How the coronavirus crisis is affecting your pension
With three practical tips
First of all, we have every sympathy with everyone who is affected by the coronavirus crisis, whether this involves concerns about health, family, or work. Let’s hope that the coming weeks and months bring better news for us all. Are you concerned about what impact the coronavirus crisis is having on your pension? We’d like to reassure you. Our pension fund is fortunately doing rather well, but it is difficult to indicate in concrete terms what the financial impact will be on your pension in the longer term. Moreover, as far as organizational aspects are concerned, everything is running smoothly behind the scenes, despite all the changes needed to facilitate working from home both in our company as well as at our pension administrator, AZL. That’s also an important consideration – certainly as far as the monthly pension payments are concerned.
Financial
We were doing relatively well at the end of 2020, which meant that cuts were not necessary in 2021. Pension that has been accrued does not need to be reduced. The risk of cuts, however, is higher due to the coronavirus crisis than prior to this. It is still difficult to determine the further financial consequences of the coronavirus crisis. We will only be able to say something more about the financial impact when we look back on this at a later stage. Of course, we want to know what has happened with the coverage ratio recently. In March last year, during the first lockdown, this fell sharply. The current coverage ratio tells us whether we can meet our future liabilities. The crisis team met on several occasions to discuss the developments and to see whether additional measures were needed. The coverage ratio has since risen again, but we are certainly not back at the early 2020 level, even though the current coverage ratio has been increasing steadily since the start of 2021. Like last year, indexation is at 0%. This means a decline in the purchasing power of your pension. If you would like to know more about the figures, take a look at News in brief.
Organizational aspects
We have all been working at home as far as possible for around a year, and we hold our meetings online. Our location meetings have also been converted into a digital version: a webinar. This worked out well. We’ll certainly repeat this next time if that’s still necessary. For the rest, all the processes are simply continuing behind the scenes. This applies both to us and to our pension administrator, AZL. Of course, we’re keeping a close eye on matters. An example of this is the pension payments, which are transferred on the 23rd of each month. We do recommend, however, sending as much information as possible digitally to AZL, where applicable. AZL staff are also working online as far as possible, which is why it is important that you have registered your e-mail address properly in your personal details under Mijn pensioen. You can also contact AZL by telephone.
So, if you have a pension issue, don’t hesitate to call. You can contact them on 088 – 1162 401 or by e-mail at pf-tno@azl.eu.
It’s best to contact the administrative office by e-mail: info@pftno.nl.
What else can you do?
- If you want to supplement your pension, you can do this via the voluntary TNO Pension Fund scheme: Extra and/or Net Pension. Of course, you can also arrange a supplement yourself.
- Are you a member of the voluntary Extra or Net Pension Scheme or do you have TOP capital? Then check with NN IP to see whether the risk profile is a match for your current situation and adjust your profile where necessary.
- Check whether your house is mortgage free when you retire. That will make a huge difference to your monthly expenses. If you rent your home, check whether there are other ways to reduce your fixed outgoings. Finally: stay informed of the pension fund via the news on the website or via your inbox – we send you e-mails every few months with news updates. Our director, Kostijn van Gerven regularly gives a personal update on how the Pension Fund is doing.