What do the 10m new savers read? Not their pension illustrations – they read Sun Money – Dan Jones’ excellent financial section.
Today’s lead article is about pensions and before everyone comments “not another slagging off for the industry”, it’s about how you can avoid being ripped off.
Rip-off charges – don’t pay them
Not many people know that there is a charge cap on transfer penalties on DC pensions. There is – and it’s 1% of the fund. So long as you are 55 or older – you can ditch your rip-off charges and get a transfer of 99% of the monies you’ve built up. I waited till I was 55 to transfer one of my pensions and saw the transfer jump from £9.000 to over £14,000.
Another of my pensions had an average of 2.5% pa charge on it, by switching the money to my low-cost workplace pension , I’ll save myself £40,000 by the time I want to take the money.
I didn’t pay an adviser a bean to get my money out of rip-off charge land and I’m proud of the good financial work I did for myself.
With the help of a proper pension dashboard and our new service AgeWage, we hope to help millions of savers do the same!
Why I help the Sun.
The Sun did some bad things in the past – I can understand people refusing to forgive and forget. But the Sun is the newspaper that is read by the people who pension people ignore. When the Sun speaks on pensions, it matters!
So I’m really proud to have been asked to help with some Sun articles, and if Dan and Harriet ask me to help again, I’ll do everything I can to keep their articles punchy and accurate.
That’s me in the corner – losing my religion!
It took three weeks to write this article, every sentence, every number and every quote has been scrutinised and tested. This is journalism of the highest order.
Anyone who thinks it is easy to write about pensions with this simplicity should try it!
We need the Sun to write responsible articles, I’m delighted that they are promoting TPAS and AgeWage and First Actuarial. We should all be proud to be associated with what the Sun is doing for pensions.
If we don’t – we really are pension potty!
