Pensions
Pensions
This is not intended to sell you the concept. If you are not already aware of the benefits of pensions for yourself and your colleagues then please do ring us on 01483 715823. But what is the pensions menu?
If you have something in place already:
There have been enormous changes in legislation in recent years and you may need to review and perhaps change what you are doing to minimise the financial and legal risks.
You will undoubtedly have to change it to comply with the new NEST (national employers savings truist) regime
I f there is nothing at present:
Perhaps you will accuse us of bias, but is it time to start something? It does not have to be a perfect scheme on day one, but anything is better than nothing, and you can improve it in later years.
Generally speaking a group scheme that you may arrange for your employees will have lower charges than individual plans, and this alone can improve the final pension by up to 10%.
We can arrange self administered schemes, top-ups, and schemes or other arangements to supplement the pensions cap for high earners.
But compulsory employer managed and sponsored pensions are coming. The much misnamed personal account ( now renamed NEST) will require every employer to set up, administer, and pay into what in effect will be a company scheme. Implementation will be 2012 to 2016. As an employer are you including this in your budgeting. Do your employees know how much it is going to cost them ?
When is this going to affect you ? Click here to find your timetable http://www.pensionsadvisoryservice.org.uk/media/386546/phased%20implementation%20dates%20-%20dwp%20version.pdf
and how much is it going to cost, and how can this be phased in as well ?
The minimum requirements are : (subject to start dates for individual firms as above)
employer employee
Oct 2012 to sept 2016 1 % 1 %
Oct 2016 to sept 2017 2 % 3 %
October 2017 onwards 3 % 5 %
You the employer will be responsible for administering the personal accounts for your employees, no advice will be available unless you appoint an IFA to add that service - or you can invite us to set up a scheme that will exempt you from the quango arranged personal account, have advice available for both yourself and your employees, and probabaly a better scheme as well. But you really need to be finding out about it now.
There is of course a lot more than this, tax releif, terms and conditions of employment, employer take on all or part of employees contributions and a lot more. If you do not know about it then you do need independent financial advice now. If your existing advisors have not kept you up to date over the last couple of years why not ? Seek information and advice from us now.