One in twenty of the workers auto-enrolled to the Government’s new Auto-Enrolment (AE ) scheme, ‘My Future Fund’– or 38,463 in total - come from Galway.
The lion’s share of the workers auto-enrolled to My Future Fund come from Dublin, with one in three (32% ) – or a total of 262,611 of the workers auto-enrolled so far - hailing from the capital. Cork had the second highest share of workers auto-enrolled, with one in ten of the workers signed up to AE - or 75,706 in total - residing in Cork. Galway workers make up the third biggest proportion of the total amount signed up to AE.
This is according to new government figures which provide a county-by-county breakdown of the number of workers enrolled to AE since it was launched at the start of the year (see Table 1 in Appendix ).
Commenting on the figures, Keith Butler, CEO of Ask Acorn (a nationwide network of financial advisers ) said The figures reflect the concentration of workers in various counties, and so naturally, counties with higher concentrations of workers hold a higher proportion of the overall number of workers auto-enrolled to AE than is the case for other counties. Recent CSO data[1] shows that the highest proportion of workers reside in Dublin, Cork, Galway and so it’s not surprising that workers from these three counties account for the highest proportions of the overall number of Irish workers signed up to AE.”
So far, over 763,000 employees have been automatically enrolled since My Future Fund launched at the start of the year[2], with their first contribution to the scheme made in January and their second contribution made in February.
Pension experts at Ask Acorn are urging workers who have been signed up to AE to carefully weigh up the scheme and decide if it is going to form part of their long-term plans or not, reminding these workers that they are still within the opt-out window -- -- which is between six months and eight months of the date they were automatically enrolled -- if they wish to leave the scheme.
For any worker enrolled on January 1, this means that their opt-out window runs until between June and August. The pension experts however are warning that any decision to opt out should not be taken lightly, particularly if AE is a worker’s only opportunity to join a pension scheme.
Ask Acorn is also pointing out that workers still have alternative pension options even if they have been signed up to AE – such as supplementing AE with a personally owned pension or signing up to a company pension scheme that became available after AE.
