Check your pension when your working life changes

You have good reason to be excited when you get your first job with a pension scheme. If you start saving early, it could easily mean that you have half a million or a million kroner to spend in retirement.

Generally, you will also have insurance through your pension scheme, which provides financial security for you and your family if you become ill or die before you retire.

When you get your first pension scheme with AP Pension, there are several things to consider: How well insured do you need to be? How should your pension savings be invested? You will automatically be offered a meeting with your pension adviser – and it is a good idea to accept that offer.

A new job generally means that you also get a new pension scheme. However, some of your insurance policies through the old scheme will often continue for a period of time and so you will not be financially insecure if something happens to you.

When you get a new pension scheme, you can choose to leave your previous savings or transfer them to the new pension company. Whether or not it is an advantage for you to leave your savings where they are is an individual decision. This may depend, among other things, on the amount of your savings and what you pay in costs. If you want to keep all your insurance cover at AP, it is a condition that you continue contributions to AP through your new employer.

Regardless of whether you switch to or from AP Pension, you will contacted about your options as a matter of course.

If you resign and money no longer goes into your scheme, AP Pension will contact you. You will then have to decide what should happen to your scheme, including whether you want to keep some of your insurance policies for a period of time and pay for them out of your total savings.

If you are no longer making contributions to your scheme through an employer, you cannot keep the insurance policies that are tax-free in the event of a payout. This applies to the cover in the event of critical illness, and it may also be necessary to change your scheme if you want to keep your death insurance.

If you are posted abroad for a period of time, this will affect your pension scheme. As a rule, if you are liable for tax in a country other than Denmark, you cannot deduct your pension contributions. On the other hand, payouts are tax-free when you return to Denmark.

In concrete terms, this means you will get a new pension savings scheme to which you make contributions while you are posted abroad. When you return home to your job in Denmark, you will start making contributions to your “old” savings again, while the savings from your posting will generally remain in a separate scheme.

While you are posted abroad, you will continue to be covered by your insurance policies through the pension scheme.