What sort of crappy backward County still allows toll bridges ?

A57 to Lincoln and there's a bloody toll bridge, 40p each friggin way, thats almost two miles of mileage allowance wasted, had to drive round in circles for a bit to make that up.


Seriously, how many A roads still have highwaymen working them ?

Dunham Toll Bridge, I'm surprised you weren't aware of it.

Only when half a mile away




I normally head to Lincoln from the north rather than from the east, decided to go a different way today just for the hell of it, grrrrr...

Its not even an impressive bridge.

It was even worse pre 1975 when it got upgraded carriage-wise.

Ah, pensions. I've been looking into getting one of these (I'm 24), but no idea where to begin and what's best for me.

Don't worry, what's best for you will be decided by a totally impartial advisor.
Then your fund will not be be seen as a cash cow and the investment performance will not be dismal and finally at the end of it all the annuity rate will not be poor.
Your pension will be one you can depend on and your retirement will be comfortable ... trust me I used to be a financial advisor.
lol

You left out the bit about a retirement spent cruising the world on your pension.

I didn't think my wife would approve.

Beware of anyone offering independent financial 'advice'. They will probably recommend the policy that makes them the most commission. 25 years later you will be trying to track down them / their insurer to bring a claim for a mis-sold policy.

Take out a SIPP and do it yourself without the need of an advisor.You will need to do some research though , dont do it blind.

Funny things personal pensions. The big selling point is if you are / become, say,a 40% taxpayer you get £100 of savings for each £60 you contribute. The downside is your money is locked up and no longer belongs to you. Not only that but when you take an annuity you lose the capital you saved (which an annuity provider - insurance company - swipes).

To save for a decent pension you'll need to contribute c. 20% of your gross pay through your working life (which most people can't afford).

I was told 12% (for my age, and obviously the later you leave it to save the more you'll need to contribute in the future - source: BBC News or DWP) but basically the advice is to avoid at all costs and drop everything into a savings or ISA?



What is one of those?

Grrrr ... don't get me (or Jerry Chicken) going on ISAs.



With having largely had irregular earnings over the last 15 years, I opened two ISAs – one, an ordinary one, and the second, taking a bit more of a gamble.

The former got the point, a couple of years ago, that it was gaining me something like £10 every six months. It's taken seven years or so for the second to even get back to what I'd put in.

You're better with an ordinary savings account, frankly – and fortunately, since the crash, those seem miraculously to have become available again.

One of the things I most detest about today is that you're expected to be an expert in every damned thing you need, because so many companies have utterly ditched real ideas of customer service.

Do what the supposed pension investment experts do - look for companies that pay a high dividend - if you had put your money into say BP not only is it very low risk in the long term the return on the investment is two fold: capital growth, since October growth has been 12% and dividend yield is 4,5% so if you invested £3k that would be worth £3,360 plus you would have had £135 in dividend so a growth of near £500 on your £3k investment. A tad better than an ISA!! - 3k invested in St Ives PLC a year ago is now worth a staggering £4,875 - thank goodness for those share save schemes!!

Self Invested Personal Pension. I got one as I had a works pension with Aviva or Norwich Union as it was called. Absolutely useless they are. When the pension lost money during the bull period around 7 or 8 years ago it was the last straw for me. With the Sipp you decide which funds , stocks and shares your pension is invested in.If it loses money its my fault. I didnt see why I should pay fees to a useless company to lose my money.

I'm like a lot of people in their mid-late 20s without a pension (although I'll be auto-enrolled in one in a few months) and to be brutally honest, reading this, it's no surprise that so many my age haven't bothered.

I completely get the importance of having a pension but the thing that has put me off is basically the sentiments that people like JerryChicken have shown. Everything I'm told is that pension companies are basically all shysters who promise the earth and deliver a fraction of it.

I've spoken to advisors and pension companies and not one of them has been able to explain why I'm wrong to think that. That, to me, is down to one of two reasons; either their marketing is extremely poor (and given the size of some of these marketing budgets, that's unlikely) or they are in fact all shysters.

Is it any wonder young people don't save into a pot?

One thing that any young person who wishes to start contributing to a private pension scheme should bear in mind is that, outside of company contributed schemes (which in my totally unqualified opinion you should always go for - ie your employer also contributes some element of your investment), you are basically on your own swimming in a sea of sharks.

And its not just the bloke at the end of your street who has rented a lock-up shop and called himself a "Financial Advisor", its the likes of NatWest and probably all of the other major financial institutions who see your pension contributions as simply a flow of unrestricted funds for their own "investment" divisions to play with.

I name NatWest specifically for it was they who received £500 a month from me when I had my own business, at the recommendation of, erm, NatWest, during one of their annual appraisals of the business and my personal financials, advice which I was then billed and automatically debited for - are you young gullible soon-to-be bled dry "investors" getting a picture here ?

But don't worry too much about it they told me, your pension "investment" will provide you with a life of Reilly when you are, ooooh 55, (yes that was one age that they mentioned), world cruises will be yours and a champagne pensioner lifestyle awaits, oh and by the way, we do ISA's as well, you really can't lose with those for if you had "invested" in an ISA ten years ago it would be worth three times the initial investment, look here is the proof, and indeed there was the proof, I gave then £10,000 to put in two ISA's.

