Blog 4 showed how the past changes to the Additional State Pension mean that you could have built up several different parts of State Pension. Your Additional State Pension will depend on a large number of factors.
So far, I’ve just explained how your State Pension builds up at the moment, based on NI you are paying or credited with this year. But your eventual State Pension will depend on your past NI record, as well as what you are building right now.
Being “contracted-out” generally means that you are paying lower National Insurance rates than the standard full rate for employees. You will be paying lower National Insurance as you are opted out of State Second Pension (S2P).
I want to try to help you understand how the State Pension works – both under today’s rules and in the future.
I will start by explaining the current State Pension.
This blog will just focus on how NI payments help you build up your State Pension. I hope it will give you a better idea of how the system works.
It is no secret that I have spent most of my working life in pensions – thinking about them, writing about them, occasionally dreaming about them, and debating how, together, we can make pensions work better for people.