Are you putting enough into your pension?

Britain's state pension is miserly. And given the state of public finances, it's unlikely to get any more generous. So you need to make sure you're saving enough to give you a fighting chance of a decent retirement, says Tim Bennett.

The economy may have shown the odd sign of life recently, but the news on pensions remains bleak. This week we learned that Britain offers the most miserly state pension £95.25 a week for an individual and £152.30 for a couple of 17 OECD countries, the Office of National Statistics reported. And given the urgent need to make spending cuts to address Britain's woeful public finances, there's no guarantee future pensioners will get even that.

The UK's debt problems also mean that state employees shouldn't get too comfortable about their pensions. If you use "proper financial methods" to calculate it, says the Policy Exchange think thank, the "unfunded" obligation (meaning the Treasury has not set aside any specific funds) on taxpayers to pay for these pensions is around £1.1trn well above the national debt. This is simply unaffordable, and many believe that a change in conditions is a matter of when, rather than if.

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.