There has been no indication that Brexit will remove the rights that non-British workers have to state pension entitlements they have built up here.
The new version of the state retirement plan says that you qualify if you have worked and paid national insurance for 10 years or more. This does not have to have been ten qualifying years in a row.
The amount you receive will be based on the number of qualifying years at the point you retire. You can find out how much state pension you may get by requesting a state pension statement from the government’s website.
Most UK expat pensioners are now having to live off an income that is worth 20% less than it was in the Christmas before the Brexit referendum. The findings come from Equiniti, which handles pension payments for more than 60,000 expat pensioners, most of whom are receiving their pensions in the Eurozone.
With market uncertainty and Brexit woes, these expat pensioners have seen the value of their income dropping by 3% over the past 12 months. That’s in addition to the 17% fall in the year following the referendum to make up a 20% overall reduction headache. And with Eurozone inflation running at 1.5%, expat pensioners are beginning to feel the pinch.
It’s not just British expats in the Eurozone struggling since expat retirees in other parts of the world have also seen the pound’s slide affect them with those in the US worse off by 10%, while in New Zealand, Australia and Canada British expats are 14% worse off. Expat pensioner incomes have also fallen in South Africa by 15% and in Jamaica by 4%.
Expat pensioners are at the behest of the currency exchange ROLLER-COASTER and anyone hoping to retire overseas will have had their plans derailed by currency fluctuations and the Brexit vote.
He added that British pensioners heading overseas for retirement should appreciate the impact of any currency exchange rate movements on their budgeting and he urged them to shop around to find the best currency rates and transaction costs.
Withdrawal Agreement would include a commitment to social security co-ordination:
28. Social security coordination rules set out in Regulations (EC) No 883/2004 and (EC) No 987/2009 will apply. Social security coordination rules will cover Union citizens who on the specified date are or have been subject to UK legislation and UK nationals who are or have been subject to the legislation of an EU27 Member State, and EU27 and UK nationals within the scope of the Withdrawal Agreement by virtue of residence. Those rules will also apply, for the purposes of aggregation of periods of social security insurance, to Union and UK citizens having worked or resided in the UK or in an EU27 Member State in the past.
