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gaps in NI record

kenpoken
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gaps in NI record

#210496

Postby kenpoken » March 26th, 2019, 8:42 pm

Hello everyone!

I would be grateful for your help/advice regarding our state pensions.

I am British (50 years old)
My wife is a non-EU national (43 years old)
We both lived and worked outside the EU until 2011. We have both been employed in the UK since March 2015.
We would both like to retire (partially or completely) within the next few years (i.e. we may not continue to pay NI contributions for much longer).

I have 8 years on my National Insurance record up to 5 April 2018 (I think 5 of these years probably come from my student days).

My wife has 3 years on her National Insurance record up to 5 April 2018.

We’ve got plenty of savings, so we assume we should try to fill some of the gaps in our NI records to build up as much State Pension as possible for the future.

We were hoping that the written State Pension Forecasts (which we recently requested and received) would include some kind of paying-in slips so we could easily pay contributions for the gaps, but nothing was included in the letter!!!

So our questions:
- How many gap years can we still pay NI contributions for?
- How exactly do we make these payments? (Online???)
- Is there a deadline for doing so? (We are extremely busy at the moment, so if waiting until the new tax year doesn’t make much difference, it would be much more comfortable to deal with this over the next few months, rather than rushing around in the next few days)

Many thanks for any help you can give us!
Ken

mc2fool
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Re: gaps in NI record

#210507

Postby mc2fool » March 26th, 2019, 9:38 pm

kenpoken wrote:We would both like to retire (partially or completely) within the next few years (i.e. we may not continue to pay NI contributions for much longer).

You can continue to make voluntary NICs.

We were hoping that the written State Pension Forecasts (which we recently requested and received) would include some kind of paying-in slips so we could easily pay contributions for the gaps, but nothing was included in the letter!!!

Sign up for the online statements, there you can easily check your gaps and the cost of filling each one, as well as getting yourself an instant forecast at any time. Start here: https://www.gov.uk/check-state-pension.

If you really want a paper tick box paying in form then get yourself a Statement of National Insurance Account, which includes such a form.
https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/shortforms/form/NIStatement

kenpoken wrote:So our questions:
- How many gap years can we still pay NI contributions for?
- How exactly do we make these payments? (Online???)
- Is there a deadline for doing so? (We are extremely busy at the moment, so if waiting until the new tax year doesn’t make much difference, it would be much more comfortable to deal with this over the next few months, rather than rushing around in the next few days)

- Currently any/all back to 2006
- Simplest way is to just send them a cheque.
- You have 10 days, until the 5th of April, to be able to pay pre-2017 years at their original cost. e.g. £13.25pw for 2006. From 6-Apr they'll all go up to £15pw. As a general rule the cost of voluntary NICs is frozen for two years after the year they are for and then goes up, and you can only pay them at all for up to six years afterwards. The current ability to be able to fill gaps back to 2006 is an exception, as part of the transition to the new state pension.

For more information on all the above see https://www.gov.uk/voluntary-national-insurance-contributions and the follow on pages, and the pages they all link to.

kenpoken
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Re: gaps in NI record

#210621

Postby kenpoken » March 27th, 2019, 10:50 am

Many thanks McFool

Your reply is very helpful!

A follow-on question, if I may:

We prefer to pay our voluntary NICs for gap years by online banking (my wife does not even have a cheque book). In the pages you kindly sent the link for, they say we should include a reference number in the online banking payment.
They say: "For one-off payments, your number will be 18 characters beginning with 60"
They say we can find our reference number on our bill. But we don't have a bill!

Do you know how we can find our reference number?

Sorry for the trivial question, but I am concerned how they will identify our payment as what it is intended to be.

Thanks again
Ken

goRt
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Re: gaps in NI record

#210627

Postby goRt » March 27th, 2019, 10:57 am

kenpoken wrote:Many thanks McFool

Your reply is very helpful!

A follow-on question, if I may:

We prefer to pay our voluntary NICs for gap years by online banking (my wife does not even have a cheque book). In the pages you kindly sent the link for, they say we should include a reference number in the online banking payment.
They say: "For one-off payments, your number will be 18 characters beginning with 60"
They say we can find our reference number on our bill. But we don't have a bill!

Do you know how we can find our reference number?

Sorry for the trivial question, but I am concerned how they will identify our payment as what it is intended to be.

Thanks again
Ken


I had to ring them up the other day to get mine, set some time aside in your diary for that call!
Couldn't tell me how I could have got the number myself.

DeepSporran
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Re: gaps in NI record

#210663

Postby DeepSporran » March 27th, 2019, 12:11 pm

Post #11 by ‘sledgehead’ in this MoneySavingExpert thread:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/sh ... tributions

tells you how to work out the reference, but to be honest, I think it would be safer to check with HMRC or just send a cheque with covering letter specifying the years you want to pay and your NI number. That’s what I did a couple of months back and it seemed to work fine. I could see my online NI record and pension forecast updated a few weeks later.

JohnB
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Re: gaps in NI record

#210671

Postby JohnB » March 27th, 2019, 12:26 pm

If you are 50, like me, you'll probably have 2 years for when you were in full time school education 16-18. You won't for when you were a student, unless you worked and paid NI.

orangepekoe
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Re: gaps in NI record

#210676

Postby orangepekoe » March 27th, 2019, 12:33 pm

Yes ring them up. They will talk you through the sensible course of action for your circumstances.

The phone lines are very busy. When I phoned during the day last week it wouldn't even put me in the queue of calls, but later at about 7pm I got straight through.


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