Are you paying into a lame pension?

Pensions can be expensive, and many of the default funds aren’t up to the job of providing a decent retirement anyway. So what do you do?

There aren't many things from the past most of us at MoneyWeek really hanker after. But we all really wish we had final-salary pensions. Back then, all employees had to do to get a good pension was to hang on to their jobs, and hope their employer didn't go bust before they died.

Today, nothing is so simple. You might still get a company pension (and soon, via the new auto-enrollment system, you probably will). But, as Josephine Cumbo points out in the Financial Times, you will have to contribute to it, then bear all the risk of both its investment performance and its later transformation into a long-term income.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.