Anyone able to advise how well I'm doing in terms of my pension currently?
39 years old.
Got a teacher pension thay currently shows as £7665 pa OR £4927pa with a one off £32851.
No longer paying into this
Then got 2 other workplace pensions thay have a current combined total pot of £41500.
Recently increased my pension contributions to be adding in £8115 pa to the pot between mine and employer contributions.
It's a bit how long is this string without a bit more info, but a few things you can work out yourself.
Start with how much you think you need to live on when you retire. If you're not planning on retiring until you reach state pension age, you'd have almost £20k (in today's money) from that and your teacher pension, so you need to guess/work out how much you might need. That depends on whether you own or rent, the sorts of holidays you like, the car you want to drive etc etc. Suggestions that a comfortable retirement for a couple is about £40k a year, which sounds high to me based on what we currently spend, but will be very individual.
Do everything in today's money and work out what you think you might need. Take off your teacher pension and state pension if you want. That'll give you a figure, say £10k a year still needed. Multiply that by about 30, that would mean you'd need a pot of about £300k - remember that could/should include ISAs as well.
Whatever the number, it'll sound a lot, but don't panic. Google compound interest calculator. Make the starting amount the £41k you've currently got in a pension, annual addition of around £8k and however many years until you think you'll want to retire. Set the interest rate at about 4% - that depends what you invest in, but that should be a reasonable amount after inflation. That'll tell you what your pot may be when you retire. Hopefully it's close to the number above, but play about with it until it does - don't just increase the interest rate, do things like increase contributions by 3% a year (your salary will increase). You might find you need to up your contributions to £10k or work a year longer than you thought, but you'll be on the right path and the fact you're wondering about it before you hit 40 puts you way ahead of most people.
If you haven't already, I'd also suggest a LISA - you get basic tax rebate when you pay in but no tax when taking it out after 60, so you can use it to supplement a pension, minimising the tax paid.
As a couple of useful resources, check out Meaningful Money or Damien Talks Money on YouTube.
