An easy question to ask and a hard one to answer: if you have spent years contributing on a base of 1,200 euros a month, how much pension will you get? The answer, assuming you have contributed enough years, is 1,028.57 euros a month across fourteen payments. And that is not an arbitrary number: it comes out of a public formula you can work through yourself with pen and paper.
As an autónomo (self-employed worker) you get to choose (within limits) how much you contribute each month. And that raises a question almost nobody answers with real numbers: is it better to push hard and contribute on a high base from now to collect a bigger pension, or to contribute the minimum, invest what I save, and raise my base only at the end?
This isn’t a matter of faith. It depends on how the pension is calculated, and once you understand that mechanism you discover something that changes the whole strategy: most of your contributing life doesn’t count towards the amount of your pension. Let’s see why, and at the end we’ll show you a free calculator to test it with your own figures.