Good to hear that, thank you. The problem with the TPS is that they cannot do this kind of analysis and presentation as it is verging on 'advice' and they are forbidden from doing that.

I agree which is why I started this series, though I do have some sympathy with them. The legislation on financial guidance is tricky and so they have to be ultra conservative on what and how they describe it. I'm not an adviser just an ex-maths/IT teacher who believes the explanations can be simpler. Thank you for your feedback.

Thank you for your kind words. 1) Lump sum payments. There are three flexibilities, this video expresses my opinion (remember I am not a qualified financial adviser) that the additional pension is better value than the faster accrual. The third, early buy-out, which I have looked into briefly, is trickier to assess because you can only choose to use it in the first 6 months of joining the scheme and then you pay the extra for the rest of your career - there is no lump sum payment option. It's something I intend to look at a bit more as the McCloud changes mean that everyone will be starting the career average scheme again in April 2022 and so the 6-month limit on opting to do this will also open again. 2) Having a break...or retiring before taking the pension...is certainly possible. I did this but I also run my own business so I have alternative sources of income to tide me over before I reached the minimum pension age. Taking time out of the career average scheme will mean that the CA pension will stop being increased, other than inflation. For example, if you were on a salary of £57k then each year adds £1k to the CA pension. If you stop at 52 then the CA pension will stay at the amount built up at that point, increasing only through inflation. So, the basic amount will be around £5k less if you don't work for 5 years. There is a slight added extra reduction due to the fact you also won't be getting the 1.6% bonus increase above inflation that is paid every year that you stay in the scheme on the amounts already built up. Interestingly though if you did leave at 52 but returned to do a TPS-eligible role with a school for even just one day before you were 57 then the pension built up at 52 would get that 1.6% above inflation increase for all of the missing years. (The limit is 5 years before coming back loses this bonus).

@@dfountain Thank you so much for your reply. Lots of food for thought! I’m working on building up my index fund portfolio at the moment so that would be what I would cost on at 52 but ‘losing’ that £5000 is not something to be taken lightly. The idea of coming back to work for one day to make it match inflation is interesting. I think I would probably avoid the break but I am aiming to take the early retirement. I find these thought experiments very interesting. Looking forward to the next video.

Just to be clear your existing pension isn't 'losing' £5k rather that by not paying in to it you are not increasing it by £1k a year. If you left and went to work elsewhere and joined their pension scheme that would be in place of the £1k per year you could have added to the TP scheme.

Thank you and good luck with your planning.

I'm afraid there is a limit on how much you can add from the combination of all these flexibilities, so doing two of them won't let you build up any more in total -the limit is current £8,500's worth of annual pension. However, if you started before March 2012 you do currently have the option to purchase a similar amount of additional pension in the final salary scheme - see "retrospective additional pension"

@@dfountain Hours after posting, I realised this too! However, as it is always rising, it is a difficult target to reach, bar making a lump sum. The advantage of taking a two-pronged approach is that the 1.6% bonus is maintained, admittedly at slightly greater cost. Keep up the great work that you do.

www.teacherspensions.co.uk/forms/flexibilities.aspx You have to pay either with a lump sum or over a period of "years". As such you might want to work out how much you need to pay between now and 5 April and then juggle the monthly payments etc to get them to add up to the amount you need to pay to avoid paying the 40% income tax. Remember there are other pension products available outside the TPS - hence the need, I would suggest, for getting properly qualified financial advice.

Just to echo what David was saying, I’d definitely look at other products before paying more into the TPS. I have an S&S ISA and a SIPP to give me flexibility on access to my cash.

A good point, I did look at making a comparison using the 12 month option to see the difference a year made but there isn't much difference between the 12 month purchase of AP and the lump sum. Longer periods would be more problematic to compare as the amount you pay for the AP isn't increased by inflation each year but the FA is based on a % of your income so will change. So whilst the AP amount bought will increase by inflation each year the FA gets a similar increase as your pay rises BUT then costs more. Selecting the non-family benefit does make it cheaper but, imo, by a very small amount. Given that anything could happen in the, hopefully, years if not decades, between buying the AP and accessing it I'd take that risk.

Yes, reductions apply to AP if taken early.

Glad it was helpful!

No way to answer that as they have different risk factors. The AP is a pretty- much guaranteed return because the rules do not depend on anything other than the inflation figures and how long you live for. The AVC is a market based product so could do very well or not. Also, once you have "bought" the AP your money has gone and "you" own the promise to pay you - if you die before that the Government has to fulfil that promise then very little is handed on to a partner or dependent children, whereas with the AVC the fund can be.

