick up some tutoring work in the exam revision season relatively easily. Or he could do supply teaching. I know it seems a stretch given he hasn't been in a classroom for 20 years, but schools are so desperate atm that any warm body that can babysit a class will do.

Sounds like he took a transfer out into another scheme and then potentially cashed it in in a dodgy way. Quickest way to investigate is to issue a DSAR request to TPS which will have to provide all of the paperwork around where the money was sent to.

Apologies - I forgot about CETVs - but that isn’t a lump sum of cash being handed over to the pension holder though.

And I in turn forgot that you can get a refund of payments in the first two years! I agree it's not the situation here anyway, unless as a PP suggested it went into some dodgy scheme which allowed very early withdrawal?

I have always found the TPS to be helpful, so I hope that more information will be available soon.

Just a thought,
Under the old state pension system (pre 2002), teachers pensions were opted out of paying SERPS contributions. If you later took your money out of the teaching pension, you had to pay back these contributions from the amount you received.
Your partner could ask for a state pension forecast. If he has missing SERPS contributions for the years he was working then he would have pension contributions for these years.

https://pensionaccess.co.uk/blog/what-happened-to-serps/
The above website gives an address that you can contact about your SERPS contributions.
My father, who thought he knew everything, took out his teacher pension when he left teaching in his fifties. He lived until he was 96 so this was not a good decision!

I've actually found the TPS helpline very unhelpful several times where they have given me incorrect information in a very confident manner. Get him to email them if possible and get it in writing.