This is an article I wrote in 2019 the morning after a meeting with friends to discuss what it’s like to get to retirement and get stuck in a kind of “Straits of Hormuz”. I thought it would be good to dig it out and re-publish- this links to the original.
I said this was a week when I was thinking about choices, retirement choices and something which the pensions industry (like no-0ne else) calls “choice architecture”.
De- stress, don’t get distressed!
I have previously described the period when you move from the relative calm of the Persian Gulf to the wide sea of the Gulf of Oman and on to the Indian Ocean as fraught. If you are on a tanker laden with oil , loaded from Kuwait or Saudi, you have the 21 mile Strait of Hormuz to negotiate, it is a rite of passage when you are prey to all kind of threats from land and sea, but you know if you can get through, you are safe. You have no choice but to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, your oil changes currency once you have, it is now a new currency.
The key to this narrow navigation is awareness and vigilance. Decisions need to be taken in this tight channel that are existential, your boat, cargo and most of all – you – are vulnerable. The prize is the freedom of the open sea tantalisingly close ahead.
I hope the analogy with retirement holds good. Read Damian Stancombe’s pre and post linked in post to see what trauma the retirement process involves. There is a realisation you are moving from one life stage to another and for most of us that includes accepting that the support mechanism that provided a framework is no longer there. We all know of people who simply can’t cope without that framework, David Butcher is good on this, mindfulness is what he calls the vigilance needed. It isn’t just the enemy without- the scammers and false prophets peddling financial products, but the inner voices of doubt that prey upon self confidence/worth.
The rite of passage from feeling at work to being work-free may not happen overnight, it may not happen at all, but for most of us there is a point where work no longer defines us and as a state of consciousness, that is the moment of retirement. That is the moment when we leave the Strait of Hormuz.
You can download it and paste it on your wall like I did when I had an office in WeWork.
It shows the extraordinary complexity of the infrastructure supporting the shift from accumulation ( on the left hand side of the map) to decumulation ( on the right hand side of the map. The Strait of Hormuz is guarded by administrators. Today those administrators are armed not with guns but red and yellow flags which they throw to warn against decisions they consider may be foolhardy.
Those decisions are usually “flagged” if the destination of travel looks likely to leave the saver “on the rocks” or “captured” by scammers. But flags could well be thrown where an unnecessary tax-bill is incurred or where pension is swapped out for tax-free cash at an unreasonable rate. Indeed there seems hardly a decision that we take in our financial Strait that might in retrospect be considered “ill advised”.
Is it any wonder that people dread being faced with the complexity of choice, the risks of taking the wrong choice and the likelihood that – other than from paying for advice – the decision will end in a trip to the headmaster’s study (aka MaPS)?
This is the ordeal we put people through at the very time when they are suffering the trauma of moving from being at work to retirement from work.
I am told that you could , at the height of tension, a small army of protection to keep you piloted through the Strait of Hormuz and so you can in retirement. If you have a rich cargo, you will do so since you can afford it, if you have a small bark with meagre cargo you are on your own. That doesn’t stop pirates.
Keeping it simple
To complete this extended metaphor (some would say conceit). we need a clear channel to navigate and a sound craft that carries us from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and beyond.
There is nothing that is going to make retirement easy, but we need not make it unnecessarily hard and that we do right now, with too much choice, too little direction and too many flags thrown to reprimand our non-advised decisions.
We don’t need to use fancy phrases like “choice architecture” to keep it simple, we can use clear direction and targeted support to pilot people to financial freedom in the ocean of later life.
Watch “Your 3 pension options in 3 minutes” on #Vimeo https://t.co/LPse4nFTYL
— Henry Tapper (@henryhtapper) March 17, 2026