If you buy £250 of additional pension now then when you take the pension at 68 it will pay out the inflationary equivalent of £250 a year for the rest of your life. So, about £21 a month.

@@dfountain So I am paying in £2512 (over a year) so that I keep the value of that £250 in 25 years time?

Yes, the key advantage to the TP is the full index-linking. The scheme was designed before the Government opened up the other type of pension funds so that you no longer have to buy an annuity with them and that can be more attractive if you want to keep access to the capital. Once you've paid into the TP you only have the promise of the annuity. If you were to buy an annuity instead the same is true but as you no longer have to do that it's no longer such a clear cut distinction.

Not only is it protected against general inflation through indexing, you get Income Tax relief in your contributions! If you saved the money in an ISA, the money going in would be post-tax and is then not indexed linked. However, the money coming out would be from income Tax. You could set up a SIPP, but the returns are not guaranteed and they are not indexed linked. I suspect that matching the TPS scheme with a DC/money purchase scheme would be next to impossible, at least not without having to take huge risks.

Thank you for letting us know. Good to hear your calculations come to a similar conclusion regarding the FA versus AP. I have done some work on the EBO and found it very similar in value to the AP, BUT with no benefit to surviving dependents should you die before them.

I know it's way off topic, apologies, but the idea that you will be teaching in anything like the same way as now in the mid 2060s is unthinkable. Changes are already happening that will make the world of work and notably teaching unrecognisable by then. Looking that far ahead at your pension might not be worthwhile? For someone much older. like me, however, this video of David's is very useful indeed and I'm grateful for the work he's put in.

Yes, working on even the smallest contract gets the 1.6% bonus on top of inflation. You can even have a complete break from teaching and so long as you come back to the scheme within 5 years you get the 1.6% bonus for all the intervening years as well. However, that 1.6% bonus still takes many years to catch up to the better value AP gives you initially. By my calculations you need to work continuously (or with breaks of less than 5 years) into your mid to late 60s for FA to be better value.

I would switch to buying additional pension rather than the faster accrual based on the figures I went into here. You can do your own calculations. Work out how much you add in a year using the FA option, the difference between 1/57th and whatever rate you are doing, and then see how much it would cost to buy that amount of additional pension using the 12 month instalment plan. However, all of the ways of buying extra TP are nowhere near the value of the "normal" amount you are paying for...there simply isn't a way to make up for missing years for the same cost that you would have been able to get at the time.

If you have savings from your time abroad or by other means, eg an inheritance, you might want to consider paying for an additional pension, a faster accrual and if you have not used your Pension Annual Allowance in full, maybe even an AVC or a SIPP too! It would cost you a packet, but you would end up getting lashings of income Tax relief, so it would not cost quite as much as would appear at first. Another thought is that you ought to call Future Pensions to discuss if you have missing years of NI contributions and whether it is worth buying off any gaps in your past. Teaching used to be contracted out, so, like me, you may need more than 35 years to get the full State pension; I need 38! That you were abroad makes me think that you will have a gap there. If you get this looked into well before March 31st 2025, you can go back far, far longer than the usual six years, but only six years after that date. My advice is that you call them when they open at 8am, as the queues get longer as the day marches on.

Glad it was helpful!

Yes, it is different. An AVC is a defined contribution pension scheme. You pay in and that money is invested and grows (or not) and you can have access to it once you reach the minimum pension age. At that time you can use it to buy an annuity or take out either in one go or bit by bit until it is gone. When you purchase AP you are, in effect, buying an annuity directly without going through the building up of a pension pot of money and then shopping around to get the best deal.

Yes, a payment into the TP for additional pension lowers your "taxable income" that is used for that assessment. I would probably suggest doing the monthly instalment method rather than the lump sum option though as the scheme is set up for automatic tax relief on the monthly instalment route but not for lump sum payments. Doing this means your taxable income is reflected in your ordinary pay slip and end of year P60.

