“I don’t really understand pensions”

A local lady came into see me yesterday for some basic advice about her pensions. Like many people I meet, she started our conversation by pointing out that “I don’t really understand pensions”.

That wasn’t entirely true because she then went on to demonstrate that she had a pretty good grasp of the basics.

Unfortunately the financial services industry doesn’t have a good track record when it comes down to simple explanations. We had an interesting discussion around the differences between protected and non-protected rights, for example.

But sometimes the solutions can be simpler than the perceived problem.

In this lady’s case the establishment of a Stakeholder pension plan that would accept contributions from her new employer, personal contributions that she wanted to make and accept a transfer payment from a previous employers pension scheme where she had been offered a transfer value because she had less than two years of scheme membership.

Our job was going to be to select an appropriate plan, help her with a suitable investment strategy and then implement this. All of which we were going to do for a fixed fee and no commission.

The lady would then have a retirement planning base on which to build for the future.