How to Maximise Your Pension

We all want to retire in comfort and have the funds to do what we’ve always wanted to do. However, with the State Pension only providing you with less than £10,000 per year, you likely won’t be able to have the retirement you want with just this income.

Of course, many people rely on their basic workplace pensions too, but this could still only scratch the surface of what you want to retire comfortably. So, if you want to maximise your pension, here are some helpful tips.

Track down your old pensions

Most people in the UK have had around 6 jobs by the time they turn 45. This means you could have multiple workplace pensions across the years, and you may have forgotten about some of them if you left these jobs a long time ago. Failing to claim these pensions could mean you’re missing out on a lot of money, so finding them is really important!

Luckily, you can use the free Pension Tracing Service to track down all of your old pensions, which you can then transfer to one private pension to keep all of your money together. A Wealthify pension will allow you to consolidate all your old pensions - visit their website to find out more about how and when to transfer your pension.

Contribute more

A simple way to maximise your pension is to increase your pension contributions. This can apply to both a private pension and your workplace pension, as you can choose to increase your contributions to save a larger amount of money. Saving for the future is definitely a worthwhile investment, so if you have some spare cash, put it to good use by moving it to your pension fund.

Get more money from your employer

With a workplace pension, your employer will also contribute a certain amount of money towards your pension each month. However, this amount can vary, so if you want to maximise your savings, find out what the maximum possible contribution from your employer would be. Therefore, if your employer will match your contributions up to a certain amount, you can make sure you increase your contributions to this level.

Invest wisely

The money you put into your private pension will be invested in order to grow your eventual retirement payout. Usually, you can choose an investment plan and the provider will handle everything for you, but you could instead choose to invest the money yourself. This could be a great idea if you know a lot about investing, but bear in mind that there’s never a guarantee that you’ll make money through investments.

Future possibilities

Nowadays, one of the most popular investment opportunities is cryptocurrency. At the moment, it’s too risky to invest your pension funds in cryptocurrency due to its volatility, but in the future, it could potentially become a more viable option. If you’re interested in investing, keep an eye on the current trends to see how this situation develops.

Photo by Caroline Hernandez on Unsplash