Dear LPG,

I am not quite a pensioner but I feel that there must be quite a few LPG readers who suddenly find themselves caring for a family member in the way that I did, and they might need to hear my message today.

In my case it was my husband.  He was a bit older than me, twelve years in fact, and he gradually began to develop quite a few different illnesses, but I think that dementia was the factor that caught up with him in the end. 

Ever since we were married, we always kept our taxes and the like separate. I used to work full time when he first became ill, while he spent my office hours at a day centre, but I would get called away from work from time to time and the ‘from time to times’ became more frequent.  Even though my employers were very good about it, in the end it was not practical for me to go to work at all.

I spent eight years looking after him and for some reason my health deteriorated a bit too, but with the benefits he was getting we were able to live relatively comfortably although lockdown became a reality for me about eight years before the pandemic ever struck.  Now I find myself widowed and looking for a new job at a time when jobs are being lost a lot more often than found. 

Please don’t think that I regret any of the time I spent with him for a moment, but I made a bit of a mistake. 

I remember being asked about rearranging the benefits we were living on, but I had heard stories about how changing from one set of benefits to another often left people in our situation financially worse off and so I decided to leave well alone as we were able to manage.  

Our benefits were really his benefits and his pension, and even though I was given the choice, I did not look into carers allowance which would have automatically meant that my national insurance would have been paid.  By not doing anything about those national insurance contributions during that time, I recently found myself bereaved with about 4 years to go until I officially retire, and with all sorts of financial problems I never even thought of before I became widowed. 

It was at this point that I made a call to the Pensions Forecast service (0800 731 0175) where I was told that if I want to get my full pension when I finally retire I will need to pay more than £4,000.00 back to the DWP to make up the short fall, and that it would need to be paid as a lump sum.  Caring has a bad habit of eating away at your savings and I know I am not going to be able to afford to do that.

While I know that pension credit will help, I just want to ask all readers who are carers, or who know carers who are coming up to retirement age, to remember to make sure that their national insurance contributions are being paid so that they don’t have the same problems as I will when I retire.

I know that this will not affect many readers of LPG because they will have already retired, but I think that many will know a carer of pre-pensionable age who really needs to sort this out.  I recently found an online newspaper article which warns that there are an alarming number of carers who are likely to be affected and explains it all much better than I can.  I ask that readers take a look at it and pass it on to any carers that they might know. 

MV, Forest Hill.

MV has shared a newspaper article on the subject...

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… while LPG has found a little information that might help…

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