26 Nov 2019

I was reading yesterday an article on Personnel Today (the personal upskilling pledge to myself is still going well!) on pensions. Now depending on which camp you sit in, I have already lost you at the P word and you have skipped past today’s ramblings. Others, this will have caught your interest.

I like a bit of pension chat personally and my interest was sparked many years as auto enrolment started to hit organisations and at the time I was working for a large county council and was part of roll out of this. I absorbed a lot of information which was helpful as I went on to lead the staging of fours companies in one Group, meaning I went through cycles of pensions talks for many years afterwards. Still one of my biggest (geekiness) achievements was amalgamation from 5 schemes into 1 and I think I was the only one who got how exciting this was!

So, the headline was ‘Men have £78K more in pension pot at retirement’. Well without reading the article you would automatically start reasoning why this would be, lower pay/gender disparages, career breaks for children, reduction in contracted hour = less contributions. These are all mentioned in the article but one of the main areas I think is lack of understanding. They stated that 4 in 10 women feel in the dark about pensions but there has been a bigger increase in women (14.6%) v men (8%) contributing towards a pension scheme in the last 15 years. I personally think this will have been impacted by auto enrollment rather than an informed decision but without reading more into the research, that is just my opinion.

Organisations should begin to support financial awareness and understanding and one of the biggest reasons we had such a high retention rate in our pension scheme was demonstrating through examples, that starting to save at the age of 22 v saving at age 40 made it much more achievable and realistic to have a pension that can support you in retirement. I would push it if I said I made pensions ‘fun’ but I do think I can say I made it accessible and understandable.

#challenge #100days #HR #Pensions