State pensions
EML Financial Services Limited is owned by four of the partners in Emsleys Solicitors. EML Financial Services is regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
After years of hard work it’s nice to know that when the time comes to clock off for the final time you’ll have a pension waiting for you to help make your retirement more comfortable. And with only around half of us having opted into company schemes, state pensions have become more important than ever.
There are two types of state pension available; the basic state pension and the second state pension.
Basic state pension
The basic state pension is available to anyone who has made National Insurance (NI) contributions during their working life that exceed a certain limit. However, because of this limit, many low-paid workers may find that they do not qualify.
Second state pension (S2P)
This type of pension replaced the old State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), and like SERPS, it offers an additional earnings-related bonus to the state pension. It's designed to boost the pension payments received by low or moderate earners, as well as certain carers and people with long-term illness or disability.
If you have a company pension you may find it has opted you out of S2P and the NI contributions that you have saved have been paid into your company scheme, but this is not necessarily beneficial.
How we can help
We appreciate that this can all seem quite confusing, and that it's essential to make sense of it all and get to the bottom of exactly what you are going to receive. So, to find out more about the ins and out of state pensions you can contact one of our retirement planning experts who will be happy to talk you through what each state pension option means for you.
