Are you saving enough for your retirement? The Scottish Widdows Pension Report has concluded that not enough of us are.
Only 48% of Brits are managing to set aside enough to fund a comfortable retirement – down from 54% last year. This is the first time ever that the figure for non-savers or “not enough”-savers has fallen to less than half.
Interestingly there are clearly defined groups among those who are managing to save enough. Unsurprisingly, higher earners are managing to squirrel some money into their pensions.
Public sector workers are also maintaining their contributions, which they have perhaps been terrified into doing with all the media scaremongering about what will be done to their schemes. After all, if they suspect that future benefits may be cut, it must be best to put as much into the schemes as possible now because any entitlements that have already been built up at the time the changes are announced are likely to be maintained. There is also the inertia factor. If your contribution is deducted before your payslip gets printed, it would involve a considerable amount of hassle with the HR department to make an alteration to it.
Pensions, it seems, have also become a gender issue, with women over 50 are not making adequate contributions. Only 38% of this age group had made adequate contributions according to Scottish Widdows. Analysts at Scottish Widdows have suggested that this generation of women may have seen the dot com bubble burst in the early noughties and then the impact of this recession and taken the view that putting much more into their pension plans would have been throwing good money after bad.
Who else is not saving enough? The Scottish Widdows survey also found that the self employed were not putting enough into pension vehicles. However, the results of this research may be misleading, because the retirement plans of a self-employed person probably include selling their business and living off the proceeds.
Finally and unsurprisingly, those with three children or more are not making enough pension contributions. However, this habit may change when the children are no longer dependant on their parents.
