I don’t consider tomorrow being “old” – a bad thing at all! That’s because I have a decent pension. It’s why I’m not for rebranding “pensions” for young people.
I take this seriously enough to write this blog and hope Thomas reads me before his session.
“The word itself conjures up retirement, old age, pensionER”
I’m not going to let that go. When I was young I thought that getting old started when you got your old age pension. That was your 65th birthday, which is tomorrow for me. Yes I was born 11/11/1961 and today is 10/11/2026. I wasn’t sure that tomorrow would come but I paid for it anyway.
I had respect for my grandparents , my parents and for everyone I knew who was old for what they’d done and what they were doing then.
For me when I was in my twenties, the idea of having longer being old than I’d had on this planet was quite something. It was quite something not because I was sorry for old people but because I admired them and enjoyed the idea that I could do with my later years as they were doing.
I would not rebrand “pensions” but talk them up as the way to allow your old person to do what you want with your money and your long life!
But for a lot of them, a pension is their first proper investment into the stock market. It’s a good one too. Your employer tops it up, the government adds tax relief and you’ve got 40 years of compound interest ahead of you.
This is right for many young people who know about how money works and get excited by their future wealth. But it’s not connecting with pensions and is dismissing them.
But what’s not right is to disrespectful of old age as if your parents and grandparents are nags. They have lived their lives, may wish that they had lived them more sensibly and put by more for their later days.
They could be nagging because they care for you, have you thought of that? I know that people can see pension providers as looking to make money out of you and that’s right. Commercial companies have to make money to be around to pay out the pensions and the question they have to prove is that they’re giving value for the money they’re taking to manage your pension.
I know that I am not doing “fun stuff“, reminding you that your parents and grandparents care for you. But most do and if they don’t, you don’t have to follow them down that route.
There are types of long term savings plan (like Penfold, Pension Bee and several others) which offer the chance to build up wealth that offers freedom in a different way than a pension and I’ve got nothing against that. If you want to supplement your workplace pension or transfer your workplace pension into one of these excellent products – do so.
But do not do so without being mindful that most people (and probably you) will get to a stage of life when your opportunity and wish is no longer focussed on earning more money. Infact it happens for most people in their fifties, maybe sixties and sometimes later, that you want to rely on a wage in retirement you’ve deferred pay for.
It is an awful lot easier to achieve the kind of lives that most older people have if you have your own pension. You will have a state pension and you’ll have a public or private pension if we stick to the strategy that was established after the second war and has developed since.
We should not disrespect pensions, like we shouldn’t disrespect older people. Young people can do a lot more with the money that they earn than what they put into a pension, but boring as work and pensions are, they do go well together.
Of course I’m not going to stop work tomorrow, but I could.