My pension is worth NOTHING

[RosieBright]

I had a job for 13 years in Government and kept thinking it was a great pension as folk kept telling me. I looked at my pension paperwork when the annual statement came through and I have £9000.
I thought that was A YEAR!!! But no, it's worth about £30 a month 😱
How can I boost this? I need anoth £100K to even have half a decent pension

Help!!!

There is no pot folks. It's a DB pension.

I have a DB pension, for a while I was opted out, I have 30 years contributions and 10 of those were PT on a salary that was under 30k and that gives me a pension of 10k PA. I was medically retired when I was 51. My lump sum was 32k, I took a bigger lump sum because at that point it was very unclear how long I would live for.

DH has a much better pension, also DB he had almost 30 years contributions and paid in extra, his final salary was close to 70k, in the last couple of years before he retired, his pension is 22k PA.

You can request a statement anytime, or more likely look online to see exactly what your projections are.

I was responding to a specific post where an estimation of an annuity from a certain amount was quoted.

Don't worry, that definitely sounds like the current value, rather than projected value.

Projected value would be a bit over £20k pa.

Yes that is good. OP must be better off than she thinks with hers.

I was in a DB scheme for 25 years and took my pension last year, 8 years early and my pension is £35k per year with a lump sum of £200k.
I suspect yours is per annum but you should be able to see from the docs.

In a defined benefit pension, such as working for local government, there is no pot.

I have an old deferred CS pension with about 12 years service and without any uplifts it’s worth about £11k a year………

It’s a defined benefit scheme. The statement/portal should show you the annual amount. You don’t then do anything with HMRC etc - that’s the annual amount you’ll get.

I don't think that's right, I worked for the Council for 4 years in a not massively well paid job and have a guaranteed 3k per year from 60 from that and an 8kish lump sum. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much it was.

@everyone
Sorry, I didn't think it would trend like it did! I only expected commiserations and doom!
I was in full time work for 13 years on a salary of £35K
Work place contributions of 23%
Have attached the documents below, and thank you everyone

Yes. About 9,600 pa. It will also be index linked and therefore will increase with inflation each year.

Yeah, those look like annual pensions not pension pots. Panic over!

That's your yearly pension.

As PP have said, your contributions are meaningless - it's your salary and your years of service that are used to calculate it.

That's such good news!!!Thank you everyone!!

And from the bit of text visible at the top of your pics it looks as if you can take it from 65, not state pension age.

Oh...I do like a happy ending :)

Phew!

I don’t know what made you think this is worth £30 p m. It’s an inflation linked DB pension for life of £9600 pa and a pp was correct in that you would need a dc pot of circa £250k to pay that annual amount.

My LGPS will pay me a really good monthly amount if I work until 67 but is reduced hugely if I want to retire earlier.

Aww I'm really happy for you - you should definitely enjoy the moment and have a glass of something nice. xxx

I think that applies to Nuvos, but not Alpha? The alpha Normal Pension Age (NPA) is the later of age 65, or your State Pension age (SPA).

A quick ChatGPT query suggests…
Yes — definitely per year.
On Civil Service pension statements, earned pension is always shown as an annual amount, not a total pot or lump sum.

A couple of solid reasons you can rely on that:

• The Civil Service schemes (including Nuvos and Alpha) are defined benefit schemes. They pay a guaranteed income each year for life, so everything is quoted per annum.
• If it were a lump sum, the statement would explicitly say “lump sum” or “pension account balance” — and the numbers would usually be much higher.

Though you can ask for a transfer value, which is sometimes worth doing.

Not sure why it says 65 as I am in the 67 bracket for my pension

Another pension thread where i have to ask. Why do people insist on replying on these threads when they dont have a clue what they are talking about? It just causes more confusion for the OP and other posters when half the answers are completely wrong. It was obvious to those of us that do understand pensions what the confusion was right from the first post. Why try and give advice on a subject you know nothing about? It really isnt helpful. It happens all the time and often the poor OP disappears because they are so confused with all the wrong answers or half right answers.