Pensions made easy thanks to Pension The Pennies

by Startacus Admin

Saving for a pension hopefully just became a whole lot easier! Pension The Pennies is a Welsh startup that's on a mission to help eliminate the barrier to entry for private pensions

Many of us have some degree of concern about our pension - will the retirement age be changed yet again, will the amount be changed, what cuts will affect it, will it be enough to actually live on? Of course, for many others, a pension is something that doesn’t need to be worried about until they’re in their 60s, and if they think about it at all, the questions are what’s an annuity and am I really going to be taxed on my own pension?

And then, of course, there are the people who can’t afford a private pension but don’t have a steady job paying into a pension for them. Like the self-employed entrepreneurs most likely reading this. There is no one thing that can help with every question and every worry about pensions, but perhaps there’s something that can make things a bit more straightforward, simple, and affordable.

Caerphilly-based fintech startup Pension the Pennies has built a platform to help eliminate the barrier to entry for private pensions, something that can otherwise be too expensive to get for people on low or inconsistent incomes. Unfortunately, these are the same people who will have insubstantial regular pensions, or none at all.

The way it works is very simple: the app connects to your bank card and every time you spend anything that isn’t a round number, the app rounds up to the nearest pound and adds that amount to your pension.

So, for example, if you buy a £3.20 lunch, the app will take the 80p and add it to your pension. If you do that 5 times a week, you would end up adding about £208 to your pension every year on that one purchase alone. But it doesn’t have to round up to the nearest pound, because one important aspect of the app is the control you have over it. You can have it round up to 50p, £5, or any custom amount that you choose. You can also tell it to stop adding to your pension if your bank balance hits a certain amount, and manually pause it at any time.

In late July, Pension the Pennies was shortlisted for the Great British Entrepreneur Awards’ Disruptor of the Year. Simultaneously, the startup is a finalist for the Wales Start Up Awards, for which the finals will be held in September.

Particularly for many of the entrepreneurs who frequent our own website, an app that so simply adds to a pension could be huge, and we look forward to seeing what comes next.

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• #pensions
• #finance
• #fintech
• #
• #wales

Published on: 2nd August 2020