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Changes to the minimum retirement age
The minimum retirement age is changing
On 6 April 2010 the minimum retirement age will increase from 50 to 55. The Government has decided to make this change as part of their pension reforms.
How this affects your customers
From 6 April 2010 your customers won’t be able to retire before the age of 55 (unless they’re retiring due to ill-health, or if they have a contractual right put in place before 6 April 2006 to retire before this age).
If any of your customers want to retire before the age of 55 they’ll have to complete the retirement process by 5 April 2010. This means that they’ll need to think about their retirement options now so they can get everything in place before the minimum age increases.
How this affects you
• Internal maturities – Aviva providing pension
For your customers using their Aviva pension policy to buy an Aviva annuity, we need to have all requirements by 1 April 2010.
If there’s any information missing after this date (e.g. HMRC Lifetime Allowance declaration) we won’t be able to set up the annuity and your customers will have to defer their retirement until at least age 55.
• Internal maturities – another company providing pension
For your customers using their Aviva pension policy to buy an annuity with another company we have to transfer the money to the new provider by 1 April 2010.
To make sure we can transfer the funds in time we must receive all requirements by 18 March 2010.
• External annuities
For your customers using funds from another provider to buy an Aviva annuity we must receive both the completed application form and the money by 1 April 2010.
• Annuity Quotes
We won’t be providing any pre age 55 quotes from mid-March 2010. This is because it usually takes about 6 weeks to complete the retirement process so there wouldn’t be enough time after this date for you to give us all our requirements by 1 April 2010.
However, we’ll do all we can to help you with any individual cases after this date, please contact your Aviva representative for more details.
What happens next?
We started writing to our pension customers back in October 2009 to tell them about the change and to explain how it could affect them. We’ll finish contacting everybody by the end of January 2010.
If you need anymore information or have any questions please contact your Aviva representative.
WA05044 02/2010
