Thursday, March 08, 2012

Things could be worse - you could be marketing pensions


Public confidence in pensions has fallen to an all-time low, according to the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF)

A survey for the NAPF found 54% of all employees are not confident in pensions compared to other ways of saving. 37% said they are confident, resulting in a Confidence Index of minus 17%.

This marks a record low since the Index was first run in 2007. It is also a sharp fall from minus 6% in September 2011, and from plus 5% in autumn 2010.

All of my friends reckon that have had to contribute real money for a pension - that excludes the public sector - advise their children that they have been a waste of money. Now I think that is an over-reaction but today's potential pension customers are not going to get a lot of supportive comments from their parents.

Maybe we need a completely rebrand the concept of pensions and the wording? Things are not helped by successive governments who have changed the rules and have seen people's pensions as a large piggy-bank to be raided when times get tough.

It looks like the Coalition are going to follow in the previous Government's footsteps and make the same mistakes. Things are not made any better when you have headlines like those in today's newspapers saying that the Government's Printing Money activities have cost pension funds £90,000,000,000. Dick Stroud

No comments: