There is a lot of concern at Pensions UK that people aren’t paying much attention to their pension. This is hardly surprising because people aren’t being spoken to about their pension but about all the things that we think should matter to them.

Thanks to Martin Richmond of Professional Pensions for reminding us of what we all do which is prioritise health and fitness apps over apps that tell us how much we have saved towards retirement.

We’re really not that interested about how individual pots are doing , what we want to know is what income we are looking forward to. The state tells us what we are getting at retirement. This is what my pension dashboard tells me today

This is what the pensions dashboard aspires to and it’s getting there , Robert Cochran – the voice of Scottish Widows (Lloyds Bank) gets this from his Pension Dashboard (he’s signed up to be a tester so gets what the test-site tells him

I hate the way “around” is used of a number as granular as £143,859.32 but otherwise I would be rather happy to have this forecast, Robert will be paid in retirement more than I have ever been paid!

But Robert  explains on linked in that he is being given the wrong number and that he’ll be paid a lot less than this but he can work this out with his financially attuned brain.

He’s getting the wrong future income because one feed from a pension scheme is showing his cash in value as a pension and another showing the pension he’d get if he carried on paying (even though he’s left that workplace).

In short he’s  being confused by what’s a pot and what’s a pension. Richard Smith ticks his fellow expert off for not giving the dashboard the chance to get its act together but for once I can’t side with Richard. If Robert’s experience is replicated millions or even thousands of times then we will all find going on the one app that really matters (the pension dashboard) will be disastrous for our confidence in retiring.

We really don’t need much to get to what Richard Smith calls “consumer level”. We need what the pensions dashboard aims to give us, an income on a certain date (explained by the full pensions timeline- if you’re interested).

We then need a lot of collaboration to allow people , rather than to consolidate to one provider , to do the best with what they’ve got, letting collaboration by the providers give them the chance to get guided retirement income.

The consumer (that’s you and me) wants to know two things- one that the information that’s arrived on the digital dashboard is approximate to the income they can expect (Robert’s wanted) and that there’s a way to convert pots into pension that makes sense to consumers when they’re ready to swap work for retirement. Here the dashboard is very right, it should answer the big question

“what can I retire on if I were retiring now and what if I held on to the date they are quoting to me”

My concern is the concern of the Pensions UK.  People really aren’t in to checking what the day to day pot value of a pensions saving plan has done in the past few days.

They want to see their income from their savings as a single number and then at a certain time and then work out how retirement might arrive for them. It really is bad news if the data on two of the pots that Robert has are misquoting pension but it’s good that someone’s trying to project his retirement income. It is something that people will want to see, because it is as simple as the state pension that they get (as I illustrate at the top of the blog).

How to turn all these pots into the promised income, or something approaching the granular number being quoted, is another matter, the problem that a new report from the actuaries, tries to address.

We ask people to pay our pensions some attention but until we have our act sorted out with a reliable pension dashboard , we don’t want to know. We promote pensions in a way that’s distinctly archaic.

See what I mean! Poor Robert and archaic promotion of pensions.

Until we know how our pots can pay a pension through guided retirement. We must learn how to  turn pots to pension or hire an adviser to do it for us and that was really not what we signed up to. We signed up to the simplicity of the state pension.

My next blog will look at this stage two with the Institute of Actuaries. They’re trying to get as all we pension people should, they have the same  realisation.  Pensions UK and Robert Cochran are shocked to discover we’ve  a long way to go till we elevate our thinking to consumer level.

To state the bleeding obvious, we should be offering consumers a better retirement income  forecast than we do today.