Future Kazakhstani pensioners will increasingly rely on payments from the Unified Accumulative Pension Fund (UAPF), as solidarity pensions are only available to those with work experience before 1998. Citizens can already find out the approximate size of their future pension and adjust it in advance, reports infohub.kz.
Kazakhstan's pension system is multi-tiered: today it consists of solidarity and basic state pensions, as well as payments from citizens' own savings. Those without pre-1998 experience are not entitled to solidarity payments, so the role of personal savings for them is growing.
As the Unified Accumulative Pension Fund recalled, Kazakhstanis can use a personal pension plan. It allows them to determine long before retirement what amount they would like to receive in pension and understand what needs to be done for that.
To calculate the future pension, one needs to log into the personal account on the UAPF website or in the fund's official mobile application. There, all current information about the person is available: age, experience, and the amount of pension savings. Citizens can use the pension calculator, which will gather this data and calculate the approximate size of the combined future pension.
If the contributor is not satisfied with the final amount, they can create their own personal pension plan by finding the corresponding service in the personal account. There, the citizen specifies the desired payment amount, and the system automatically calculates how much needs to be accumulated in the pension account and draws up a contribution schedule indicating the missing amount.
For example, for a UAPF pension of 340,000 tenge, one needs to accumulate about 32.7 million tenge. The system will offer a pension savings plan by years and by each individual month, noting deviations from the plan if any.
If the current mandatory pension contributions (MPC), which are withheld from salaries, are insufficient to meet the plan, one can adjust the desired pension amount. It is also possible to start making voluntary pension contributions (VPC), which, as the UAPF notes, have advantages over mandatory ones: a contributor with VPC can start receiving payments as early as age 50, i.e., significantly earlier than retirement age.
Earlier, the UAPF stated that Kazakhstanis' pension should cover at least 40% of previously received income, with plans to increase this figure to 60%.