I threw away a final salary pension and feel sick.

[CommanderTaggart]

I was a teacher for 5 years at the start of my career and I had a final salary pension. I then moved to a local government role. I left my teachers pension in its pot, as all I really knew about pensions at the time was that a final salary teachers pension is an amazing thing that I was lucky to have and should hang onto. So I did.
Anyway I am now older, earning a lot more and researching and learning about pensions. I realise to my dismay that if I had transferred my teacher’s pension into my LGPS pot within 12 months of leaving teaching I could have retained the final salary link for those 5 years. Safe to say my final salary is going to be very considerably more than the 30k ish I was on when I left teaching.
I am absolutely kicking myself. I had no idea. It was a huge financial blunder that will cost me dearly in retirement and I just feel that I was in no way prepared for or helped to make this decision. “Seek financial advice” is all people ever say, but realistically when you are young and have no investments and very little in the way of spare cash, seeing a financial advisor is not something that you do.
I’m not sure why I’m posting here really, I just had to vent my huge disappointment and frustration and am seeking commiseration I suppose.

So are you going to pay for a professional view OP?

So as someone who knows next to nothing about pensions I asked ChatGpt yesterday if I made a mistake not transferring my previous nhs pension into my teachers pension. It said no, that there's actually a lot of advantages in keeping them separate for better flexibility down the road.

I then went down a rabbit hole of projections where I take one pension at 60 to enable me to have some income early if I wanted to retire early or drop my hours. But keep the other pension going until normal retirement age.

Obviously I'm not going to trust the figures from AI, etc but it seemed an easy way of exploring potential options and certainly gave me things to think about I wouldn't have otherwise considered.

I agree OP that there's no way this will make 10k difference to you. I think after ten years of nhs working (p/t so probably equivalent to 5 or 6 years full time.) my Band 6 nhs pension isn't worth 10 k total never mind having room for a 10k difference.

I’ve done something similar with an NHS pension which has left me about £400 a month worse off

I am guessing that is your back of a fag packet calculations rather than a professional conclusion

OP I hugely emphasise, I find pensions so freaking confusing and there is so little help out there unless you can pay for it. I didn’t transfer my LGPS pension when I joined the civil service, it was relatively small as I earned it whilst at the lower end of my career, maternity leave, part time working etc, by the time I joined the civil service I was full steam ahead in my career and earning triple what I earned in LGPS and I gather (from talking to AI at least!) I would have been much better off transferring it, but there was no support, I was scared to move it, no one will touch pensions without payment and I simply didn’t have the money for financial advice back then.

If AI had been around back then I’d have been better off!

You might have lost some money but you can increase your pension by paying additional voluntary contributions. If you could afford £100 pm for the next 20 years that will make a significant difference to your pension

@Overdonecabbage it’s worked out on the NHS pension site. I thoughts I’d joined two NHS schemes together but it turned out they are not. The newer one was my well paid 5.5 years the older one was very low salary .

Sorry? You’ve managed to calculate that you’re missing out on £400 a month on the NHS pension site?

@Makingadecision for this to have resulted in your being short changed by £400 a month… you must be talking about a vast salary discrepancy!

I'm actually surprised you were offered the opportunity to transfer in your Teacher's pension when you had a 12 month break in service.

I agree with PP, I suspect you can take your TPS from age 57 rather than state pension age. I'd enjoy the flexibility that gives you.

The reduction is a lot greater if you're not an active member. I think it might be 6% pa rather than the 3% active members lose.

OP I was in a final salary scheme from 2001 to 2012. Not teaching. My salary when I started in it was £25k and £45k when I left it. I now contribute to a scheme.
That DB scheme for the 11 years I was in it will give me a salary of around £9k when I reach 60. A nice addition to my retirement funds but it sounds like you have an over-inflated view of what 5 years in a DB scheme will give you. But also you haven’t lost that money. It’s pension you still have.

The sooner the education system starts setting aside a decent amount of time in the curriculum to budgeting, finances and pension understanding…. People such as the OP will get the wrong end of the stick

Wow.

Tone deaf thread to all the financial crap going on right now if you are likely to get a final salary pension in the region of anything about 60k.

We should have closed these schemes years before we did as a nation.

I suppose it keeps cruise companies in business...

A teacher's pension should increase in line with inflation from leaving to retirement, so it is not like that 5 years of pension will be stuck forever on a very low amount of old final salary - it will be indexed up to when you draw it at age 68 or whatever.

It’s Money Matters 😵‍💫

I've got 2 years in a teaching one, 2 years in an NHS and 5 in a LGPS from before I left for the private sector.

Tbh I've just left them and it's only now I'm 47 I'm starting to think about what I should be doing. I always knew I should prioritise paying into a pension which I have via salary sacrifice and my occupational pension , but just did that and thought no more of it and now I'm hoping I've not also made an expensive error!

I looked into it after seeing this thread and completely forgot that I went into the private sector prior to the civil service, and ChatGPT (I know, I know) told me I made the right decision to leave my public sector pensions as they were and not transfer into the private pension. I likely would have had to pay to get financial advice to be allowed to do it anyway due to the amount (and it’s not even that much in my eyes). And it sounds like I was also right to leave the private sector pension alone too as I will benefit from the flexibility which seems to be the biggest perk of private sector ones, I can use it to bridge the gap whilst waiting for SPA (if it ever comes 🤣)

if that gives you any reassurance.

Absolutely this. You are looking at your TPS pension in today’s money but you possible salary in tomorrow’s money. You need to add your projected inflation number to both or neither. That will make it look a lot better.