With today’s launch of the new State Pension, we’re starting to bring clarity to a system that few people truly understand.
Last autumn, I published a number of blog entries to help explain how the old system worked. Through this entry, which focusses on the period up to 5 April 2016, I want to show how people may have paid different amounts of NI over their working life through to the end of the tax year 2015/16, and how this has contributed to the State Pension they are or will become entitled to.
As we have seen, the outgoing State Pension system is a very complicated beast. In April 2016, we will be replacing this with a new clearer system.
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.