Thank goodness for kids- kid journalists for a start.
There is a gang on young journos who actually give a damn about the pensions they are in and are prepared to engage and educate themselves about what makes for a good pension.
I came across this on twitter yesterday
Employers can't cope with picking good pension schemes http://t.co/lvqjGWG2S7 via @CitywireMoney
— Henry Tapper (@henryhtapper) September 11, 2014
What I love about the article is that it is written from the heart. Kids (by which I mean anyone under the age of 30) seem to care much more about the quality of the pension they are in than people like me – for whom the damage of poor questions may have been done.
Speaking to Michelle, who wrote this article, it was clear she was keen on her employer’s workplace pension and shocked to find that most employers hadn’t got a clue why they had chosen the pension scheme they had (for their staff).
This reminds me of something I wrote on a post in accounting web recently.
There comes a point when auto-enrolment becomes something that companies want to do,we haven’t reached it yet! But when it is as easy to pay people in pension contributions as it is in cash and when the pension contributions are valued as part of total pay, then we might be getting there!
I hope that more young staff asking their bosses as to exactly why they chose the workplace pension they did. It is simply not good enough for employers to take this decision lightly.
I stood in front of 50 SMEs the other day and pitched http://www.pensionplaypen.com to them. None were older than 40 and most were kids. Everyone cheered at the end, it was great to see entrepreneurs getting into the idea that they could make a difference to their staff’s pension funds!
It depresses me that we talk about pension as “risk” and advertise auto-enrolment by means of “fines” that tPR could dish out for non-compliance.
This is not what you’d do if you were a kid. If you were a kid you would be looking at pensions in terms of the awesome opportunities they gave to invest money cheaply, save tax and build a capital reservoir to spend in your old age.
We must exercise this love muscle that drives people’s decisions to join and stay in a pension.
And we mustn’t allow kids like the ones I’ve mentioned to end up old and jaundiced.
The statistics suggest that auto-enrolment opt-outs are much lower among the under 40s and much higher for the over 50s. Opt-ins by non eligible are highest among the under 22s.
In pensions , the child is father to the man. I am slowly closing in on my second childhood!
This post was first published in http://www.pensionplaypen.com