Are you unable to claim the full State Pension? This is what I would do

Researching how much you’ll be able to claim under State Pension rules is a pretty gruesome exercise.

Because the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is constant toying with eligibility criteria, it’s tough to know exactly how much you’ll be receiving when you retire, or indeed when you’ll be able to actually claim the pension. No wonder, then, that swathes of the general public are in the dark over what support they can expect to get from the government upon retirement.

An uncertain outlook

The first port of call is to log onto the official State Pension website to ascertain the size of the benefit you’ll receive and when you can expect to receive it.

As I mentioned earlier, however, the government is constantly reviewing the pension age to ensure that the future financial assistance is both “affordable and fair.” So what’s on the website today may not be there in just a couple of years’ time.

There’s numerous economic, political and demographic factors that could damage pension eligibility for millions of people, in terms of how much they can claim and when they can claim it. However, a rapidly-ageing population is the biggest problem facing the DWP bean counters responsible for calculating the State Pension. This is illustrated by Office for National Statistics estimates predicting that the number of UK citizens within the State Pension age bracket will leap a staggering 36% between 2017 and 2042 to some 16.4m individuals.

Take these steps to protect yourself

There are plenty of conditions affecting individual pensions eligibility as of today, but there’s one criteria that all of us have to meet. In order to claim the full ‘new’ State Pension of £8,546.20 per year you’ll need to have had at least 35 qualifying years of paying National Insurance contributions.

If you have 10 to 35 years of contributions you can expect to receive some benefit. Without at least a decade of qualifying years on your National Insurance record you can expect to receive diddly squat from the government. There’s a way to ‘top up’ your credits though, for most people, this could prove an exceptionally-costly endeavour.

Let’s say that you are entitled to the full State Pension after paying NICs for those required three-and-a-bit-decades. That’s good, but hardly great. Would the £164.35 per week that the full State Pension currently provides allow you to pursue the sort of lifestyle you envisage by the time you come to retire? I doubt that, for many of us, this paltry sum would stretch far enough just to cover everyday expenses.

Whether or not you’re entitled to claim the full benefit it’s critical that you take your destiny in your own hands. Whatever your age, you need to take steps to bolster your income to supplement the State Pension and avert pensioner poverty, and a great way to do this is by buying big-paying dividend stocks. A £10,000 investment in Taylor Wimpey for example, the biggest yielder on the FTSE 100 with a reading of 11%, would boost your annual income to the tune of £1,100. And there’s plenty of other blue-chip shares that could make you a fortune now and in the years ahead.