RoF Wage slaves - pension contributions
Anonymous (not verified) 16 Jan 20 12:12
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What happens to these between them being deducted from your salary and appearing in your pension pot ?

 

I'm still waiting for the money deducted from December pay packet to show up in my pension so I can invest it. Someone has been sitting on that cash for over three weeks, which is standard every single month. 

That means that over the year a whole month's wort of my pension contributions are sitting in someone else's account for 9 months! 

That's 9 months worth of growth / dividends / interest I am missing out on every fvcking year! 

Is this normal for wage slave pensions contributions and who is profiting from this?

Yes that is how pension schemes make a lot of their money. They also charge fees, mostly, so the interest they make on your money each month is pure rent seeking.

Make a complaint to your HR person responsible for pensions and (if it's a DC scheme) have them put pressure on the administrators to improve the gap.

(We are at around 5 days as a benchmark, with Legal and General as administrators.

Is this one of those matching contribution tight-arse things? We have zero employee kick-in here as it should be. Just a glorious 15% of base salary beng tossed into the pot.

I get a v. lousy 4% contribution from my work. I hate having to put my own money in but a growing acceptance that I may not in fact be dead in 20-30 yrs has seen me put increasing amounts in each year (currently up to 14%).

The money deducted from your salary is just money that continues to sit in your company's bank account until it is transferred to the pension provider.

Administrators can be a bit slow but not 3 weeks slow, that much time means the money is sitting with your company for at least 2 weeks after your pay date. 

It may be that your finance/HR dept are slow about sending it for some reason. Or the administrator's standard direct debit date where they draw all contributions every month happens to be 3 weeks after your pay date. 

What's aunty about this?

They might not even know about the problem?

NEWSFLASH:  HR USUALLY WANTS TO HELP MAKE EMPLOYEES FEEL HAPPY.  If they could improve this, or even just make the administrator stick to their SLA, why wouldn't they?

There's no harm in mentioning it, chances are no-one in HR or finance has thought about it for a single second after they made sure the process basically works. 

If only there was some way you could find out what the law says about this.  Perhaps by spending 10 seconds googling to discover that

 Employer contributions must be paid by the due date set out under the payment schedule for paying them to the pension scheme. At the latest member contributions deducted from pay must be paid to the pension scheme by the 22nd day (or 19th day if the payment is by cheque) of the month following deduction. These dates do not override any earlier due date set out in the payment schedule. There are special rules for the first deduction of contributions on automatic enrolment under the Pensions Act 2008.

If you'd spent 10 seconds actually reading the OP and subsequent points, you'd realise that the problem may not be the timing of payment of the employer contributions but the crediting of those payments made to his pension account. Furthermore, whether it's lawful or not for the employer to delay making the contributions until the end of the period you mention, it's not an obligation to do so and therefore no reason why an employee can't ask his employer, if they are the cause for the delay, to pull their finger out. 

I know this thread is ages old but still...

A delay in monthly contributions hitting the investment account won't make any difference to the return if that's the concern, you're not missing out on 9 months' worth. You're still getting a payment invested on the same day each month.