Serps compensation companies

A question about : Serps compensation companies

Anyone have a clue what these companies are up to with their compensation offers? I have two pensions one final salary and one career average over my 32 years of work and have just received early retirement from the career average one due to ill health.

My Serps contracting out was done when I was a teenager working in local government and is now with Aviva. I had not a clue what I was doing at the time but it was real hard sell at that point in the mid 80's.

Is it something worth investigating or is it dodgy?

Best answers:

• Like so many of us right now, we are drawn to the small print of years of bumpf which make up our pensions and from which we can now plot the effects of incessant changes (for many can only be plotted in hindsight).
  My first (and only surviving) DB scheme was a non-contributory "contracted out" scheme and started more than 32 years ago. So the OP may have a valid point even though dunstonh has thrown us off the scent a bit.
  Personal pensions were of course not the first or the only means to be "contracted out".
  I was just told to join the scheme - I'd be daft not to! I think that is a kind of hard sell if no-one comes back later and offers to review and optimise it ! (They never did of course, unless they wanted to wind it up ... d'uh!).
  For the OP to have a SERPs policy with Aviva does sound a little odd if he somehow got started with it in the 80s whilst working for Local Government. But stranger things have happened especially with so much outsourcing over the years in Local Government Services and Transfers of Undertakings. When did we first see the name Veolia? And Capita ? There will be others each with their own idea about how to sell a slightly varied pension to someone who was previously bog standard LGPS! And you can bet that the likes of NU and CU's Morley etc. (which both became part of Aviva) were always there ready for easy picking via their more acquisitive and expansive corporate contacts. Maybe the OP ended up in some TUPE'd organisation that eventually wound up what used to be his LGPS pension and defaulted him into an Aviva Section 32 buy out policy - With Profits and later with Clare Spottiswoode if he was darned unlucky! But I digress ...
  However, dunstonh may recall if he goes back far enough in his records that the government offered some kind of special 2% incentive to start SERPs policies effective at a date in 1987. Not quite mid 80s, but not quite late 80s - that's when the first personal pension SERPs policies were sold I guess, and I recall some kind of backdating was recommended. It resulted in a lot of mistakes I think.
  Anyway, in recent months or weeks the media has been full of how those of us with SERPs policies can't now expect full state pensions. It took the best part of a year for the penny to drop on that one in the media. Maybe even longer.
  What is lesser known I think, is the State Pension Deductible (SPD?) within contracted out DB scheme rules which may have a similar effect after State Pension Age if we actually get there - a kind of double whammy perhaps for those of us who are relying on original DB schemes for the first part of our pensions and upon SERPs and other personal pensions to make up the rest?
• Firstly my SERPs policy (whether or not I have cashed it and spent it?) will reduce my State Pension entitlement.
• Secondly, my State Pension Entitlement will reduce my DB scheme benefits because it was a contracted out DB scheme.

Am I the first to raise this as a possible double whammy? Any more pennies need dropping fast ? And meantime might I get one-up on the system by cashing in my DB scheme and spending it before SPA, or will they still reduce my State Pension even further irrespective of whether the contracted DB scheme is cashed and gone ? Who would ever know ? Will Equifax and Experian be keeping tabs on us ? Or maybe LexisNexis will from the USA