It took 10 years, three ex's, two countries, and living with my mother for a bit, but I finally paid it all off.
Ask me how I feel. The guy who took my final payment on the phone was happier than I was
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Wow, good tips thank you. I guess I'll start paying more into my pension. My pension is currently tied to my workplace, and I've always been wary of paying into it more just in case I can't take it with me if I work elsewhere.
Is that the case? Can I take my company pension with me? Or that just stays in the company and I can't take it with me when I work somewhere else
Most people have standard defined contribution pensions now. You can probably log into some pension companies site and see how much you have in there?
If that's the case, then it's your money (locked away u til retirement) that you can move to any pension provider you like.
You can ask your company to pay some of your salary into there - therefore you don't get taxed on that bit of new salary (they might also match your contribution if you are lucky)
You can also just open a pension with another provider and pay money in. You will (eventually) get a bonis 20/40% tax refund paid in there too.
To be honest I'm no expert on the possibilities so I'm not going to be able to answer that other than to maybe reach out to your HR people and ask for some details on what your options are. Or ask on r/UKPersonalFinance.
thesalarycalculator.co.uk is a good site if you wanna compare how different scenarios affect your take home pay. E.g. put your salary in with student loan ticked for plan 1 and your pension contributions at their current level, then note the take home pay per month. Then do the same but with student loan not ticked, to see how much that increases your take home. Then experiment with upping the pension contributions until the take home pay matches the value you were getting before you took the student loan off. That'll give you an idea of how much you can increase your pension contributions without noticing a difference in your monthly pay. Then head over to one of the various pension calculator sites (Aviva is decent and simple) and see how much bigger your pension pot could end up if you do that. Will probably be quite substantial!