Just pure laziness

EdInvestor

Despite the ongoing pension crisis, nearly half of working Brits, an estimated 17m people, have never reviewed their retirement pot. And even for those who have checked, some 1.3m people say it's been more than a decade since they checked. The study showed that even of those who have bothered to check their pension, over a third admitted that they did not have a clue where or what their pension pot is invested in.

After decades of paying no attention to their investment, they then have the nerve to whinge and moan as they come up to retirement that pensions are a failure.Far be from me to apologise for the way the pensions industry behaves, in particular its tendency to extract excessive fees and charges from its customers.But aren't they asking to be fleeced?

You couldn't make it up.:rolleyes:

Old_Slaphead

Interesting numbers.

I thought working population totalled around 29million.

6 million work in public sector and should know where there pension is (ie with employer)

About 2/3rds of rest (ie 14 million) supposedly have no private pension

Around 1/6th (ie 4 million) are in private sector final salary schemes - so they don't really need to know where their money is invested.

That leaves around 5 million who either have their own schemes or are in employer DC schemes. Lets say about 50% of these have no idea where their treasure's buried.



So the 17 million headline number actually comprises of 2.5million "don't know where it's invested" and 14million "haven't got ones". How do the know the 14million haven't reviewed their 'nil' pot and just decided pensions are not worth it ???

EdInvestor

I think the point being made is that almost half of the workforce has not bothered to understand the way their pension(s) work. This applies to all the varieties of pensions.

It's quite apparent on this forum every day actually, people are constantly asking questions as they up to retirement which indicate that they have virtually no knowledge of what their options are.

It's amazing they leave it so late, too late to remedy if a problem does arise..

bumpoowee

EdInvestor wrote: »

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/pensions/article.html?in_article_id=491084&in_page_id=6&ct=5



After decades of paying no attention to their investment, they then have the nerve to whinge and moan as they come up to retirement that pensions are a failure.Far be from me to apologise for the way the pensions industry behaves, in particular its tendency to extract excessive fees and charges from its customers.But aren't they asking to be fleeced?

You couldn't make it up.:rolleyes:

Agree 100%. This is exactly what really !!!!es me off about the constant 'poor old hard done by pensioners' crap you hear about from people and the media. Take some responsibility for yourself why don't you?

Unity

Those statistics are quite alarming :eek:.
Crumbs - my husband's been keeping an eye on ours for the past 30 years! :T
I knew there was a good reason why I married him .

How can people not take pension provision for later years seriously and keep up to date with it?

Paul_Herring

Unity wrote: »

Those statistics are quite alarming :eek:.
Crumbs - my husband's been keeping an eye on ours for the past 30 years! :T
I knew there was a good reason why I married him .

How can people not take pension provision for later years seriously and keep up to date with it?

Quite easily, sadly. My OH has no pension plan in place (unless I'm 'it') and currently has no plans to.

Old_Slaphead

EdInvestor wrote: »

I think the point being made is that almost half of the workforce has not bothered to understand the way their pension(s) work. This applies to all the varieties of pensions.

If you took out public/private sector FS schemes (who quite frankly don't need to take much interest apart from knowing what the benefits are) that means over 90% don't take much interest.

That says a lot about the negative perception of the pensions industry and lack of public awareness/apathty about finance in general. Some of which is justified ie high charges & poor performance and abysmal record of holding their shareholding companies managment to account.

Here's another example of the 'can't be bothered' attitude. Debenhams were offering 20% off for Daily Mail vouchers. My Debs has a newsagent next door. I spent about £100 yesterday - nipped next door and bought a Mail and saved £20. Several people in the cashdesk queue said that was a good idea but didn't bother doing so themselves, though, from their purchases I guess they would save similar amounts. Obviously £20 for 5 minutes of their time wasn't worth it. No wonder country has such a debt mountain.

PasturesNew

I just don't understand it - and the more you try to find out, the more confusing it all is. Then things change all the time, in regulation, media stories and personal circumstances.

It's not a fixed science like maths, it's full of risk profiles and understanding and studying markets and companies and results ... and ... it's alllll just so hard and complex and confusing. And scarey. And if you DO do something, then it all falls apart when your circumstances change and for some you just don't know what to do or what's going on, and things are changing all the time ... and financial advisors are scarey blokes in shiny suits that really just want to get a signature/commission and onto the next appointment. They just want you to buy something, but you can't give them any answers to their forms because life changes so much and so often.

You can't blame the little people with a sweeping statement ... some of us are just completely and utterly and hopelessly at a loss as to what might be the best thing to do for some future point when we don't even know what will happen/change for the rest of this year.

If they'd simply made a pension a straight forward savings book type of thing that you could randomly shove money in, at least more people would have had a chance of doing something. But it's not like that.

PasturesNew

I would say, I tried to get a pension once, I started off low and set it to increase ... but then my job finished and I was on the dole and couldn't afford it. So I had to stop it. By the time I'd found another job and had caught up with all the bills I hadn't paid whilst not working, it was too late for the pension. I'd stopped it while on the dole and in order to start it up again I'd have needed to have paid every missed payment, within a set timescale - and I couldn't. So that was closed (or whatever the word is).... as a result of that I didn't see the point of starting a 2nd one in case the same thing happened again. I believed that anything I had paid in (about 9 months worth) would have all been lost/gobbled up in admin charges.

Sometimes in life, you just encounter times when there literally is no spare money to go into a pension, times you have to stop. There's not been one you could start/stop in the past, easily. Just start and put in what you liked, then stop.

And remember, there wasn't the Internet back then or forums you could ask people about the minutae of your life.

EdInvestor

PasturesNew wrote: »

Sometimes in life, you just encounter times when there literally is no spare money to go into a pension, times you have to stop. There's not been one you could start/stop in the past, easily. Just start and put in what you liked, then stop.

Yes there has, that's the stakeholder pension, launched in 2000 to meet exactly this need.It's still with us.

PasturesNew

EdInvestor wrote: »

Yes there has, that's the stakeholder pension, launched in 2000 to meet exactly this need.It's still with us.

I had found out from here that that might be the case and it's on my "to do" list, but then it's still a confusing array of options and choices.

And, for many of us, 2000 is a bit late in the day still. Also, 2000 started my severe change of circumstances, a year later I was earning 1/3rd of what I was when I'd bought my house ... and 7 years later things hadn't improved much (much in/out of work, employment for short periods, self-employment 'to get by'), so again, lots of changing circumstances, plus if you don't know what these things are, then you can get the wrong impression about what they are, if that makes sense.

I thought stakeholder pensions were something to do with employers to be honest, until the last year when I've popped in here and read a frew random threads.