Hi. Sorry if a daft question… Does the same logic apply to national insurance? So any price quoted on TPS website would be either 30% (income tax 20% and NI 10%) or 50% (IT 40% and NI 10%) less in terms of impact on take home pay? That’s before factoring in child benefit repayments. Thanks in advance

Afraid there is very little information out there as yet regarding the "retrospective purchase of additional pension": See this page which tells us we will have 6 months FROM the date the RSS is issued (not from October 2023): www.teacherspensions.co.uk/members/scheme-changes/transitional-protection/key-changes/retrospective-additional-pension.aspx However, the form they link to on this page is NOT a dedicated form for such a purchase but just the current "Career Average" form. When I questioned this I was told to use this form but attach a covering letter indicating that I was seeking to buy AP in the final salary scheme retrospectively! Sent it off last week but no idea how they are going to handle it. I did include several questions on this with regard to what the cost would be for me back in 2016 (the date I considered purchasing it), how much interest would need to be added to the costs and what the current value of an AP block would be now once the annual Pensions Increase was included. One thing I would note though is that there is a statement you have to affirm on the form that clearly states that "I confirm that I am not using money received from any pension arrangements to purchase this flexibility", so your plan to do this with money from a private SIPP may have to be reconsidered. However, what you should be able to do, once you re-join, is apply to TRANSFER the SIPP to the TPS and this, in effect, "buys" additional pension. It wouldn't use the tax-free lump sum part of the SIPP as the right to take that tax-free amount will be held in the TP as well as the SIPP. You would have a time limit from re-joining the TPS of 12 months to complete the transfer. You cannot buy the current Career Average Additional Pension until you re-join the scheme, but you will be able to do that at any point whilst you are in. There is no time limit to doing this.

As always, thank you. I'd found the same form and was a bit baffled by the reference to Career Average at the top as you point out! Noted re the information re Transfer of the SIPP. I may just apply for early pension actuarially reduced (again, another odd form where it asks me to get my employer to complete a section - which of course I no longer have). All a minefield so your advice always helps so much. @@dfountain

@@dfountain fyi an interesting conversation with TP today who were adamant that the option to buy additional pension retrospectively in the FS scheme was not possible but only as a supposed ‘new’ member to the CA scheme. Seems to contradict their own website!

They have now added a form to make the application, and I have, as a deferred member, had my application responded to with the costs involved! www.teacherspensions.co.uk/-/media/documents/member/applications/miscellaneous/apb-december-2023-v18-fs.ashx

For a 21 year-old the cost for buying £250 is £1720. So, roughly 7 years to get the value back.

@@dfountain thanks, i've decided to do buy out of 3 years instead, and maybe additional lump sum rather than FA in the future

That is also an interesting comparison. The early buy out is very similar in value to the "additional pension", possibly slightly better but it does lack any enhancement for your partner should you die before them.

Not something I'd considered as my gut feeling was that the other option, getting AP in the FS scheme, would be better value...but now you raise it I do suppose that you would be able to put it into another pension and, so long as you are paying income tax at the same rate as you were, then you'd get the same tax relief from your new scheme. The whole question of how income tax would be handled has not been clarified yet.

This isn't a question I am qualified to answer. I am not a financial adviser and this really moves away from simply explaining how the scheme works into proper "financial advice". That said I do have some thoughts on how to proceed.. 1) Speak to a financial adviser ;) 2) Make the comparisons for yourself. Find out how much it would cost to buy a comparable annuity, that is one that is full index-linked, not capped, and that has dual-life coverage if you have a partner so that they would get part of the pension if you died before them. When I did this it was when annuity rates were lower than they are now, however I did find that buying such an annuity was a lot more expensive than buying AP - particularly if you are talking about buying "small" amounts (annuity rates are generally quoted in amounts per £100k of pension fund). 3) Consider the "loss" to your estate. If you pay for AP then the money you hand over is "gone", you've paid for the promise to pay YOU for life and so the money you hand over is no longer part of your estate and cannot be passed on after your death. The same can be said of a pension fund AFTER you've bought an annuity but up until you buy an annuity or use it via the drawdown options, it is still yours and CAN be passed on after your death. 4) If you are contemplating taking "early" retirement then consider a more hybrid approach. You can put money into a private pension and instead of buying an annuity or taking your pension immediately upon leaving teaching you can drawdown on the pension fund's capital to delay taking the TP. This will increase the annual amount the TP pays as it would be subject to a lower reduction factor as you leave it until closer to your normal pension age.

One other point I would raise with you is that if your school DOES leave the TPS then you are free to take the TPS pension whilst still working. If you waited until 60 you would be allowed to take the NPA60 final salary scheme in full without taking the career average part and could leave it until later should you so desire.

