Okay the pension you have in your NI contributions (maybe 5 quid a month by the time you retire) are non transferable... unless you contracted them out to a private pension provider beforehand. Theoretically you could do that still and then take the money from there and transfer it into CPF but that would be a lot of hassle and the pension providers usually only accept it if you have an active pension you still pay in monthly.Saint wrote:
Didn't actually know you could transfer UK pensions in to CPF??
Good luck if you can and report how!
If you have a private pension though you can transfer it out to your CPF as CPF fulfills all the requirements, ie. your money is basically locked up until retirement... yes I know you can use it to buy a HDB or for your child's education but for the purpose of transferring from Britain let's just take it as that.
What you will have to do is contact your pension provider and explain to them that you are living permanently overseas with no intension of ever moving back (so they will be keen to get rid of it as well to save the cost associated with holding your pension) and then they will ask you to write a letter providing your details, where it should be transferred etc and you also have to provide a copy of your PR... and this is how you set the wheels in motion. You will also have to contact CPF to get details on how to receive a foreign pension on the transferee side. This is what I found out so far but can't do it yet as I am not a PR with a CPF account yet. Also I am still UK resident while I do my masters here... So your first step would be to contact your pension provider. If you have mutual funds you might have to liquidate them first as only cash and not securities might be transferable... then I guess you will have to wait for ages HMRC will need to sign off... but it should be possible and this way you can also avoid paying income tax later when retired which you will have to pay on your annuity you have to take up if it is in the UK.
One thing to note: with the exchange rate being slightly up but still below three you might want to wait with actually transferring it. My personal opinion is that there has been a major shift in economic underlying that the sterling will stay down for a prolonged period (maybe 10 years). The recent recovery might be an incentive to get out of sterling and also shed any sterling investments as they will underperform over the next years (Equity Derivative and Hybrid Structurer here).
Spot on mate, the two years here felt like eternity. I can't believe what I am seeing and the lazy attitude, nobody wants to take responsibility for anything here, and just push it to someone else or ignore it. Sure you could argue that it is the same in Singapore, but I lived there for over three years and Singapore is just much better as people still want to help but just don't want to do anything that is not by the book. I am staying here one more year to do my Masters at Birkbeck as the home student rate (to get at least something out of this country) while the wife finishes her charter-ship and once I am done in August next year I am out of here.There is a tiny light at the end of the tunnel though: BT has included 0845 and 0870 in your unlimited nation-wide calls to landlines... so you don't pay anything any more after 7pm or on weekends from a BT landline. That saved me millions when listening to stupid music while waiting for someone to answer the phone after 45 minutes to an hour, who then does not have a clue. Don't get me started about BT customer service though. When we moved I had to call them because our phone line wasn't working. I called them five times in 3 days as they kept f**king up and never called back either. Average waiting time (even a 8am) was an hour to talk to someone. So I was standing in the payphone...ksl wrote: Oh how i hate that ---------------------place they can keep every penny i have paid in! They are all f----g idiots at the highest level in the civil service and believe me its got much worse, because now they are not civil service, but contractors with no offices open but just a phone line, which you pay a 50 pence per minute for. It's a blah blah blah disgrace. Worse than f------A------a
Littlegreenman says: Ladies and gentlemen,
please feel free to say hello to the latest SPR (ie. me)." Hello!" from a Lancasterian and welcome to Singapore, you really must have suffered in that backward Country! For me every visit is like stepping into a time machine.
