There are a million self-employed people who already have pension plans that would total 20,000 million euros, and they are precisely one of the objectives of the simplified employment pension plans that began their journey this summer. The great objective in this field of the policy deployed by the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security in the last legislature has been to transfer the center of gravity of the individual pension plans, until now the dominant ones in Spain, with high commissions and that They basically benefit upper-middle incomes, towards employment plans, with less commission and a more distributed range of beneficiaries. The regulation ended up being approved just before the July elections, and from now on is when the self-employed can really opt for these plans.
According to Inclusion, with the new plans, commissions will be reduced in such a way that the self-employed sector will add around 200 million savings per year for this concept, which increases their profitability.
There are three main options that the self-employed have to invest in employment pension plans, in all cases with an increase in the deduction limit to 5,750 euros per year (4,250 for the employment plan plus the 1,500 for the individual limit). . The first is through the plans of the self-employed associations, with ATA that has already had one in place for a year, and UPTA, which will start it this October; the second are those developed by professional associations; and the third, the option of joining sectoral plans, such as the one for construction or the one prepared by hoteliers.
The plan for the self-employed that has started before is that of ATA, but with meager results for the moment. Launched a year ago, and managed by VidaCaixa, it has only added 1,000 participants with a total balance of three million euros. It is true that the true deployment of the simplified employment plans came later with the approval this summer of the corresponding regulations. However, the sector recognizes that “there is a lack of awareness” and “a new impulse,” and they also justify the slow start due to the consequences of the election year.
For its part, UPTA signed a pension plan with Banc Sabadell in June that, in practice, will start this October. The commission charged is well below individual plans, and as always in these cases, the risk varies according to the life cycle, so that as the self-employed person approaches retirement, the investment is more conservative.
“The core element of the plan is to reduce risks to a minimum, savings must be preserved,” says Eduardo Abad, president of UPTA, who is confident that “there will be a mutation from individual plans to employment plans, because they have another tax treatment and now improvements can be guaranteed,” he adds.
Another path that the self-employed can choose are the plans that professional associations and other associations will implement. In this area, this week the General Council of Economists (CGE), which brings together 45 schools and 55,000 members, received approval from Social Security so that they can also implement these pension plans, something for which they already Negotiations are very advanced with a banking entity to assume management.
“It's that phrase that was said before, the virtue of savings. Since they have reduced the incentives of the individual plans, the employment plans are an opportunity,” says Valentí Pich, president of the CGE, who adds that “clear regulations” were necessary, and that is why they consulted with Social Security if the general schools , like the CGE, were considered promoters of these plans, and obtained an affirmative response.
The third way that self-employed workers can choose is to sign up for their sector's pension plan; such as construction, which is already underway, or hospitality, which is being prepared.
