Expat Pension Concerns Cause Dwindling Number of Brits in EU

At the end of March 2017, a new 12-sided pound coin will be introduced in British currency.

With one and a half billion of the new coins being put into circulation by the Royal Mint, banks and shops will receive the coins on March 28, but it may be at least a few days before they are handed over as change in the shops.

In the 34 years that the current round pound coin has been in circulation, it has been heavily counterfeited and the issue of fakes is more prevalent than you might think.

There’s quite a buzz around pensions at the moment – and rightly so, as they provide the backbone of our income in our later years. But currently, pension deficits are hitting the news, and figuring them out can still prove difficult.

Pension deficits concern what are commonly known as “final salary pensions” or Defined Benefit schemes.   Final salary or defined benefit (DB) schemes are essentially occupational pension schemes that provide a set level of pension at retirement, the amount of which normally depends on your service and earnings at retirement or in the years immediately preceding when you retire. Because your pensionable salary is used as one part of the formula in order to calculate your pension, a final salary scheme is commonly referred to as a ‘salary related’ scheme. Two common examples of ‘final pensionable salary’ would be your last year’s pensionable earnings or an average of your last 3 years’ pensionable salary.

Recently, there have been high-profile failures of these systems, such as the folding of Monarch Airlines – and the collapse of their pension fund. Initially, it appeared that owners could still walk away with a profit (after new hands tried to turn the airline into a more accessible and “Ryanair-like” product) by offloading debts, and this included dropping the pension fund. Ironically, this was once a major credit to the business. The fund, which is now in the Pension Protection Fund (PPF), had been under speculation of being left short when the business first began to struggle back in 2014, after years of asset-stripping.