Two years later my £10K ISA's were worth around £7k and something didn't quite seem right with my pension schemes either for despite putting in £500 a month the pot didn't seem to be growing by £6k a year plus interest but was shuffiling along something less than that amount, ah yes, the fees they said, and the market, its not very good at the moment, but don't worry they said, it will pick up and you've plenty of time yet.

There was even one year when my £500 a month didn't cover the losses they were making in the "investment" of my pension scheme and for two years it started to go backwards, I was actually playing them to go and put my money on the horses down at Ladbrookes, or so it seemed, this culminated in one annual statement where the covering letter stated that "We are pleased to enclose your annual statement..." and when I opened it the value of the pot had fallen by £4000 in the year, if this was them being pleased then I'd hate to get a letter that started "We're very sorry to say..."

Eventually a few years ago NatWest threw up their hands and finally admitted "We haven't a fekkin clue what we're doing so we're selling our pensions division in its entirety to the Arthur Foggan Scrap Company", or similar, and they sold the business to Aviva, who, possibly by coincidence seem to know what they are doing and have dragged my pension pot back up to what it was before the banking system failed in spectacular style five years ago, we may now be able to go forward even though according to NatWest I should have been retired these past two years and should be typing this from the library of the Queen Mary II as we gently dock in some foreign clime and I toss a few pesata's at a local ragamuffin to peddle me on the back of a cycle taxi to a local bar.

Am I being sarcastic - yes, they are all fookwits, trust none of them.

Should you bother with a pension plan - yes, unfortunately you should because despite them all being fookwits who are looking to line their own pockets with some of the cream from your earnings, they are the only fookwits that will help you, may your god go with you in your venture.

Assuming no investment growth, no inflation and no salary rises 40 years saving 12% of salary would give you a fund of 4.8x salary. At current annuity rates that give you a pernsion of, say, 20% to 25% of your salary. If you assume 5% pa real terms growth (ie above inflation investment performance) I would guess (without doing the calculations) that would equate to a c. 2/3rds of salary pension. Not sure those levels of investment returns will be feasible though?

My motto - never ever ever buy a "financial product" from a High Street bank. Even worse if you know anyone who is proposing to use a banks trustee service to deal with their estate on death persuade them to change their arrangements.

The problem with that is you have to spend time handling your investments and it's easy to get things very wrong by poor discipline.

More generally, seems to me SIPPs are just another con - they line the pockets of IFAs when they advise switching out of insureance companies, of SIPP providers and in my case stockbrokers. The time I've paid all the fees, especially the 'brokers discretionary management fees it has been almost impossible to make positive, inflation adjusted growth over recent years (except this last year).

For most people, I guess the best possible is to decide what index you wish to track (eg FTSE 100 or whatever) and just invest in the lowest cost tracker fund. Then forget about it until about 10 years before retirement when you start to need to consider reducing exposure to shares.

The big problem with investment managers is they are only worth paying if the outperform the market. Despite all the hype, glossy brochures, "reguaralry top quartile" etc there is no empiraical evidence that they do. If I recall correctly, it would take 15 years straight outperformance of the market by a fund manager to be able to substantiate a claim of outperformance. There will be virtually no fund managers that have been in post that long. So all claims are just marketing drivel.

PS None of the above should be construed as advice!

PPS I kept a smaller part of my limited pension funds with an insurer and it has outperformed the SIPP.

The really frightening thing is that consecutive governments have now abdicated their responsibility to provide a pension for the current batch of 20/30 year olds and those who follow them and instead point them to private schemes which as you point out in your other post rely more on glossy brochures and unsubstantiated (and years later disclaimed) promises to take care of your future in a way that they already know is not possible.

Its very easy to be cynical about the whole mess that is the financial services sector but also very easy to justify the scepticism when their whole house of cards fell down in such a spectacular way.

It precisely the reason I said dont go into into it blind so you know what you are getting yourself into, be it trackers ,shares ot investment funds. If in the last year you invested in emerging markets then you will have lost out no doubt. If you invested in UK small caps then you will have made a tidy profit. Its all about having a spread of things in my opinion.

As you said in your first paragraph Dally you are right. Poor discipline will cost you.I researched things for about 12 months before I got my Sipp so I could fully understand what I was getting into.

BP is a bad example. Remember how much the value of its shares fell almost overnight with the Gulf of Mexico tragedy? Then there were those other "low risk" companies, loke RBS and Lloyds. Then there was Marconi plc - left with a huge cash pile by Lord Weinstock only for his successor to blow the lot and detroy the company. As very rich ex-investment banker said to me - the problem with shares is when they go down they go down quickly and much more quickly than they rise. You should never invest in less than, say 40, companies in order to try to mitigate risk.

I love reading stories about Ponzi schemes and bookies. I find them amusing as can be seen by some of the comments on these forums.

It's more amusing reading comments with people believing that concepts are actually reality.

It's a clever set of systems and so many have been sucked/suckered into them.

Some you lose, some you lose even more but it's always the shysters/bookies with the new cars, bonuses etc., very rarely the investors (gullible)