Claiming Pension

I believe your pension would be worked out by AFPS as if you were getting it at 65. If you decided to take it at 55 then you would get less each month, because the 'fund' has to pay you for 10 years longer. I have heard that the pension payment is quite a bit less than you would get at 65. I'm the respondent in a divorce and the one with the pension and my thoughts on the whole pension sharing arrangement are that it must have been dreamt up by people who weren't actually going to have to decide whether or not to go for the option. one of the big disadvantages of pension sharing is that my pension would be reduced by the amount my wife gets as soon as the PS order comes into force. If my wife had ten years to go before getting her share, I would lose that money forever, even though my ex wife wasn't getting paid anything. And if my ex should die before me, my pension isn't reinstated to its original value. I don't think there are any good options out there for dealing with pensions under current law.

Looking again at the example :
Hope I'm not stating the obvious.
bear in mind me being rubbish at maths
Example - AFPS 05
A Servicewoman (salary of £20,000)
who has 15 years’ reckonable
service at the point of her divorce,
who is ordered to pay 50% (ie 71/2
years) of her pension accrued for
this period to her ex-husband, would
have her pension file annotated with
the amount of the sum to be debited
as a result of the Pension Sharing
Order. In this example the sum to be
debited is £2,143."
So at the date of divorce she has a pension worth 15 [years] x one seventieth of her annual salary at the date of divorce [£20k]so that's £4,285 a year and the non-member spouse gets 50% of that - an annual pension of £2,143 transferred to them?
With AFPS a pension credit member can't transfer out so it sits in the scheme index-linked to RPI - but the basis/AFPS pension promise will be a pension of £2143 a year with a bit added on for index-linking to the RPI to keep pace with inflation......
it looks as though the ex-spouse's pension credit income would be 50% of the total pension income at the point of divorce adjusted to account for RPI at the point of being paid to the pension credit member.
ie not much growth but at least keeping pace with inflation.
If you know the years of service and salary at the point of divorce and whether any years of service thresholds have been or are about to be passed - you can have a stab at working out a 50% share?

What the example doesn't show is what happens when the time comes to pay the pension credit member's pension - ie the adjustment for gender/age you're worried about.
in the example the AFPS member is female - so if her spouse is male - we don't know if they stick to paying the amount of annual income transferred - ie £2,143+ RPI additions or at the point of payment do they calculate a value/CETV for the pension and increase the payments for his shorter life expectancy and in your case reduce them?

Can you work out what his pension income would be if he could take it at the date of divorce penny - is he about to pass a pension increase/years of service threshold?

Are you an AFPS member leggo?

Xafinity Paymaster - AFPS's admin company - 2010 Newsletter on website:
Former Spouse Pension Credit Age. As a result of revised DWP regulations, pension credit members who are entitled to pension benefits as a result of a Pension Sharing Order, may now claim their pension from age 55, with effect from 06 April 09.
NB. Pensions are actuarially reduced to accommodate this revision.
Should any Former Spouse Credit Members wish to enquire about this option, they should write to The Pensions on Divorce Team at the SPVA address shown on page 1."

[as Principal Civil Service pension scheme admin Paymaster had a complaint against them about a basic error in pension sharing upheld by the Pension Ombudsman.]

"NB. Pensions are actuarially reduced to accommodate this revision."

it seems therefore that Peter@BDM is wrong to be confident that post 2009 AFPS pension credit members can take a full pension at age 55.

Really we're all just stumbling about in the dark aren't we?

Sorry that you got a raw deal from your pension share Maggie.

Re your previous post with the pension sharing example, Maggie. You say

"So at the date of divorce she has a pension worth 15 [years] x one seventieth of her annual salary at the date of divorce [£20k]so that's £4,285 a year and the non-member spouse gets 50% of that - an annual pension of £2,143 transferred to them?"

this is a very logical and commonsense assumption and on that basis I could, of course, work out roughly what pension I would get. I'm just not sure that the AFPS applies logic to the pension share though! Nowhere does it say that the amount debited to serviceperson is credited to the spouse. Furthermore, it would make the CETV/CEV irrelevant to the pension share calculations as it is always worked out on a percentage basis (as far as I am aware).

I assume all this 50% of someone else's pension only applies if you have no pension of your own? My partner's stbx has 20 years of civil service pension, has now given up her job because she doesn't like it and she keeps getting told off (not surprising- six months ago he was getting 50 odd texts a day from her when she was supposed to be working - if I was her boss I'd be telling her off too).

Anyhoo - says she has seen the size of his CEV (oo err missus!!) from his army pension and has decided I can keep him, he can keep her and the kids and as she won't have much of a pension she'll have half of that too.

I so mad I can't think straight, surely the court won't see it that way?

50:50 works both ways. He has half of what she has and vice versa. In real life this would be reflected as a less than 50% share of his pension but 50% of the joint pension pot. It would be hard to work out what exactly this means though as there are all sorts of adjustments to be done depending on the type of pension and gender - women cost more to fund in retirement because they last longer as a rule. That's the kind of stuff you need an actuary for ...

Hadenoughnow