£1m for comfy old age? Better start saving…
Apparently, we need a £1million pension pot to enjoy a comfortable old age. No, that’s not collectively – each. A silver-fox couple who really get on, possibly because they only just met on Telegraph Dating, could share, I suppose, but you get the gist.
I must confess I’ve been poring over the exhaustively detailed facts and figures provided by the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association like a DUP special adviser rootling through the eviscerated entrails of the Brexit agreement. And it doesn’t look good.
If I retire on a minimum of £10,200 a year, I can afford a UK coach holiday but not a gym membership, my furniture will come from Wilko, and I’ll be buying own-brand tea bags at Tesco. On an annual income of £33,000, however, I can bag a fortnight in Italy, a
£75 cut and colour every six weeks and Kenco coffee.
My instinct is to lie in the foetal position under the kitchen table. But, realistically, I need a hugely timeconsuming hobby that either gets me out of the house (no heating necessary) or leaves me too exhausted to do anything but
listen to the wireless and drink homemade gin, distilled from hedge clippings and despair.
That’s a toss-up, then, between wild swimming, which costs nothing, and bringing up my grandchildren, which pays nothing.
At present, I do neither because I don’t like the breezy freeziness of British water, and I am still bringing up my actual children.
But if this blunt report tells us anything, it is that we must force ourselves to sit up and plan for the future, even those of us who couldn’t tell a gleaming financial instrument from a second-hand tuba.
I have no great desire to drive a 4x4 or start collecting expensive antiques. I shall have books to read, dogs to walk, friends to meet at the cinema or gather for rowdy-andopinionated Sunday lunches that last until bedtime.
What constitutes “comfortable” is a matter of perception. For me and for most of us, it resides in this: choice. And we must accept, however reluctantly, that choice and comfort is usually predicated on a cushion of cash.