Can I take my pensions out now?

Hello everybody,

I am wondering if I can take my pensions out now. I am on non income based benefits only and so that’s DLA and contributions based ESA.

Being non income based I think I can draw out my pensions without affecting the benefits, am I correct?

The reason I want to do it is because I have three small pensions and all in my name. My husband is the beneficiary if I die or go gaga. Because I have epilepsy as well as MS I am getting more and more useless at dealing with things so I want to get these pensions into joint savings accounts where hubby can access them easily if anything happens to me.

I don’t need nor want to spend the money but I want to get them in my husbands control in case he needs them in the future.

My plan is not to pay tax on them so I will draw out 25% as a tax free lump sum and the rest over the next few years as lump sums keeping the withdrawals below my tax code.

Is that doable?

Flo

The ESA could be affected depending on how much pension is received. My pension is too high so I don’t get anything financially from my contribution ESA - just maintains my NI stamp

Neil

Hello if you want your hubby or your family to have access to your money you should get power of attorney your hubby could just have it or your children can have it if anything happens to you or yourself. When my dad passed away it was easy for my mum to sort out the money in banks etc, but if anything had happened to my mum it wouldn’t be easy to get to the money that she has for her funeral. So I now power of attorney for my mum which makes things a lot easier. You can have up to four people on the paper or just your self, I would though have your children.

Hubby has got power of attorney but to be honest about him, he’s not the brains of Britain and he hasn’t got a clue. Even though we went to a solicitor and she sorted it out for us, he still doesn’t understand what it is.

To be blunt, he’s too dim and needs it done for him. It’s because he can’t understand these things I want to get it sorted now.

I thought contributions based ESA wasn’t means tested.

You lose 50p of ESA for every £1 of pension over £85 a week.

1 Like

Hello Anon,

It took me a huge amount of googling and I have never found this out for myself. I ended up doing a fake benefit check on Entitledto and it concluded that I’m entitled to ESA but at around £5.50 a week lower than I get now so this sounds right.

I was about to say the same thing. If your worry is that you may be unable to cope the POA is important. There are 2 types:

financial where you are nominating someone to act for you if you are incapacitated; and health, where you nominate someone to make decisions if you are incapable ie, if you need to go into a home. I’ve done both. Like Anon, I dealt with the death of a parent and it makes you doubly determined to sort stuff out for your kids!

POA is so easy to do on the .Gov site.

Wife just did both types for her father who has recently gone into a care home.

Even though we have a Will and our son is Beneficiary we are going to also get a POA set up for him so that he can deal with our “stuff” more easily on our death/illness .

You just never know what’s around the corner

We didn’t use a solicitor I went on the website it’s cheaper that way. I think it was about £82.00

Another thing is that you can not be bankrupted.

Kay