Retirement review – weekend Money pages overview
Retirement was the name of the game this week with specific focus on annuities. Andrew Ellson kicked things off in The Times by disclosing details of a leaked e-mail from the ABI which indicates that ministers are about to attack the vested interests of pensions providers by overhauling the way people buy annuities. Ellson highlights how this could help restore the fractured relationship between politics and pensions.
The Sunday Times continued with the retirement theme, looking at how both high earners and members of workplace schemes can beat the uncertainty over pensions. Nina Montague-Smith wrote a piece on the annuity time bomb, where advisers warned that plummeting annuity rates are driving people into investment-backed retirement income policies.
The Telegraph also turned its beady eye to the pensions sector, as new research from Barings Asset Management showed that a sizeable number of people who have assessed their pensions schemes go with the default option available to them when joining a company. Nineteen per cent of people questioned in the research said they had no idea how their funds were invested.
Next up on the retirement round-up was the FT with news that European and US companies are paring back their contributions to defined-benefit pensions schemes in an attempt to reduce their costs. The FT also looked at how investors are increasingly leaving their pension pots invested in the stock market as the income offered by insurance companies fell to an all-time low last week.
The Guardian also noted the plummeting annuity rates and offered some constructive advice on how to survive the pensions crisis.
Many of the weekend papers noted how annuity rates were at an all-time low as a result of nose-diving government bond yields. The Sunday Times warned that gilts could be headed for a bubble and offered investors some advice on this tricky sector.
And the rest of the scores on the board this week are:
| Charity | 2% |
| Credit cards | 4% |
| Fraud/scams | 5% |
| IFAs | 0% |
| Insurance | 11% |
| Investment | 31% |
| Mortgages | 16% |
| Pensions | 19% |
| Regulation | 0% |
| Savings | 7% |
| Tax | 0% |
| Utilities | 5% |