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!!!

@RosieBright Both Alpha and Nuvos are final salary schemes in the Civil Service - so defined benefit schemes. Not as generous as earlier Civil service pension schemes, but still good ones. Like others have said, I'm as sure as I can be that the £9000 will be per annum - and will be more by the time you retire, especially as you are planning on returning. But print out what it says when you get home, black out any personal details and then post a pic here.

Are you sure they haven't accidentally put gaps in your years of service. This has happened to some teachers (on defined benefit scheme). Check your service record dates.

OP Your so-called worthless pension won't be your only income if you have fully paid up stamps in HMRC/State Pension. uou may not be as badly off as you think.

Just to be pedantic. Alpha and Nuvos are defined benefit schemes which are career average not final salary schemes.

pretty poor

LGPS do this and it is so much easier to read and understand than the paperwork

Nuvos and Alpha are not final salary they are CARE. The only link to final salary would be if there was a protected final salary pension with classic / premium from linked service previous to Nuvos being introduced.

OP, I am 67 and worked 12 years for local authorities between 1975 - 1987 (10 in 1 and 2 in the other). I cashed in around £15K about 10 years ago to pay off my mortgage and I receive around £280 per month for the LG pension. I was working at quite a low level in LG, so your pension sounds extremely low. I would suggest that you contact the pension/superannuation department of wherever you worked.

Yes. You are right and I am sorry. I retired on the original Classic, so had to Google it for those 2 and should have known AI would get it wrong.

I’m not sure that’s right - I worked in the civil service for 5 years and got £10k whilst making no contributions myself. Friends who did had 2-3x that amount so I’m not sure that’s right!

£9k per annum seems a lot more likely than a £9k capital value for 13 years' service.

One final idea that came to mind - especially if the £9k is described as a "one off lump sum" is whether that represents a lump sum, and there is also a £3k per annum pension payable as well (a bit like the old 1/80th pension and 3/80th lump sum?). I am intrigued to see the statement now!

That won’t be right. The pension calculator is down due to transfer to new provider so you can’t check but cannot see how that can be right at all. Its a defined benefit pension.

Hoping that the posters who think that it is £9k per year are correct.

So it’s more than likely the £9000 showing up for OP is the annual amount she will get, as they don’t reveal any other money info? Good news for OP if this is the case.

I worked in a LA job for about 13 years, always part time and my pension from that is around £5000 per year plus a similar amount of lump. That would tally with yours being about double that per year for full time work for around the same period.

Hi OP. Assuming you didn't work 1 day a week on minimum wage, this sounds way off. I suggest you call the scheme administrator as soon as you can.

It may represent a scheme that you were in for a short amount of time i.e. scheme 1 1995 - 2017 and then a new scheme 2018-2020 or something. Perhaps you are misinterpreting defined benefits for a defined contribution value. Perhaps its an AVC as part of a wider scheme.

Just get off MN, end the speculation and get answers to see what is going on.

But there is a lesson here, don't delay taking an interest in your pension until a time where it is too late to do much about it.

Ah yes the great civil service pension we are all told about in the press. Sadly it only applies to senior management. I think my husband thought he’d struck it lucky with me a my pension when we met. He was very disappointed when he saw the reality of it 😅

It should be £9000 per year. They never give a total amount as it's a defined benefit pension which means you will get the full amount for life if you retire at pension age, rather than a pension pot.

They’re still a decent pension. Just over 10 years in and I’m over £11k per year pension. Even if my salary never rose again, and I only did another 15 years I’d be on over 30k per year. Can’t argue. Plus I pay a bit extra to bring my retirement age forward by 3 years.

The provider has changed. We were all told to download our previous statements if we didn’t already have them, so until you get a new one on the new portal you won’t be able to view your previous one.

EXACTLY 👿

Contribution rates are meaningless / arbitrary in defined benefit pensions.

It’ll be 9,000 a year.

Ah, @RosieBright I wonder if you are looking at the benefits for a partial period as the scheme changed so often?. So in CS pension quotes, you get a £x premium for nuvos, £y for classic and £z for alpha… a summary page should show the total. Sounds like you would also be affected by McCloud, so worth bearing that in mind later too. Is this online or your annual benefit statement? Pension has just switched over to Crapita management and lots of functionality on the website is still down. May be that too!

It is. In her OP, she is describing a defined contribution pension. That’s not how gov/public sector pensions work. They don’t have a ‘pot.’

You’ll get a better return with a teachers’ pension that you can ever hope of getting by putting the same contributions in a defined contribution pension.

When you say your pension is worth nothing I would take your nothing over the pension I paid into for years 35-40 years ago

That pension is worth £0 used to prop up a failing company that failed

The most galling thing is having been in the position to have knowledge of certain things (Exh worked as one of the directors of another company in the same industry) I did actually warn them that if they went down a certain route it would bankrupt the company.

I was told that I didn’t know anything

Only realised a few years ago that during the predicted (by me) bankruptcy they used the pension fund to try and stay afloat.