Money expert Martin Lewis has stressed the importance of keeping your old paperwork after a woman boosted her pension payments by a bumper 20%.
Speaking on the latest episode of The Martin Lewis Podcast on BBC Sounds and Spotify, Martin took a call from a woman, Jan, who managed to boost her pension by a bumper 20% just by digging out some old payslips.
She told Martin how she realised once she started drawing her NHS pension when she hit retirement age that the amount she was being paid was wrong.
Jan hit pension age in 2022, and when the NHS pension service contacted her with her projection, she told them that they hadn’t made the right calculation.
The NHS told her that it had, and stuck to its guns. The NHS scheme at the time promised a pension based on ‘your best 12 months’ pay’, and because she had left the NHS and then later returned after having children to a lower paying job, the system had taken the lower paying job as the basis for the calculation, incorrectly.
Having realised the issue, Jan appealed, and the appeal was rejected. But she then found that the NHS had only sent them her last year of payslips.
She then dug out a box at the back of the wardrobe and found her old payslips from 1990 to 1992, and this gave her the evidence to go back and prove the pension calculation was incorrect.
She added: “The adjudicator said yep you’re right, they’re wrong, and my pension was uprated by 20%.”
Martin replied: “20%! Wow. That’s real money. How wonderful.”
She continued: “I’d only been working for eight years but it makes quite a lot of difference when you’ve got a small pension.
“I’m not very good at keeping paperwork but I did put those payslips in a folder in a box at the back of the wardrobe. I’ve moved house, I’ve had children, but I still knew where to find that box so I was feeling quite pleased with myself.”
Martin said: “So I tend to talk about this, my whole thing is, people always ask me how long do you keep paperwork for, and the official rule is, whether it’s four or six years depending on your circumstances. My answer is you keep the important stuff forever, it doesn’t have to be paper, you can take a photo and digitise it, you don’t actually need the cupboard in the back of the wardrobe.
“Although if you choose to do it that way, that’s absolutely cool.
“I wrote a blog way back in 2010 where I said, we don’t know what the future misselling scandals will be, and lack of paperwork because modern data protection says firms should not be keeping more data than they need on you, so often they get rid of old data, but that’s a crucial thing you need to prove your case.”