this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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me_irl
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Why do those private pensions not amount to anything?
I didn't get the benefit of a final salary pension. I have also not worked long enough at any particular company to really benefit from a big pot. The longest I've worked for one company is ten years, I think the company was paying in as little as possible. When I looked at a forecast for the pay out from that one, it was about £100 a month.
You should consolidate those 4 pensions into one pot and take more control of it. There's an extremely high chance that the employer provided pension is performing poorly and not growing as fast as it could be. They pick the lowest risk by default so growth is massively stunted.
It's pretty easy to open an account on something like vanguard and transfer those pensions in, you can then have control over how that money is invested - usually they make you pick a "risk factor" where highest risk has highest potential growth and lowest has lowest potential for crashing, but the TL;DR is over a 15 year period even if there's a crash you'll come out on top because it averages out.
Essentially what I'm saying is pool your pensions together and pick the highest risk factor for the next 8-10 years, it's a bit of a gamble but it's a better chance of that pot growing into something actually useful than you have right now.