Martin Lewis is urging people to check if they can add as much as £74,000 to their state pension – but only if you’re the right age.
The money saving expert returned to ITV on Tuesday with another slate of top financial advice, including a bombshell warning on state pensions.
Martin explained on ITV1 and ITVX how the deadline is fast approaching to buy back missing National Insurance years in your history.
Because the amount you get in your state pension depends on how many years of National Insurance contributions you have on record, if you’re missing years from your record you could boost your state pension massively by buying them back.
For every £800 you could add £6,100 per year to your pension pot, Martin told his viewers.
And how worthwhile it is will increase as you get closer to retirement age. If you’re over 45 – so born after 1979 – it ‘probably isn’t worth doing’ unless you have large gaps in your NI history.
Martin told his viewers: “If you have gaps between 2006 and 2018, you need to think about this this year because you can only do it until next April.
“If you’re nearly at the state pension age it’s easy to see, it’s pretty obvious that you should be buying them.
“The older you are, the more likely you should be. If there are no gaps after 2019, then you could buy those so you could wait and see.
“If you’re under 45 this probably isn’t worth doing, unless you’ve got very cheap partial years, if you’ve got a year available for £16 just go and buy it because it’s so cheap just in case you miss years in the future because it’s so cheap for what it could be worth.
“You need a minimum 10 years to get a state pension so a warning here.
“IF you’ve only got three years, and you’ve got three years missing, there’s no point buying those three years because you’ll still only be on six years and you still won’t get the state pension.
“If however you’re on nine years and you can buy a year, suddenly you’ll have 10/35ths of your pension and it will be massively lucrative, worth £3,000 a year for £800. So if you’ve got very limited years it could either be very lucrative or not lucrative.”