Richard Smith is right in wishing to get engagement of people close to retirement. We want to know what is happening to our money which doesn’t grow like it does in the building society or bank but fluctuates as markets pull it this way and that.

If we have a  wish to convert to an annuity, the problem of what we have is even more acute but even if we are taking a guess about what income we can afford to pay ourselves, working on numbers which are a few months out of date is frustratingly hard.

Read on..!

I happen to have a biggish pot with L&G and a small(ish) pot with Nest and the experience with L&G is good.

The experience with Nest is not so good. I get mysterious messages to contact them about matters which are generally administrative and onerous

This is 14th century stuff compared with the 21st century stuff I get from my banks and indeed L&G.

The simplicity of DC is very rare but at least with the pot size you get an idea of what is happening to your fund and hence your wage in retirement (if you have a means to convert pot to pension for you – and hopefully your partner). But even that seems too hard for Nest to supply the Pension Dashboard.

Of course the Nest message involves me having to log in , navigating to find messages and then starting a process that involves people interacting over a period of time, usually with more emails like this

This really is hopeless. I do almost all of my administration with banks , fund managers and stock brokers , even with the taxman – using texts and not clogging up my private email inbox which increasingly is a home for circulars and worse. To have to log in to a Nest inbox having logged into its website is incredibly frustrating.

I am looking forward to a dashboard that does things in a most modern way but I worry. First I worry that data that I’ll see will be  out of date and secondly that to act on it will involve confusing myself and the administrators I interact with at Nest with numbers.

We really should be beyond having to have this kind of conversation. We need to stop talking to each other about pots and start talking to each other of the pension we expect to get. This is a long way off in the DC world that both Richard and I are in. A world where we have numbers thrown at us which are incomprehesible

A lot of information about what a pot value and how it is calculated but nothing to tell me what I need to know is what I can take tax free and what the rest will buy me as a pension. After this I might like to know what a  pension will increase by, how much protection it will buy my wife – all this is what I need to get from my provider and I never do,

Instead , what I get from Nest is warnings about doing the wrong thing and lessons in how they calculate my pot value, what my pot is and the risks about it going down.

Nest has simply lost the sense of being a pension provider and until it finds a way to communicate with the millions of people that it serves it will perpetuate the distrust in pensions that it should be dispelling.

Of course Nest will tell us that being so big , it cannot be modern. I am sure they will blame the disastrous attempt to upgrade their systems a few years ago before returning to Tata. But my experience of getting things changed with Nest is exasperating as they simply don’t have the capacity to take decisions quickly enough to meet the demands of our times.

It is living in the equivalence of the middle ages – and so are many other “pension” companies that we have dealt with while trying to provide people with value for money assessments at AgeWage.

Nest and their peers must focus going forward on doing what they were set up for, for pensions. Only when they can tell us what we can get as a wage in retirement will I find the information I get from them  worth exploring further.

I hope has flowered and I expect to get accurate information from the pension dashboard; but that flower is withering fast. Thanks Richard Smith