“DWP backs ‘landmark’ expansion of auto-enrolment”

Mar 20, 2023 | Pensions

There’s been a lot going on, and this little piece of legislation may well have crept below your radar. It means that every adult employee, whatever they earn, will now be auto-enrolled into a pension. It was previously only 22 year olds getting more than the ‘lower earnings limit’ of just under £6,400 a year. The idea is to ‘help lower earners, who have traditionally found it harder to save for retirement’. Here’s the scary thing however. If you run the numbers, someone saving 8% (the auto-enrol, workplace pension minimum) of their £20,000 salary for 50 years will have enough to give them a pension of around £8,000 a year after inflation. But very few are going to plough-on, saving at that rate for that long. And, if we haven’t sunk beneath the waves, we’re likely to have had at least 20 tinkering governments before then. So problem not yet solved, I’d say.

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a woman holding a jar with savings written on it
“Annuity rates soar to 14-year high”

“Annuity rates soar to 14-year high”

I was asked this week whether annuities are now ‘a good investment’. They’ve been recommended very rarely in recent years, since ‘pension freedoms’ allowed pretty much unlimited drawdown on pension funds and anything left to be passed on to beneficiaries free of Inheritance Tax.

“Pension fund crisis as gilt yields climb”

“Pension fund crisis as gilt yields climb”

What? Why? With apologies to any investment professionals reading this (if you are, I’m flattered), here it is in a nutshell. To borrow money, the government issues bits of paper (gilts) which say ‘lend us £100, we’ll pay you 1% a year for 20 years and then pay you back’.