This needed to be said.  The article in question can be read from here

Dan talks of DC master trusts but you could have got roughly the same returns whether you were invested in a the default of a DC master trust, in that of Pension Bee’s personal pension or gone out and bought a shares ISA from just about anyone!

The point is not that master trusts changed everything, they didn’t, it’s the fact that for the first time, millions of people are seeing their savings grow faster than their’s ever did before.

I mean the people that Martin Lewis has been talking to for whom Cash ISAs are the natural place to save, where the kind of rates people think about compare with mortgage rates and inflation, not the returns that DC pension schemes have and will deliver.

It’s worth watching the video, it’s what people are getting from their pension without knowing it and this is why People’s and Nest and other workplace pensions are doing what Government wanted Sid to do back in the 1980s.

Lewis’ brilliant 45 minutes is for a generation who never had access to DB pensions and never benefited from it. If you worked for BT or British Airways a quarter of a century ago, you may not have known that your benefits were being paid by returns from investment (mainly in the UK stock markets BTW).

Nowadays, if you are a deferred or actual pensioner your pension is not being paid from investments but from bonds and the like as the DB schemes line up for their end-game. There aren’t a few of them (as Dan mentions) but close on 5,000 DB schemes in the DB end-game queue with assets by and large lined up for buy-out,

That I am afraid is history and not something that the people Martin Lewis is talking to (and Dan invests for), are interested in.

What Martin is talking about and Dan is actually doing, is making our money work as hard as we do.  They are talking about then investing where we work, so that not just our livelihoods are secured , but our pensions are too!

Maybe Dan has a point in not having a go at the CIOs at these big DB funds and maybe we should be asking if they had any choice – throwing out all the growth to pay the LDI bills in 2022. But that’s another story and not the one that he, or Martin or indeed I should be telling.

The story we should be telling is that if you save over time (years not months) you will find yourself making more money if it is invested than put in cash.  That is the story and its message.

Addendum from Chris Johnson of the FT in this morning’s email

That’s why we have to write, read and invest – whether we read the FT and Dan, watch Martin Lewis or do both!