Your Other Pensions

Existing pension arrangements

You may have other pension policies or deferred benefits in pension schemes from previous employers. If so, you should certainly  take them into account when planning your overall retirement strategy, and when deciding how much to contribute to this scheme.

If you are curently contributing to your own pension arrangement, you can continue to do this in addition to your membership of Trafalgar’s workplace pension. Alternatively, you may find that switching any existing contributions to this scheme while you are working via Trafalgar is more efficient and can create greater tax and NI savings.

You might also wish to consider consolidating your plans or transferring other policies into this scheme, which may bring the following advantages:

– simpler adminstration
– an overall reduction in charges
– a more suitable investment strategy

Whatever you decide, please do make sure that you obtain details of all your pensions on a regular basis; in order to build up and maintain a comprehensive picture of your retirement planning situation.

The State Pension

Your State Pension entitlement is based on the number of years on your National Insurance record, accrued throughout your working life.

There have been a number of changes to the State Pension over recent years, but generally you need 10 years on your NI record to receive any State Pension, and 35 years to receive a full State Pension. The value of the full State Pension is now over £9,300 pa.

However, people have varied working patterns and your situation may be different. If you haven’t already done so, we recommend that you obtain a State Pension forecast in order to build a full and accurate picture.

You can find out more about the State Pension, including how to obtain a personal forecast, on the Government website.