Right here goes. From the Watson Wyatt (Ltd) website which you can only log onto after joining because you need your user ID.
Tier of Membership History: Member 6% Employer 12%(pilot).
From my payslip pensionable salary = £32130, basic = £42841.
(The reason for the difference is that at the last pay deal a lot of non-pensionable allowances were bundled together and added to salary).
Therefore I pay £160.65 and BA £321.30 per month.
(32130/12*.006= 160.65)
I can top my contribution up to a max of 15% of my total taxable pay. I paid £514.28 Additional Voluntary Contribution (AVC). £514.28 + £160.65 = £674.93. 674.93/0.15= 4499.53 which was about 91% of my gross.
So with such huge sums going into my pension why am I not going to retire a squillionare?
If you put these figures into a pension calculator
http://www.pensioncalculator.org.uk/pages/home.php
you will see the problem. To get a decent pension you will need a fund of £350 000 plus, this is why NAPS and especially APS are such great schemes. They all fall short so use extra company income to top up the pension. The public sector pensions just raise taxes to pay. In effect the members of NAPS voted in the new BARP scheme by their silence. By underfunding BARP BA releases money to prop up NAPS . This is very divissive stuff and BA know it.
The silver linings for BARP'ers? At pay point 5 pensionable pay rises from 75% to 80% basic. Pay increases by 4% per annum. The Watson Wyatt calculator is too dim to evaluate right to left seat pay increase at say year 12 (pay rises 25%). A tax effecient salary sacrifice scheme may be impemented. Stock markets may make continuous exponential rises for the next 2 centuries. If you do achieve a large fund you could use draw-down instead of annuities. Something positive may happen to pensions in the next 20 years. You could work to 75. BA may acknowledge the deliberate payment holiday with BARPS and pay a sensible contribution. Buy lots of BA shares, your pension money is going to be used to pay the dividend after all.
The down side. All pay negotions at BA (and everywhere) will always be downward. Annuity rates can only fall, so £6K per £100k fund will be £4K when I retire, wiping out all the silver lining gains. If you index link your annuity it reduces further. If you want a spouse included it reduces further. If you take a cash lump sum .....
Please don't think I'm not aware of the even worse deal for all other groups on BARP. Their deal is 3,4,or 5% member. Company 5,6 or 7%. Pilots only get 12% because we retire at 55.
The NAPS pension awareness campaign kicked off yesterday. The aim is to get NAPS to hybrid into BARP but expect a lot of hyperbole to the contrary.
P.S. this website is monitored.