Martin Lewis urges people to check if they qualify for £74,000 pension pot boost

Some people may be able to boost their state pension by as much as £74,000, according to Martin Lewis - but only if they are of the right age. The financial guru returned to ITV last week 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 creeping up for people to purchase back any missing National Insurance years in their history. Since the amount of state pension a person receives is determined by the number of years they have contributed to National Insurance, if there are gaps in their record, they could significantly increase their state pension by buying those years back.

For every £800 a person has contributed, they could get £6,100 per year added to their pension pot, Martin informed his viewers. The closer a person is to retirement age, the more beneficial it becomes. for anyone born after 1979 - aged 45 and under - it 'probably isn't worth doing' unless there are substantial gaps in their NI history.

Older couple smiling at laptop

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," reports the Express.

Martin continued: "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."

He also warned that you need at least 10 years on your national insurance record to qualify for a state pension. "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," he explained.

He continued: "If however you're on nine years and you can buy a year, suddenly you'll have 10/35ths of your pension and it will be massively lucrative, worth £3,000 a year for £800. So if you've got very limited years it could either be very lucrative or not lucrative."

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