When you retire, you should be able to withdraw part of your accrued pension capital once: this has been agreed in the pension agreement. In fact, this scheme should have come into effect as early as 2021. But it has since been postponed several times. According to Minister Schouten, the current target date of 1 July 2023 is also not feasible – 1 January 2024 may well be, although she does not want to commit to that.
What is it actually about?
According to the agreement, you could suddenly take up a maximum of 10 percent of your accrued pension on your retirement date. You can spend this freely, for example on the repayment of your mortgage or a camper. However good that may sound, pension funds and insurers warned against implementation problems. In addition, differences arise in taxation, depending on the time in the year that you receive the benefit and at what rate it is taxed. Finally, the benefit can have consequences for, for example, the health care or rent allowance, so that sometimes only 20 percent of the amount remains.
Why is this so complicated?
The withdrawal is not standard, but a maximum of 10 percent. As a future retiree you can, for example, also opt for a different percentage or amount – as long as it is less than 10 percent of your pension capital. Pension funds and insurers must inform everyone well in advance about the consequences of their choice. For example, about tax consequences - especially now that the averaging scheme is no longer valid - and the possibility that supplements will be canceled in full or in part. But it is difficult to provide enough information if you do not know every detail of the applicant's personal situation.
Calculations show that people with lower incomes sometimes only keep 20 percent of their one-off benefit. And that is of course not the intention of the scheme. So it will take some time before the regulation is in place and functions properly. This again proves that it is very easy in politics to shout something that makes people happy, but that the actual implementation is much more difficult.
More information
Do you have questions about your pension accrual or do you want to discuss what a withdrawal of your pension capital would mean for your situation? Feel free to contact our pension experts. We are available every working day from 8.30:17.00 a.m. to XNUMX:XNUMX p.m sc@unie.nl en 0345 851 963.
