There is concern about headlines and photos like this. I can understand that. What young people don’t need is telling they need to work out what charts tell them as they manage their retirement finances. The photo above suggests that what’s needed to deal with old age when a working person is a lot of paper and a lot of determination to win.

I don’t think that most of the 15m people that Pensions Commission has identified of not saving as they should would feel intimidated by this article, not because what it said but what it showed.

Of course there are people who enjoy looking after their money and investing. But most of us don’t and for us there should be a simple alternative which allows us to invest without having to take decisions either on what happens when we put the money in or take it out.

This article can be read here.

Here is Sarah

“I am 35 and have essentially nothing saved for my future, which is a huge concern.”

Sarah works in library services in Oxford – full-time at one library and part-time at another. She has saved £5,000 into her pension.

After finishing her PhD in 2020, she said she had

“good intentions of contributing to pension schemes. But because I then had a succession of part-time jobs, I never started. I never thought, this is a job I’ll be doing for long enough.”

Sarah thinks she’s failed because she’s saved £5,000. She has got £5,000 in a pot which will show not just what she saved but the impact of her money being invested. What good does this number do Sarah, what good the reader for that matter?

The article goes on to explore the pensions gender gap

Women had a median pension wealth of £81,000, versus £156,000 for men.

What do Guardian readers make of this? If I didn’t work in pensions I would be mystified by the purchasing power of those pot sizes.

What about Kevin

Even some of those who have pensions are concerned about how long their savings will last. Kevin, 64, a digital user experience designer from Yorkshire, has managed to save £58,000 into his workplace pension and owns a house “in a cheap area”, but still worries it won’t stretch far.

Let’s be clear, Kevin doesn’t have a pension , he has a pot of money which could go up or down and Kevin thinks he’s got a workplace pension which he’s no idea how far it’s going to  stretch.

It is not just that the amounts people have been quoted as their “pension” aren’t enough for the Pension Commission, they simply don’t make sense to the people who have a right to these pots.

Here’s Martin; he’s saving £500 per month of his take home earnings (he’s self employed so he’s pretty determined).

 He says he first started to think about his retirement plan after his father died 12 years ago. “My mum’s got his pension but it wasn’t as much as I thought it would be,” he says.

But he is uncertain as to when or if he’ll be able to retire.

“I don’t know how long I’ll carry on working for,” he says. “The world economy is so unpredictable. You don’t know where the market is going to be. The world is changing so quickly.”

These are the worries of ordinary people saving from their pay for a wage in retirement. They are not being offered a pension but a pot. They are worried about markets if they’re into what they’ve been doing. Most people have handed over substantial amounts of money with no idea of what happens to it. Sarah think that her pot is what she’s saved, that equation makes sense to most people but when they get to retirement they’ll have no idea what the amount they’ve put away is worth.

Why do people worry about pensions and how they are reported?

The pensions dashboard will do a lot to give people an idea of what they will be on when they retire. But as Richard Smith tells the VFM podcast , the amount they’ll be being quoted won’t be accurate and will over estimate the deferred pay they’re expecting. Martin’s expectations of his mum’s pension are typical.

We all worry about our pensions because we don’t know what we’re getting; people worry about how pensions are reported because those writing articles seem to know little more than we do!