Pensions are for your retirement, not for a rainy day

The point of saving into a pension is that you can’t get the money until you retire. The chancellor should resist the temptation to relax the rules on early access.

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There's no point saving into a pension if you're going to spend it early
(Image credit: Copyright: Dan Brownsword)

Budgets bring all sorts of odd ideas out of the woodwork. Ahead of this week's we saw pretty much everyone involved in the financial industry to produce a view of some kind on the UK's pensions system allowances up, allowances down, rates up rates down, freedoms up, freedoms down.

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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.