Making sense of your leaving service pension options letter

When you leave a job, you’ll need to make decisions about your company pension.

You should receive a letter setting out the options you have to deal with your pension fund.  We’ve set out what the most common options mean over here.

This blog explains the documents you’ll receive, and how the process of moving your funds to a new pension is done when you leave your job.

Your leaving service benefits options letter

This letter (they have various names, like statement of options on leaving service, pension benefits options statement, and so on) generally comes from the pensions administrator.

For many people in Ireland, it will come from a big pensions admin company such as Mercer, Willis Towers Watson, or Aon (there are lots of other providers).

The leaving service options letter typically has four parts:

1. A cover letter, which explains why they are writing you. That’s fairly obvious – you’ve left the company.
2. A snapshot of your pension. This is important.  It will set out when you joined the pension, when you left, and above all, the value of your pension.  This tells you how much retirement money is at stake.
3. The options statement. This is the list of options you can choose from.  We’ve explained these in detail here.
4. The benefit options decision form, or member decision form. This is a tick-box form where you can select the option you want.

If you’ve not received a letter, or lost it

You can ask for a leaving service benefits options letter at any time.  It doesn’t matter if you left your job last week, or a decade ago.

If you have no paperwork, the best place to start is your old job’s HR department.  If you have an old pension statement, you’ll quickly find the contacts for the people who run your old company’s pension.

You can contact them to receive an up-to-date value and list of your options on leaving service.

How do you move the money?

If you’ve decided you wish to move your pension after leaving a company (maybe to increase investment control, reduce costs, or simply to create an account which is independent from your old employer), there are 3 steps.

1. You’ll need to open a fresh pension which can receive the funds. We can advise you on the alternatives
2. The decision form needs to be returned, along with detail on where you want the money to be sent
3. We’ll do the work to make sure your old company pension move the money into your new account.

Moneycube can assist with three steps – just fill in the form below if you’d like us to help.

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