2nd January 2014

Pension- somewhere cheap to stay in France?

Letter to the editor

Dear sir,

Both my wife and I paid into a pension as soon as we started work at age 17, and we increased the contribution percentage of our salaries several times during the 1970s throughout the 1980s, and our employers also increased their contribution percentages as well.

We also started various pensions privately with insurance companies throughout our working lives, some of which were with profits schemes for safety and some were unit linked.

We are now in our late 50s and I have just been informed by my Financial Adviser that there are some problems with our pension planning. 

Apparently the government has stopped the first pensions which we started at age 17 until we are aged 67. In my wife’s case this is a loss of 7 years pension which is about £91,000 and in my case it is a loss of 2 years pension which is about another £26,000.

We were promised about £250 per week from age 60 for my wife and the same per week for myself from age 67. Not only have the Government stolen the above figures, but apparently we are now only to receive about £145 per week. If we both live to age 80, this is another loss to us of £70,980 for my wife and another £70,980 for myself.

My Financial Adviser also tells me that in 1997 the Labour Government started taxing my previously un-taxable private pensions, and apparently they have also only made about half of what they should have done. Furthermore, the nice safe with profits schemes which we had been paying into for a long time, have now collapsed with relatively little value because the Labour Government insisted that they sell out of the market right at the bottom in 2003.

Anyway, according to my financial adviser, apparently it will now all be OK because of something called compulsory enrolment to a new pension scheme which the Government has just invented, and also the government has cracked down on the outrageous charges which they say Financial Advisers have been ripping out of my pensions all these years.

But I am not so sure, particularly after a lifetime of deceit and what appears to be outright theft by various governments, particularly the Labour Government, and I am not entirely sure that the loss of my pensions has a great deal to do with Financial Adviser charges, as they seem to be the only people who have NOT let me down over the years. 

My question to your readers, who I understand are mostly the best Independent Financial Advisers, is twofold :-

1) Should I really join the new compulsory enrolment thingy?

2) And, whilst I am a loyal patriot could somebody explain to me in simple terms where my main pension has been spent, because I reckon, on the above figures, that the government has had £258,960 from my main original pensions, and goodness knows how much from our private ones?

I am awaiting your response with great curiosity.

Mr Joseph Publique

Auto-Enrolment, Adviser Letter of the Week, Regulation, Pensions