Making Retirement a Reality
Perhaps you’ve had 2022 earmarked as your year to retire. Maybe you’ve paid extra to top up your pension pot or maybe you’ve reduced your hours with flexible retirement to ease you into life after work. Or alternatively, retirement could have been a more spontaneous decision and you need some pointers on where to begin.
Regardless of how you’ve arrived at this stage, we want to help make the process as easy as possible with our retirement basics guide.
One of the initial starting points to taking your pension is using our My Pension tool. Our secure My Pension portal allows you to view your current pension value and see what the value of your pension will be at retirement, this ensures you are on track for the lifestyle you want. We advise that you do this well in advance of retirement to make sure the value of your pension is as anticipated.
Another useful source of information is the Retirement section of our website, this covers all the ins and outs of retirement such as when you can take your pension and the types of retirement available. There is also a Guide to Retirement available in the Resources section of our website that explores the topic in greater detail.
Once you are clued up on all the pension facts, you should follow our 6-step process to claim your pension. The below steps will take you well on your way to making the retirement process as smooth as possible:
- The first step is to speak to your employer about retiring and agree a retirement date. If you are requesting ill health retirement, your employer will organise a medical before agreeing to ill health retirement.
- Once you and your employer have agreed and set a retirement date, your employer will notify us.
- Around 4-6 weeks before your retirement date, we will write out to you about your pension options. This will include your options to swap pension for lump sum.
- Complete and return the forms we send to you.
- After your final pay has been paid, your payroll department will pass on your final pay details to us. This is used to calculate the final value of your pension and lump sum.
- We will write out to you once we receive your final pay details, confirming the date of your first pension payment.
If you are a deferred member, the process is even simpler. All you have to do is let us know when you want to take your pension and we will write to you with options. After that is it just a case of waiting for the payments to be processed.
If you want your pension payments to start by a certain date you should contact us in plenty of time to ensure this is possible. The length of time it takes to process and put your pension into payment varies depending on resources available. It may also depend on how long it takes to receive final pay information from your employer.
Once we have received all your paperwork, including your completed forms and final pay figure from your employer, we will process your pension for payment. Pensions are paid on the 15th of each month, with payroll closing around 1 week before. So your first payment will depend on when we receive your paperwork. If you are getting a lump sum, this will be paid around 15-20 working days after we receive your paperwork.
And voila, now you’ve completed the process you can sit back, relax and enjoy your well-earned retirement.
