State pension warning from Martin Lewis for anyone born before 1979

Martin Lewis is encouraging individuals to see if they can boost their state pension by as much as £74,000 – but only if they’re of the right age.

The financial guru returned to ITV on Tuesday with a fresh batch of top money-saving tips, including a crucial alert about state pensions. On ITV1 and ITVX, Martin highlighted how the deadline is rapidly approaching for buying back missing National Insurance years from your record.

Since your state pension amount is determined by the number of years you’ve contributed to National Insurance, if there are gaps in your record, you could significantly increase your state pension by purchasing those years back. For every £800, you could add £6,100 per year to your pension pot, Martin informed his audience, reports the Express.

The value of this move increases as you approach retirement age. If you’re under 45 – meaning you were born after 1979 – it ‘probably isn’t worth doing’ unless there are substantial gaps in your NI history.

Martin advised his viewers: “If you have gaps between 2006 and 2018, you need to think about this this year because you can only do it until next April. If you’re nearly at the state pension age it’s easy to see, it’s pretty obvious that you should be buying them.”

“The older you are, the more likely you should be. If there are no gaps after 2019, then you could buy those so you could wait and see.”

“If you’re under 45 this probably isn’t worth doing, unless you’ve got very cheap partial years, if you’ve got a year available for £16 just go and buy it because it’s so cheap just in case you miss years in the future because it’s so cheap for what it could be worth.”

“You need a minimum 10 years to get a state pension so a warning here. If you’ve only got three years, and you’ve got three years missing, there’s no point buying those three years because you’ll still only be on six years and you still won’t get the state pension.