Re: DB, tax free lumpsum, what happens if I loose car and bounus in years before reti
I am considering making AVC contributions for 2 or 3 years and stopping making contributions until I am 7 years from retirement. At that stage I will have more certainty as to my final remuneration will be in terms of calculating revenue limits.
Any commnets.
Just to clarify earlier responses, please note that the Revenue will allow you to average remuneration over any period of three years
or longer ending not more than ten years prior to your date of retirement.
This means that you could take your earnings from age 52 to age 55 if you were retiring at age 65. It also means that, if your BIK etc, were to stop at (say) age 53, you could take the average from age 50 to age 55. While this would not protect you fully from the impact of the loss of BIK, etc. it would at least let you take 60% of the figure (i.e. three years BIK spread over five years averaging) into account.
Please also note that remuneration over any period ending prior to your date of retirement can be "dynamised" i.e. increased in line with inflation from the end of the year to your date of retirement, so you may have more scope than you think.
Regarding what happens if you are overfunded at your date of retirement, in theory the Revenue could insist that the excess funds are absorbed into the scheme and effectively become used by the Trustees to defray costs or provide benefits for other employees. However, in practice, Revenue will generally allow the excess to be refunded to the member through payroll (and hence subject to both marginal rate income tax and PRSI) on a case by case basis, although they could refuse to allow permission to permit such a refund if they were to judge that there had been a case of deliberate overfunding by the member.
Homer