I’m going to be honest here, I’m not great with pensions.
I have a great one through my current work and over the last few years I’ve been paying more into that than I used to but I also have two other pensions floating about somewhere from my last two employers. They’ll both be reasonably small (one will be teeny as I only worked for this company for a year) but still, I paid money into them so I need to get them tracked down and sorted.
It’s only in the last few months that I’ve started to think like a grown up when it comes to pensions even though I like to think I’m quite money savvy with financial matters in general. I think I’ve put my head in the sand because I don’t really understand pensions but helping my dad lately has changed that. More than ever now, I know that I want to be in a good place when I retire and ideally, I want to retire as early as possible so now more than ever I need to be thinking about my pension and what I can do in order to grow my pension fund.
So, my first plan of action last month has been to increase contributions to my current company pension plan to around double what I was contributing and to get Mr Frugal to do something similar to his. We both have plans where the more we put in, the more our company puts in so by doubling our contributions, it’s also doubling the company contribution too.
The second thing I need to do is to track down the pensions from my last two employers and get them sorted, ideally combining them into one so I can keep an eye on them too. That’s where PensionBee comes in!
I’ve read a few posts about PensionBee by the lovely Katy and Lynn who are fellow UK Money Bloggers, and it definitely sounds like their service could work for me. Basically, PensionBee can cleverly combine your old pensions into a brand new online plan which they can then manage for you. And you don’t need to worry if you don’t know all the details of your old pensions as you’ll get a personal BeeKeeper who can track them down for you by using their in-house database. If they can’t find them that way then they’re happy to help you contact your old employers to get the information that way.
There’s a couple of different plans that you can choose from, all with varying levels of risk and returns, but I’m not the best person to give advice on this bit so all I would say is have a look through the details, watch the videos and then decide which one best suits your personal needs.
Once you have transferred your pensions, you can login to your account online whenever you want to see your current pot size, your projected retirement income, or even set up regular or one-off contributions. Your personal BeeKeeper is there whenever you need some help, which is probably going to be quite often knowing me. They’ve also got a really handy pension calculator that can tell you how much you should be saving.
Disclaimer: I am working with PensionBee to share this with you. Pensions are investments so your capital is at risk.
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