If you watched the Channel 4 Dispatches programme this evening What’s Your Pension Really Worth? you could be forgiven for wanting to totally give up on saving in a pension plan.
All the ‘evidence’ suggested that if you really busted a gut and saved a massive amount of money, you were still going to end up being ripped off by annuity providers.
A much better idea, the programme seemed to suggest, was to take on a mortgage debt and buy a buy-to-let property.
Alternatively you might like to take a call from one of those nice call centres and get involved in a bit of ‘pensions liberation’ which seemed to be OK as long as you didn’t tell the HMRC you had done so!!
There were one or two reasonably good learning points about the need to shop around for an annuity and to make sure that the annuity you purchased actually reflected your wishes (a sad story about a family who thought their father had bought a survivor’s pension for his widow- but hadn’t).
In reality this programme did nothing to install an confidence in saving for retirement and as one pensions expert on Twitter this evening called it a bit of a pensions car crash.
When oh when might we get a balanced programme that actually helps the consumer may good choices about what to do?
Or perhaps that just won’t be the kind of interesting TV that producers are looking for.
