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!!!

Thats not true they're still defined benefit.

This is incorrect. They are still defined benefit

So much rubbish on this thread and this may be the winner! I joined 10 years ago and my OH in 2023 and we both have DB pensions. Perhaps you mean Final Salary (they are now Career Average) but that is not what you said.

Phone PensionWise .. free Government agency. I found them really helpful

This will be if absolutely no use to the OP. She has a DB pension. Pensionwise won't discuss a DB pension. Their remit is limited to DC.

Maybe you could explain acronyms

DB - defined benefit
DC - defined contribution.

I have to say though, why contribute to a thread on pensions at all if you don't even know what the very basics like this means?

Being a complete ignoramus about pensions myself, and realising from this thread that the OP was maybe in the same position, I did find PensionWise very helpful in deciding whether to continue working and when to draw my state pension. Not everyone can have your superior knowledge. We are not worthy

Nobody said that apart from you. If you check, this thread has been running for days. OP had the answers to her question within a couple of hours. Coming on to a thread about something as specialised as a civil service DB pension and giving inaccurate advice isnt helpful for anyone.

You can't have a Pension Wise appointment to talk about DB pensions but you can call Moneyhelper pensions help line 0800 011 3797

Ok. The end result is the same. The new pensions schemes are crap compared to before! It's all about reducing costs.

Could it be possible you have 2 pensions? Sometimes they close one scheme and open a new one. This happened with my dh’s government pension.

Not at all. CARE can work out better than final salary for some and is still guaranteed so nothing like a DC pension.

The OP showed her statements in a post 4 days ago. That has been taken into account. She only worked for 13 years. The amount she has on the statements between the two schemes is £9665 per year.

Thanks, she said in her post she only had £9000 total, making £3 a month, has she worked it out now?

You can read her posts to find out the answer.

If you click see all on the OP you will see all 24 of her posts. This thread is 5 fays old. It was all sorted out in the first few hours.

So sorry for wasting everyone’s time. It might prove helpful information to someone though.

Are you looking at the value of the pension pot? They quote it on public sector pensions for the high earners for tax purposes if they have an additional pension but it really is an irrelevant function for most of us.
What you actually get is based on your contributions per year and the number of tears and it increases with inflation.
People talk nonsense about gold plated public sector pensions but they are not what they were since David Cameron's time when the cobtributions went up, value dropped and retirement age moved to match state pension age. Every umion voted against it but it was implemented anyway.
It is estimated you need a retirement income of at least £20,000. A private pension pot of £100,000 will not go far at all, you need more like 1 million which is beyond most peoples budget.
If you save into a SIPP or LISA you get tax benefits that increase the value but if you work until 67 in your current scheme you may well not need any additional savings. Your union or pensions dept should be able to give you general advicd.

I can't think of one situation where CARE is better. Every public sector union voted to reject it. You have to pay on more for longer and get less back. I took the hit and took my CARE part of my pension at 60 but I doubt zi can live long enough to even get back what I paid in and given its linked to state pension age which is rising it is going to be worse again in the future

CARE is only beneficial over Final Salary if your salary in your last years is less than you were earning previously, eg if you go part time. But that won't be the case for many people.

The good thing about CARE is that it extends the viability of continuing to operate a defined benefit scheme. So many employers have either stopped DB schemes completely, or introduced a DC scheme for new starters.

Occasionally there was a bit of a fiddle with Final Salary schemes, where a person with the right buddies would be given a promotion or substantial pay rise shortly before retirement, to bump up their pension for the rest of their life. This was not specific to public service schemes.

Well you wouldn’t get that per month, (9k) but it will depend on your contributions. Civil service pensions are contributory now.

They’ve always been contributory.

Not always.

I joined the service in 1978. Contributions were paid at 1.5% but that was for a 'widows and orphans' add on. The employee's pension was non contributory.

If you were single at retirement the widow's pension contributions were (IIRR) returned.

It started to get more complicated c2002 when the Premium version was added where partners as well as legal spouses could get a survivor pension.

Then, after 2010, the contributions were ramped up further. In effect a pay cut.