Don't let your financial adviser scare you into saving too much

You won't need nearly as much money in retirement as the financial industry wants you to believe, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

Most stories in the papers tell us that people are worse off than they think they are or we think they are. So, I have been pleased this week to see two pointing out the opposite. The first, in The Times, tells us that "the world is better off than we thought".

The OECD has been putting out reports into global well-being since 1820, and notes that if you take a few factors outside straightforward GDP into account, the world looks to be in pretty good shape. GDP per head has gone up ten-fold since 1820, and wages have also risen very substantially. But add in advances in education and it looks even more "impressive."

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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.