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“When people move through five or six jobs in a typical career, they may forget some of the details of their pension benefits or not understand their complexity,” says Graeme Egan, a portfolio manager and financial planner with KCM Wealth Management Inc. in Vancouver.

With two or three jobs under your belt, the options for what to do with deferred pay, which is what a pension is, become even more complex.

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1. Transferring a pension to another plan or payout. Employees who leave a job can get benefits including pension transfers to locked in plans, payout of unvested benefits, termination allowances that can in part be rolled into RRSPs, and payment of vacation days not taken. You can take the money and run. That way, you wind up paying a lot of tax. Or you can shift some payouts to RRSPs. To save tax, leave money locked into plans.

2. Use of an annuity to defer income and get more out of capital. Among the choices of transferring accumulated retiring funds is the seldom considered annuity option. The annuity can start right away or be deferred. The annuity payout will contain a return of capital, boosting the return over what the straight investment would pay. Compare what the annuity pays per thousand dollars of purchase price with what a 10-year government bond or a chartered bank stock pays. The annuity transfers investment risk to the insurance company that sells it, but weigh the price of that peace of mind. Once you buy the annuity, you’re in for life.