Save into your pension while you can

Fiddling with pension tax relief could be a nice little earner for a government hungry for cash, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Save what you can while you can.

916_MW_P03_Merryn

Pension tax fiddles could be a rich source of revenue for the Treasury
(Image credit: 2018 Getty Images)

Like most other readers, I hate doing my tax return. I put it off until the last possible minute (or until I start to worry that my promises to my accountant that I am on the case are beginning to sound like lies). But this year the whole admin nightmare is gearing up to be even worse than usual. That's because, thanks to a mixture of enthusiastic pension-saving (I'm not as young as I was and that scares me) and a missing bit of admin, I have gone over my annual contribution allowance (which has fallen from £255,000 in 2010 to £40,000 for most people now, and a miserly £10,000 for high earners). And that means that I have to pay a (very difficult to calculate) tax penalty via my self-assessment form.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.