A pension’s autobiography on the dashboard!

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 pots

My 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.