It’s 4% regardless. So I now get an additional payment to my base salary which represents a 4% amount of the pensionable salary (pre-Tax). Note that this is instead of contributing to a long-standing, certain-employee-group-only, group pension plan - not a ‘workplace pension’ scheme.
I can choose to add to this 4% with any amount I want to. In fact, I could just take the 4% salary ‘boost’ payment and run (contributing nothing to my personal pension at all), but then I wouldn’t be able to claim back the tax paid on the 4% and whatever else I put into the pension. So this compound effect of tax-back on personal pension contributions, plus the fact that the plan I’m now in performs way, way, way better than the employer GPP means the performance is much better than if I had not gone through exhaustive, boring, deflating research into pensions. And then took a leap-of-faith presenting this research to my employer.
So the pension team have been in touch with me this morning, the same person who said they would keep me up to date with the progress of my transfer considering the issues I’ve been having… and then didn’t let me know it was rejected again.
All they’ve said is “sorry for your inconvenience”. No next steps or how to resolve it.
For context, Monzo keep submitting my double barrelled name as first name, middle name, rather than just first name, which is why it’s being rejected. However Monzo have confirmed that they have my name correct on my account so I don’t understand why it is being submitted wrong.
PensionBee have been really good and they keep sharing with me the rejection reasons. I might just stick with them even though they have higher fees.
No one can answer this! It depends what fees you’ll pay and what investment options you want.
The Monzo product is limited by:
No choice of investment product (it’s a target date fund)
Can’t pay more into it after transfer
But it does have low fees, and TDFs are the default funds for most pension providers.
I wouldn’t use it at this point and I wouldn’t move a substantial pot to a new fund without indipendent financial advice. But if you have a small pot that you just haven’t looked at for years or something it might be alright.
Hi - thanks for your reply. I did not know you could not add “new money” into the pension once it has completed the transfer - that seems daft as you cannot increase its value.
I think I will stay with PB as it has a lot of cash in it as it seems to be doing a good job.
So it’s three months since Monzo told us they were working on allowing customer to make payments to their pensions:
Unless Monzo can provide a timeline for this functionality, I’m going to have to close my account down.
If you’re going to build an MVP of pensions, it needs to include payments by default. It’s literally how everyone uses pensions and expects them to work.
And yet I’m trying to transfer a pension out of PensionBee (to Virgin Money) and it’s taking months, presumably because they’re having to write letters to each other.
Interesting document, thanks @Chrispykreme. I consolidated half a dozen pensions a couple of years ago including from some providers on that list, and the process was anything but quick. About 6 months in total I think.
