Richard Smith was more than ever Dashboard Definitive this morning. Here is an hour long video of what went on at the Pension PlayPen coffee morning. Each section of ten minutes delivers more than an hour of conference discussion and that means you get more in an hour than you’d get by taking an hour out of your diary to listen to the usual suspects waffle on their sanitised nonsense!

Now that anyone can test the pension dashboard for themselves (and report back their findings), everybody with an interest should. But only after watching this video!

I found out that because I took some tax free cash out of my personal pension it no longer shows (quite rightly- as I am a “pensioner” having crystallised my pot.

I found out that the amount showing when I log into Nest is nearly twice as much as shows  on the dashboard. My partner found that being in a hybrid DB/DC with AVCs to boot – confused the hell out of the mechanism that fed into the dashboard. The reality is that the first iteration of the dashboard will be inaccurate and potentially misleading.

Richard’s talk confirmed my suspicions that we will not be told whether the income on display whether it is triple locked, targeting inflation , guaranteeing inflation but with a cap or not paying any inflationary increases (aka falling in real value every time we get inflation – all the time).

Richard is brilliant on all this and I can only urge you to listen. There aren’t many questions (as I suspect most of us wanted to hear more of him than of ourselves). My concerns were brilliantly dealt with.

Thanks to everyone who came, I’m sorry for those who couldn’t but not as much as usual, as – having watched the video – I realise that it loses very little from the original. I am not sure that a better performance from the master of the dashboard will be available so make sure you watch it here. You can send it to your friends and colleagues by using this URL