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!!!

Is that the figure if you took it now rather than when it's due?

Gosh no, £9000K a year would be amazing

£9 in total doesn’t sound right at all. That means without any growth you’ve been putting away less than £1k a year. It just doesn’t make sense

I guess so

I don't think that seems far out to me tbh. Who would think you could work for only 13 years and then have enough to live off of for the 20 years you might be retired?

The Alpha Scheme (which I'm in, and have only been a civil servant 4 years, so not sure about other previous scheme you were in) works on the basis of 2.32% of your annual salary being accrued per year. So in very simple terms:

You work in a gov dept for 10 years and you earn exactly £30,000 per year for all those years, with no inflationary rises or promotions.

That means you earned £300,000 over 10 years and 2.32% of that was annually accrued as your annual pension = totalling £6,960 per year when you take your pension. In effect it will be more than that due to annual pay rises.

That can’t be right, I’d contact your he team and/or pension provider. That equates to about £57 (you said the company were contributing £200+ a month) a month invested, a pension of that length should have gone up by approx 5% a year ish.

For 14 years at 23% contribution - I'm pretty certain your £9k is per year. Post your statement when you get home...

The accrual rate in Alpha is 2.32%. If you earn £30k, you accrue an annual pension of £696 a year. Do that for 13 years and you've accrued £9k a year.

Thats not how a DB pension works. The OP has confirmed she was in Alpha which is DB. The amounts shown as a percentage are meaningless. There is no pot just a guaranteed amount per year.

The 23% of your salary contribution is a bit of a red herring. That's the amount that the government put into the overall civil service pension fund 'pot' on your behalf to fund all civil service pensions. Your ACTUAL pension is worked out on accruing 2.32% of your annual salary each year.

It sounds like you’re in a defined benefit scheme, so there isn’t a total amount of the pension fund
Have a good look at your pension statement and as others have said, post photos here for clarification.

Local government pension schemes don't show you a pot of money that your pension is worth. It will show you how much is is worth annually at the time the statement was run and a possible projection for what it is worth a retirement date.

Do you want to DM the section of your annual benefit that shows the value and I can confirm what it is trying to tell you?

Yes 9k per annum sounds right. I’m on 16k per annum but worked a bit longer and had relatively high salary.

Not necessarily - your pension is actuarially reduced if you take it early, before NPA (normal pension age), to reflect the extra years it will be paid. The specific % reduction depends on what scheme you're in though.

Oh gosh. And at 61 there's not much you can do. I think from the other comments, this would be something you'd be much better off talking with someone in person with the real figures and documents in front of you.

I hope and suspect this is where capital have taken over - in the same schemes as you (also started 2008) and prior to capita taking over figures where much more favourable than you mention. Try calling them - it’s all one hell of a mess at the moment

This is correct. Unless you working very part-time or opted out, this will be around what your annual pension should be.

It's very hard for anyone to say whether this is correct or not when you haven't said whether you worked full-time or very part time and whether it was a well-paid job or very low paid job.

I have about 13,000 pounds a year from one job I did in local government for 15 years - part time for some of that time but fairly well paid.

I did another local government job for a few years and only very part-time so will only get about 50 pound a Year from that I reckon!

Did you contribute anything? Sounds like it was employer contributions only and if you’d given a % of your salary they would have matched it.

Don’t panic. I, too, think that’s your annual figure as it stands now. I’m in a local authority scheme and for 10 years of being here have accumulated around £10k per annum pension.
I have another pension from a previous public sector employer and that’s £14k per annum after 13 year service.

My dad paid into a private pension for forty years. Before he died I was looking after his bank account and I was shocked to see this only amounted to about £9 a month!

What was your final salary in the Civil Service?

Were you in the old Classic/Classic Plus/Premium scheme for the whole of your service or were you affected by the move to Alpha?

Have you asked HR or My CSP for an explanation and in particular has the figure been adjusted for inflation?

was it the government state pension you were looking at OP?

HMRC can show how much state pension you have accrued and if you havent worked for a certain amnount of years (35 I think) you will qualify for less than full state pension. As you still have a few years to work this may be possible to remedy with "catch up " contributions.

This will be seperate to your work private pension:
www.gov.uk/check-state-pension

Phone them up. When I separated from my first H in 2008, my pension paperwork valued my pension at £10k. I only contributed to it until 2013, when I left the organisation.

Now, 17 years later, if I took the pension today (I'm 56), it would pay me a lump sum of £70k and £800 a month. If I wait until I'm 60, I get a lump sum of £100k and about £1200 a month.

The value now shows as £290k, which makes no sense compared to the £10k value in 2008 (when I was 38). I'll never really get my head around it. I think it's the projected figures that matter here. What will it be worth when you are 55/60/65. I can log into mine, and get projections. Can you?