You probably are saving enough for your retirement, but you might want to change how you do it

Don't worry. You'll probably have enough

(Image credit: © Getty Images/iStockphoto)

published 15 June 2021

You aren’t saving enough. How do I know? Because fund management companies keep telling me so.

My inbox is jammed with press releases from them. “Is saving half your age into your pension enough?” asks one. Answer: No. Current auto-enrolment numbers are “simply not enough”, says another. “One in four women over 50 have less than £5,000 in their pension pot,” screams a third. Oh, and “two-thirds of people aged 50-65 are undersaving for their retirement,” and so on and so on.

You get the picture. It’s tinned soup and staycations all the way for you forever. Pandemic or no pandemic, you are not going down the Nile. Awful, isn’t it? I’m not convinced it is.

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There are two things to remember here. The first is that fund management companies grow in two ways: by performing well (so their assets under management grow naturally) and by encouraging you to give them more of your money to manage so their income rises without the pesky problem of having to perform well (all fund managers charge you a percentage of your assets under management).

The result of this is that one of the industry’s main marketing strategies has to be the constant release of the kind of statistics that keep you in a state of perpetual anxiety about whether you have or have not saved enough.

You almost certainly are saving enough

The second thing to remember is that there is a very good chance that you are saving enough, with the caveat that everyone has a different “enough”. In the UK almost everyone in work is auto-enrolled into a pension, with 8% of their salary going in every year. That might not seem enough to fund-management marketeers (nothing will ever seem enough to them, I suspect). But if things go mostly OK in the market – say 4% to 5% average annual growth – that will mean the average person on the average salary ends up with about £200,000-plus in their pot.

It’s not private-jet stuff, but add it to your state pension and you have a base income of around £18,000. We are also saving plenty outside our pensions. UK residents put £75bn into 13 million adult individual savings accounts (Isas) in the 2019-2020 tax year – £7.1bn more than the year before. The number of Lifetime Isas, from which you can withdraw cash for house purchases, more than doubled to 545,000. There is now £620bn in UK Isa accounts.

All this might begin to explain why, despite the best efforts of the industry, only 16% of Generation X (41- to 55-year-olds) say they are concerned about being able to live comfortably in retirement. There’s a similar situation in the US where, despite relentlessly downbeat messages from the pensions industry, 80% of US retirees say they have enough money to “live comfortably”.

Keep an eye on your costs

Still, assuming you are one way or another saving “enough” –or at least what you can – maintaining calm in the face of their marketing is only the beginning of your battle with the industry. The next part is attempting to make sure that the fund managers messing with your head do at least a reasonable job of managing your money once they have wheedled it out of you – and that they don’t take too much of it for themselves along the way.

The question of cost is ongoing. Nearly all fund managers still charge too much nearly all the time (check their margins) and the extent to which they do really matters. Invest £5,000 a year, get a return of 5% and pay 0.5% in management fees and 30 years later you will have £320,820. Make that a 1% fee and you’ll have £291,000.

You could argue that it doesn’t matter what you pay as long as you get outperformance. I’d argue that you can’t know when you commit to pay for a fund what kind of performance you’ll get, so it is a slightly circular argument.

Given that cost is the only known variable when you buy, you might as well go for low cost over high cost. Follow that to its logical extreme and you will also think that you might as well just buy passively run funds, which are generally cheaper than active ones.

Look at the US and that view seems vindicated. Over the past five years 75% of large-cap US funds have failed to beat the S&P 500 and last year 60% of them underperformed, even though active managers are supposed to thrive in a crisis. Why?

Passive or active funds? It depends on the market

Over the past decade the top performers in the US have been the tech mega caps, such as Apple, Alphabet and Amazon. Thanks to their size, these are also the top holdings in all passive funds, hence the excellent performance of said passive funds. Active funds that were also (quite rightly) holding these will have underperformed passive funds due to their fees. Active funds not holding them will have underperformed simply because they weren’t holding them. There has been little way to win.

Things have been different in the UK. Over the past five years its mega companies have been a bit droopy, due in the main to their old-fashioned value bias (Shell, BHP and BP all feature in the top ten in the FTSE 100). So active managers that have not held them – but held, say, mid caps instead – have easily outperformed. According to AJ Bell, 85% have beaten the average FTSE 100 tracker over the past ten years. That’s why advisers often tell investors to go passive in the US and active in the UK. Good advice.

Or at least it was good advice. Something might have changed. Look at the past few months. So far this year 60% of active fund managers have outperformed in the US. Last month, 70% did.

This is because, as the world reopens and inflation is upon us, big tech is no longer outperforming; mid-caps are – and so is anything with a value bias. That suggests that on your way to “enough”, you might want to consider a major change to the investing styles within your portfolio.

Go active in the US. If the market is no longer to be led by ten to 20 huge growth stocks, there will be much more scope for active managers to outperform. And shift a bit more to passive in the UK. If big commodity, financial and pharmaceutical stocks are about to outperform here, there will be less scope for active managers to outperform the index. All change.

• This article was first published in the Financial Times

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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.