We all have those annoying and pesky tasks that we’ve been meaning to get around to. Sorting out your pensions is often one of them. Well, if you have a bit of spare time on your hands now due to the lock down, now’s the perfect time to be getting onto it. Remember you aren’t the only one, there are over £19 bn of lost pensions in the UK.
Here are some practical steps that you can follow to start sorting your UK pensions:
1. Work out who your pension is with…
This sounds basic but UK pension providers are merging with and acquiring each other all the time. Take AVIVA for example they have acquired Norwich Union, Winterthur Life, Friends Life (who had acquired Friends Provident), you get the picture. Basically, who you took your pension out with originally may not be who runs it now. They are holding your money so you should find out.
If you’d like to find out who holds your pension now, we’re here to help.
2. Get up to date with your pension company
Once you’ve found out who’s managing and administering your UK pension, you should get your details up to date with them. You might have got married, you might have moved once, twice or more, you might still have your parents address listed as the primary contact address. Well now’s the chance to clean that all up.
Getting your contact and address details up to date helps if you need to do anything in the future. These are the documents you may need to have on hand to enable that update:
- Marriage certificate
- Passport
- Birth certificate
- A utility bill/bank statement that is addressed to you at your current address that is no less than three months old
You may also need to get the above documents certified and sent to your UK provider. If you need help with that during the lockdown, were here to help with certification and guidance.
3. Get information on your UK pension
By law UK pension providers have to send a yearly statement. While this is a really good starting point it pays to know about your scheme in detail, as they say “the devil’s in the detail”. Does your pension plan have any really valuable benefits like guaranteed annuity rates? Is your Scheme fully funded if it’s a final salary scheme? Are there guaranteed minimum pension benefits? What’s the transfer value of your UK pension? What benefits does your pension offer?
There’s a lot that you need to understand about your pension and now is the perfect time to get reacquainted with it. We can happily do a review on your UK pensions and let you know exactly what you have and what valuable benefits might be part of that pension.
4. Get all your supporting information together
Best practice you should know and have on file the following information:
- Your UK National Insurance Number
- When you left the UK
- When you arrived in New Zealand after accruing your UK pensions
- Any dates that you spent living outside of New Zealand since the first arrival date above
As your trusted UK pension adviser in New Zealand we’re here to help however we can.
