This is the whole of the life of a friend of mine. He/she’s a fan of the pension dashboard and you can see why.
I love the “around the £54,142.86 per annum” . That’s not approximation – that feels like spurious certainty! But let’s not bicker with the pensions dashboard.
Let’s remember that the income from some of my friends pensions are based on pot conversion to a level annuity , nor that the state pension is revalued by the triple lock, nor that Centrica’s and Prudential’s pension increased by its occupational DB rules!
It’s an estimate and it’s flawed but you have to start somewhere and it is already more than 10 years that I went to my first dashboard conference in the Aviva garage in shorditch.
My friend is going to get a pension of over £54K and that will be for the rest of life, in fact a large part of it will be inflation linked and some will go to a spouse (if there’s one). If there isn’t, I know a lot of people in the market for a wedding!
Of course he or she will have to wait till 2034 to get this income (he/she will get this projected income from occupational funds and the state pension and less if he takes it early. The state pension won’t pay until our anonymous star’s state pension age (2034)
We can guess that our superstar will be 67 then making the star 59 now. This means he/she could be taking his DC pots anyway he wants but the dashboard’s not saying anything about them. No mention of what gives tax free cash nor what the tax payable.
Here’s the note that came with the screenshot of a whole savings life on a screen.
Your whole life on one screen – it’s incredible! …
How does YOUR life look on a single page? Mine’s above:
My past:
➡️ 1980s – first pensions: State Pension (blue), DB (purple)
➡️ 1990s – Hybrid pension (olive) with both DB & DC sections
➡️ 2000s to 2020s – five DC pensions (teal) from different jobs (deliberately left unconsolidated – I like to monitor each), all shown as estimated retirement incomes rather than potsMy future:
➡️ 2030s – retirement, with my total estimated monthly income from age 67 shown at the top, increasing until I die …
➡️ 2050s/60s – my life expectancy is 84, but could be higher!
Ok – I admit this person’s had a pretty cool life (in pension terms) and he/she’s looking forward to life in 30 years of more.
I haven’t seen the whole of someone’s financial life expressed in this way and the idea of a pension autobiography is very cool.
In 2026, meanwhile, I read the “average” pension is only £595 per week (£30,940 p.a.) for a retired couple and £282 per week (£14,664 p.a.) for a single retiree.
Reading the autobiographies of high earners is said to help us learn their decision-making frameworks, find motivation, and discover practical methods for solving complex problems. I’m not so sure about that.
For me this example simply confirms that earnings in the UK financial services sector sit well above the national median, with overall averages ranging from roughly £35,000 to nearly £50,000 annually, and specialised or senior roles stretching past £100,000.
Pension envy is the feeling of jealousy or frustration that some people experience when their own retirement savings look small compared to the secure, guaranteed pensions of others.
Britain’s DB pensions were once the envy of the world, but our retirement structures now just face continuing talk about fairness and proposals for yet more “reform”.
I have had a similar comment from a friend of yours now living in Brighton. My view is that we should be happy when the system works as well as feeling sympathy for those who have less going forward.
On the BBC news this morning was a woman pensioner who was living on a budget for food that allowed him to spend £1 a day.
Finally she met a woman who advised her she could get help for her rent through pension credit and she did and she said that now she can go out and have a coffee with her friends.
She said she lived on the state pension and some money from a pension she had saved for. We in financial services have no idea.
Thanks Derek