Really appreciate you spelling out some options. Sounds like I need to do some shopping around for comparison. Keep up the great work demystifying the TPS.

​@@jamienewportIf the independent school is going to leave the TPS to save money, that should ring alarm bells in my head that going forward the new pension scheme will not be as generous to its members. What should I do in such a situation? I should consider a faster accrual and an additional pension contribution, as much as I could sensibly afford. Then, if I really do not like the replacement pension, move to a school or college which allows TPS membership. I agree that paying for consultation with a qualified financial planner/adviser seems wise.

In such cases TPS will offer you the choice to accept the proportion of AP that you have already paid for OR to pay a lump sum to cover what would be the remaining payments.

Thanks for quick response David. That’s good news. The last piece of the jigsaw before I pull the trigger! Keep up the great work

Both would get the same actuarial reduction, so in that sense it doesn't change how they are compared. I believe that AP is better value than FA unless you have a career of over 30 years AFTER buying FA...this is due to the 1.6% bonus that FA gets each year that the AP does not and that means that going 5 years early will reduce the FA's value even more when making the comparison.

You take the additional pension at the same time as you take the other pension. If you do this it will be actuarially reduced. For instance, taking your NPA67 pension at 60 will give you 69.9% of it. So, instead of getting £250 you get 69.9% of £250 which is £174.75. Of course, you will still have paid the same amount for it so it will take more years to be paid back, but consider this; the 30 year old paid £2180. Divide that by £174.75 and it takes 12.5 years to get it back. 60 + 12.5 = 72.5. That means they have their money back before they reach 63. If they'd waited until 67 to take 100% of the £250 they wouldn't have got it all back until they reached 76.

@@dfountain very very interesting stuff. Thanks very much for your answer. I just want to say that your videos has taught me a lot and they have been the main reason I have just bought a considerable amount of additional pension. Thanks for your work putting all this together. I will be looking forward for any further video! Maybe some comparation between beefing up the pension and paying up the mortgage? Just an idea.

Great, always good to hear they have been useful. The one on comparing it to pensions is interesting and I did toy with the idea however, it's an area that strays out of the TPS and into general financial investments - with no qualifications in this area I don't feel comfortable putting my opinions out there. Unlike the mechanics of the TPS investing in property just depends on too many variables that are outside your control. Personally, I always looked to reduce my debts as fast as possible - the memory of interest rates going into double digits is a wound that ran deep.

​Having debts when inflation is high reduces the value of the debts. I suspect that when interest rates were high, inflation was higher. This is why those who invest in property want large mortgages, as I flstikn erodes the debt pile (as well as gearing their business).

Yes. The money will come out of your GROSS pay, before income tax is deducted. This means your pay will initially look as though it is £310 less but if you hadn't used it to buy the pension the Government would have taken 40% of it (£124) in income tax and left you with £186. The cost to you of getting £250 per annum added to your career average pension is £186. If, when you retire, your income is only in the 20% bracket you would be getting £200 a year after tax (index-linked of course)

@@dfountain

Thank you!

The reason no-one can tell you is because the DFE is still working out how they will change the regulations to comply with the legislation - and so no-one actually knows, yet! I doubt we will hear much about it until 2023 either. The legislation requires the scheme to offer at least one remedy but the way the legislation was discussed the intention is for them to offer a few alternatives. My understanding of those is that there should be these two options if you decide to go for the final salary remedy for 2015-2022: 1) You get a refund of the money you paid for the additional pension (plus inflation) 2) You continue to pay but the amount you have 'bought' will be converted from the career average scheme to an "equivalent" amount in the final salary scheme. By "equivalent" I don't mean it will be the same but will reflect what you could have bought in the final salary scheme for the same contribution.

If you were to buy additional pension now then you are, along with everyone else, in the career average scheme and so it will be based on that scheme. Only AP bought in the period 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022 will be eligible for the remedy. (Not that anyone has decided on what the remedy for AP will be yet)

