A friend of mine is eligible to join their new employer’s group pension scheme and asked me to advise them on it. Of course I obliged, but isn’t there a scheme broker to go through the scheme with them? No, they were sent an email with the form, asked to fill it out and return […]
Budget 2023 made some interesting changes to pension funding. Under traditional company pensions, a company can make generous contributions but there was a formula used in calculating how much can be made each year which the company could claim tax relief against. This formula included your age, salary, current pension values and a computation factor […]
If you are a member of a company pension scheme, you have to be in that scheme for at least two years to be legally entitled to the value of your employer’s contributions (when I started working, it had just been changed to five years. Before that, you were never entitled to the value of […]
With four different Master Trust products being launched over the last number of weeks, I found myself logging onto a number of webinars to find out more about these new products that are replacing one person company pension plans. One thing that struck me was all the life company wanted to emphasise that financial brokers […]
The Finance Bill has made some interesting changes to funding for retirement, namely in PRSAs. Current rules At present, employer paid contributions to an employee’s PRSA is a Benefit in Kind (BIK) for tax purposes. But the BIK is not put through the PAYE system so the it does not attract USC & PRSI taxes, […]
We all know the State pension is a ticking timebomb. The Pensions Roadmap 2018 – 2023 stated that over the next 40 years, the ratio of workers to pensioners is expected to fall to 2.3:1. This is going result in a pension deficit of €400 billion over the next 50 years if changes weren’t made. […]
There is a lot of pension legislation coming from Europe that is having a big impact on pensions in Ireland. It is important to have an idea of where this has come from first. The first directive, known as IORPS I was introduced in 2004/2005. The government at the time availed of an option not […]
One of the features of the auto enrollment pension scheme is that members will not get tax relief on their contributions. Instead, the State will make a top-up contribution to your pension pot and your own contributions will be deducted from your net salary (the payment amount will be calculated from gross salary). The government […]
Minister for Social Protection, Heather Humphreys, published the framework for the pension auto enrollment scheme. This is something that has been talked about since 2007, so it is good to see things moving forward and it looks like it is actually going to happen. We have written about this before, so I am not going […]
Liverpool Football Club won the League Cup (I can’t keep up with the change of sponsors, so I just call it the league cup, much to my son’s amusement) last week. It was an entertaining 0-0 draw with both sides having goals disallowed for marginal VAR decisions. Liverpool won the penalty shoot-out 11-10. Liverpool are […]