Pension Value Dropping

If your pension fund was 11,000 and it dropped to 1, 000 that's wrong

If it was 400,000 and it dropped to 390,000 that's understandable, it's a 2.5% drop

If you are young it probably doesn't matter, you are buying in cheaper each month now

If you are drawing down pension next month you've just lost 10,000

So it depends on your circumstances

OP, if you are more than 10 years off retirement then what you should do is this: nothing. The worst thing you can do during a downturn in the markets is panic and move your money into 'safer' funds like cash, that way you will miss the recovery. And with stocks and shares, there always is a recovery.

investments go up and go down but averaged over long periods of time historically they tend to go up.

If you're still more than ten years from retirement, I would not be concerned about what the market looks like today. No one can truly predict the future, but odds are very high that the market value of your fund will be higher than it is today by the time you retire.

If you are concerned about stability of your pension as you approach retirement, you could see if your provider offers a "target date" or "target retirement" fund. This is a balanced fund which is automatically rebalanced as your chosen date approaches to have fewer high-risk volatile investments like equities and foreign stocks, and more lower-risk and less volatile investments like bonds or even a certain amount of cash. This helps reduce the effect of a sudden downturn in the market right at the time you are retiring. Check with whoever manages your pension fund for more information; they usually can't directly give you financial advice (unless your provider offers that as an extra service), but they can advise you about the available funds in your plan and provide the details of each.

What is the makeup of that fund? It sounds very high risk. My 3 pensions (from 3 previous employments) are all in the highest risk funds from their respective providers, yet are only down between 8% and 20% from their 2021 peaks.

11-13 years should be plenty of time for it to recover (and deliver significant gains), but also plenty of time for another shock to the markets! So you will definitely want to de-risk as soon as you can afford.

I'm way off retirement but my fund is down 7% in the last year. And its aggressively managed, although it is very well diversified. The risk was chosen by me. So 30% drop seems highly volatile.

6 month figures also down 7% and 3 month figures almost break even.

So I lost 7% between 3 and 6 months ago (April to july) more or less balanced out rest of the year.

I'd ring your investment manager or financial advisor and find out what kind of assets its invested in, even just for your own knowledge. And look for the return you've gotten since you started, that's an important figure too.

When people access the percentage fall in you pension are you taking contributions into account?

Example - My fund since December last year has dropped 3% but that is from that snapshot in time. Since then I have contributed 10 more monthly payments which have been wiped off also. So that brings real losses up to 15.7%.

Well loss might not be the correct term so, but my point still stands when people say how much was wiped off their fund. In essence my contributions this year were all plugging a hole in funds "loses" in the market. So instead of 3% "reduction" in fund value it's actually 15%.

I upped my contributions last year. I'm putting in around 1,600 per month and employer €480. So that's €24,000 ish per year.

They weren't plugging a hole, they were buying more units than earlier payments sinc ethe price has reduced.