The tax year runs from 6th April to 5th April so if your exam marking was in January then you have missed doing this for last year's tax year. Any payment into any pension scheme can take advantage of the tax relief so it doesn't have to be into the TPS, you can open a private pension. One of the difficulties (nice difficulty to have) is working out just how much needs to put into the scheme if all you want to do is gain relief on the 40% amounts. Putting in too much isn't a disaster as it just means some will only get the 20% tax relief but putting in too little will mean that you get taxed on 40% on a bit. Personally I'd open a private pension and then do the sums at the beginning of March so I could put in a lump sum to the private scheme. Doing this does mean dealing with HMRC to get the other 20% back. One thing to watch out for if you buy AP via the TPS with a lump sum is making sure you get the full tax relief...HMRC are not used to dealing with pension schemes that are NOT set up for automatic tax relief and whilst the TPS will give you the proper tax relief if you buy AP in instalments through your pay packet they don't if you buy the AP with a lump sum payment. See this video for more on that: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/apmehtOkprTMcpc.html

@@dfountain thanks David. I think I'm going to attempt to get AP via my employer to save hassle of getting extra tax relief back. I may have £4000;pay in the 40% tax band. Is there a straight forward to work out how much AP I need to buy? Cheers for replying. Clare

The flexibilities page is the one you want. A bit of a workaround to get what you want. I would enter my DOB, pick the basic £250 block and the 1 year option for payment. You can then double the block if it's too little, i.e. £2000 in total, or spread it over more years if it is too much, i.e. £8000. If it turns out that you cannot get close enough to the £4000 target spend then you can always open a private pension and put in the extra into it as well. Remember that if you start it now then you won't have the full 12 months to pay in before the next tax year.

First, please do remember that I am not a financial adviser just an ex-maths teacher. For the actuarial reduction, yes the calculators on the TPS website are fine...or at least I found nothing wrong with them. I did get fed up with having to flick back and forth between the schemes so I made my own that you can use: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MmQ1h1AwCoC5IggRdVai4L0aBu5j0subZHCkVe3JNOw/edit?usp=sharing The AR is the same for any additional pension. In purchasing AP the lump sum is a little cheaper but harder to get the tax relief sorted, primarily because HMRC take a while to be convinced that the scheme is not set up for automatic tax relief IF you buy AP with a lump sum. I explain this here: dfountain.co.uk/lump-in-the-throat/ Also, to get tax relief your wife would need to be earning over the amount you pay into the scheme - and don't forget the amount she is paying into the pension already (~10%)...there is also an annual limit of £40,000. If she were to pay it from her wages over 1, 2 or more years, then the tax relief is taken care of automatically - and it also makes it less likely that you would breach the annual £40,000 limit.

@@dfountain Thanks David, I really appreciate your suggestions. Next question - I put my wife's details into the TPS calculator with her current salary and it came up with a post 2015 figure of 26,749 with the slider on 67, I then moved the slider down to 58 and the figure dropped to 9,944. When I put the same figure into your Summary-Different Pensions sheet (B17) it only drops to 17,877 - am I missing something really obvious, possibly to do with the TPS current and projected final salary being the same? What I'm trying to get to is (I guess at todays rates), how much will £250 of additional pension actually be if taken at say age 55 or 58? Thanks.

Well...I have just been back to the calculator and it looks as though they have taken on board my major criticism of it and removed the inflationary increases. Now back to your query. I believe that when you moved the slider from 67 to 58 they will have removed 9 year's worth of contributions as well. My sheet doesn't add anything to the figures you put in...it is just based on what you have now and not what you would add if you worked on further. For instance, if you were on £57,000 a year and intended working another 5 years you'd need to add £5000 to the CA pension figure shown on your statement.

Thanks David, I see my mistake! I've told the wife to cancel the world cruise and get back to work! I'm now using the actual from her latest statement plus 1/57th of salary for each year I want to see in your sheet.

Bear in mind that your normal pension contribution is taken off before you work out your "taxable income". So, to get into the 40% tax bracket you would have to be on a gross salary of over £55,980 because the 10.2% pension contribution would result in that giving you £50,270 taxable income. If you are over that amount then paying monthly for AP will take care of the income tax because your payments for the AP come out of your monthly salary BEFORE income tax is calculated and so you get full relief on the 40%. This is called the "net pay" income tax relief method.

@@dfountain wow. Didn’t even know that. My gross is about 50,000 now so assumed I was on the 40% tax soon. So I don’t need to worry for quite a while then yet?

