No fear of breaking even on an annuity

Annuities are much more complicated than you might have realised. And that's where providers are looking to make their profits.

I wrote a piece this week on the pensions industry. It should, I said, be abolished entirely in favour of an extension and expansion of the Isa allowance. I have an almost endless list of complaints against pensions and the way both the state and the industry use them.

But the main one is that the industry has complexity on its side and, boy oh boy, does it ever use it. Most people saving into a pension or being paid out of a pension haven't got the faintest idea how it all works or what it is all costing them. So it costs them too much.

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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.