The Finance Bill was published on Thursday and it has some interesting bits about pensions. The death of the personal pension From 1 January 2024, you will not be able to implement a new personal pension plan. If you have an existing personal pension plan you can continue to contribute to them until maturity. They […]
Do you remember when you were smaller and your mum would let you and your brothers and sisters take something from the sweet press? And instead of taking one thing, you took loads of sweets? So she took away all the sweets? There was excitement in the pensions world with the annual funding limits being […]
PRSA’s have always been somewhere between a personal pension and a company paid pension. While most of the rules for pensions are the same, each type has a few differences around the edges. The rules that applied to your PRSA depended on whether the PRSA was an employer based one (even if the employer didn’t […]
Ireland is a lot different to when I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. For the last few decades, people actually want to come to Ireland to work. There are great opportunities for people to work for some of the biggest companies in the world. But just like the Irish move abroad and […]
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. […]