@@dfountain I saw another of your videos talk about the additional pension costing you less than the calculator says due to not being taxed on it. Is that correct? The TP site suggests I’d pay £110 a month on my chosen additional pension when spread over 10 years. Would that mean my takehome pay will be £-110 or is there some tax issue i dont white understand that will mean i dont pay the full 110? Sorry. Last q! Thanks so much for your help

@@dfountain one more maths q. Is it cheaper to buy £500 worth of additional for 5 years and then same again. (Rather than order £1000 worth spread over ten years)? Seems so on the calc but cannot figure out if of/why that would be correct

Exactly. On £50k gross you would be paying around £5k to the pension and so your taxable income will be in the region of £45k...under the £50,270 threshold for the 40% bracket. That is unless you have other income.

Glad it was helpful!

What will be interesting is how they address the transfer of those who have paid for Faster Accrual but who, on retirement, choose this period to be treated as Final Salary. There is no FA in the Final Salary scheme so the proposal is that it will be converted to Additional Pension anyway. I suggest you find out how much AP you would have got in the FS scheme for the same cost as you are currently paying for your FA...hold that in reserve so that you can ensure you get parity when the time comes!

Thank you for the comment. TP, to be fair, are much more restricted than I am. I am NOT a financial adviser and just an ex-teacher. As for AP, yes, I haven't ventured into the comparison between it and other investments because that would require a better understanding of financial products than I have - and something for which you'd need a 'proper' adviser for.

Yes, you can combine them - though there is a maximum limit for all combinations when added together. For 2021-2022 was £7,100. So you have £3,100 available to buy. This increases each year with inflation and the limit for 2022-2023 will rise to £7,300. Now, I am not sure if you get the full extra £200 allowance or if it is based on a percentage of how much of the limit you had previously purchased. There is one other element of the remedy coming that you may want to keep an eye on but I'm afraid that I strongly suspect that you won't be eligible. There is a part of the remedy that allows teachers to revisit their decision to opt out of the TPS after 1 April 2015. However, because this is based on the premise that such opt outs were triggered by the change from final salary to career average I think you may not be eligible for this as your opt out predates the change by quite some time.

@@dfountain Thank you David for your help. Your channel has helped me immensely. As I opted out in 2008, your are correct in that I would not be able to rectify my opt out decision. For now purchasing 16 units of additional pension will have do, I will also top up with faster accrual 1/45th though this must be applied for every financial year. My only worry is that the cost of additional pension is reviewed every 4 years, so as a result of the valuation the cost to me might increase, or decrease, lets hope for the latter. Is there anything else I could do to reduce shortfall? I have heard of AVCs but not really sure of how they work. For now additional pension and faster accrual will have to do, it will put my 5% pay increase this September to good use 😂

Bear in mind that I am not a financial adviser, just an ex-teacher. AVCs are just another name for a private pension. They are invested in the stock market and can go up and down in line with those investments whereas the amounts in the TP always go up with inflation. The costs for the AP in the TP are unlikely to change significantly as the cost corridors used apply not only to additional pension but also the main scheme and the Government are proposing altering them to make changes less likely.

@@dfountain Thank you David, I will just stick with AP and FA . The stock market is very volatile at the minute and for this reason along with the fact that the investment could decrease, I will give AVCs a no go.

The question of revaluation is an interesting one, something I will need to look into in more detail. In the meantime though I am interested in looking again at your motivation to do the faster accrual route rather than more additional pension. My calculations make the AP seem better value than FA and, if I understand this correctly, Faster Accrual is no less immune from changes following a revaluation than additional pension. You can pull out of purchasing either at any point and will be credited with the amounts already purchased in proportion to how much you have paid in up until that point. For example, roughly, if you bought £4k over 10 years and stopped paying in after 5 years you would get £2k.

Glad you liked it!

The year you pick should be one that you considered doing it at the time but were put off by the fact it would have to be in the new scheme. Picking the earliest date, April 2015, doesn't make sense to me as you would have been aware of the coming change at that time and just be doing it a month early could have paid into the scheme at that time. 2016 was the best for me because this WAS the time that I was looking into the scheme more closely, it just so happens that I think the inflation factors from that point - IF THEY ARE GOING TO BE USED - are good. I am still awaiting confirmation that the revaluation of the amount of AP bought will be made from the date it is being retrospectively purchased on.

Understood. From your experience with TPS, do you think a phone call would be worth a try to clarify how the retrospective AP will be calculated?

@@dfountain Hi David, have you heard from the TPS yet regarding whether the AP revaluation is being made from the date it is purchased for?

Hope it is useful, if you have any questions please do ask.

@@dfountain thank you. I am sure I will have one or two questions!! I plan to work through your videos at a slow pace. I think they are far more informative than the TPS website. Thank you.