Baz

Hi All,

Just a quick query, my wife and i have pensions we paid into in the UK (police & nurse), having recently moved to the Gold Coast, and conscious of sky rocketing property prices, we were wondering if anyone knows if your able to bring your UK pension over to Oz, and cash it in? We basically want to put it into our savings account for a house.

Is anyone aware of any companies which will take care of this for you so its easy to do?

Cheers - Baz

Pulaski

The UK rules on transferring pensions overseas, using ROPS aka QROPS, are specifically designed to make it impossible to cash out British pension savings prior to bona fide retirement. Therefore anyone/organization which would do such a thing necessarily engages in some sort of fraud.

As a secondary point, I believe anyone who cashes out pension savings prematurely, is, er, not making a prudent choice.

quiltman

As Pulaski says, it is now very difficult to transfer pension funds overseas. Your problem may, I believe, be that you both appear to have what the UK government classes as "government pensions" -and these as I understand it cannot be converted to cash value to transfer overseas. You usually get a lump sum based on your pension, plus in some cases can commute a further part of the fund value to cash. My BIL was a copper for 30 years and retired about 4 years ago - he got a lump sum and commuted another few thousand so he got a reduced pension but meant he could buy his retirement home in Lanzarote!. You would need to ask the holders of your pension funds what you can and cannot do with the funds. Also, be aware that as they appear to be government pensions they are generally excluded from double Taxation Treaties and are taxed in the UK - you would need to check with HMRC the situation re Australia.HMRC have on their website a list of what are classed as government pensions and it's worth checking as SOME nurses pensions are NOT so classed. I'll see if I can find the links later as I'm not on my main 'puter at the moment.

Baz

Thanks for the replies guys, looks like we will have to consider 'Plan B' to raise funds for the house (and I'm not sure what that is yet!)