We all know pensions are important, they’re the things that pay us a wage in retirement when we stop working.
But we know precious little about how they work and though we see large amounts of our salaries disappearing into them , we have little confidence about where the money is going, whether we’re getting value for our money or how we’re going to get our pension paid back to us.
There’s just so much to think about- investment, tax, timing and not least – the vexed question of how long we’re gong to need this “age wage”.
If we knew what we were doing and had answers to some of these questions, pensions could become things to look forward to , not just that pile of papers that lurks in the bottom drawer.
We need people we can trust!
The pensions we save into are looked after by people we can trust – they’re not called trustees for nothing. Sometimes the people charged with looking after our interests go under different names – like independent governance committees but it comes down to the same thing – the people we can and should trust – are looking after our pensions and generally doing a good job of it.
The trouble is that this message is not getting through to us – the general public. The pension experts are over there making statements about value for money that aren’t very relevant to people with busy lives. Ordinary people want people they can trust who talk to them in a simple and easy way.
That’s where AgeWage comes in
We want to help you with the things you find difficult so that pensions aren’t scary any more. Examples of the kind of things that people don’t understand include
- what happens to my money when it goes to my pension?
- am I getting value for the money I spend on retirement?
- how do I join a pension?
- what am I paying the people who manage my pension and how do I pay it?
- how do I get to get my pension savings back?
- how can I find lost pensions?
- how to go about bringing all my pots together to get my money back?
this is the first of seven articles I’m writing between now and the end of March, all are about making pensions a little less scary. Helping people like these fine folk who we talked to recently in Central London.
