People in their 50s and 60s spoke to The i Paper about their pension saving regrets
Caroline Romero admits that for most of her life pension planning was not “high on her list”.
In the 1980s, she and her late husband started running a restaurant, which they continued for more than two decades.
Times were tough as they negotiated multiple UK recessions, and Caroline admits that she put nothing away for her later years because she expected to inherit a house and retire with her husband to Spain.
But in 2012, her husband passed away. At 54, Caroline found her retirement plans “gone out the window” as she struggled to pay the mortgage on the house in which she and her four foster children lived.
Now, with a “lot of regret” about failing to pay into a pension at a younger age, she says the guidance given decades earlier was not as clear as it could have been.
“I don’t think truthfully in the 1980s the government gave us the right steer. I was young, I had a family and a business I was running, so I didn’t think too much about my pension,” she explains.
Aged 66, she receives the state pension, which she describes as “nothing”, and still works full-time running her business, Grey Matters Consultancy.
The business was set up to receive the support Caroline feels she did not get after the death of her husband, and gives guidance on things such as benefits, downsizing, and will-writing, for older people.
With no personal retirement cash beyond the £1,000 per month she gets from the UK state pension, she says she won’t be retiring in the near future.
“If I retired, I’d have to sell my house, I’d have to downsize to a one-bedroom flat I think,” she says.
Caroline, who lives in Berkshire, says: “I live in a nice house, in a nice part of the world and I don’t want to sacrifice what I have worked hard for.”
But she is not the only person at or approaching retirement who regrets not saving more at a younger age.
Monica Kranner, a 55-year-old nutritionist, is another who says she did not put away cash in her 20s and 30s, and is now playing catch-up.
Monica, who lives in London but is originally from Austria, says she “never really thought to face up” to the issue in her early career.
She says part of the reason was that as she did not have children, it was not something she felt she really needed to do.
But after becoming a mum at 54 “everything’s changed”.
“I had a little panic because I didn’t save,” she says.
“What I regret is I didn’t look into what finance experts said in my younger years. I think now it’s much easier because you have the internet and there’s so much out there on information,” she explains.
Monica saw one of her businesses, which she planned to sell, collapse during the Covid pandemic. It had been part of her retirement plan.
Investing everything she had into the businesses was why she did not focus on pension saving, she says.
Now, the nutritionist has started saving small amounts into a pension, but says it does not yet constitute a significant amount.
She is writing books for extra income and focusing on her business – MKNutrition & Mindset Coach Ltd.
Meanwhile, 51-year-old Drew Emery, from Leeds, didn’t start paying into his pension personally until about the age of 26 or 27.
For the past 20 years, he has worked as a freelance writer and has found it difficult to know if he’s saving enough each month, especially with no employer matching his contributions.
He now thinks it is unlikely he will retire before 70.
He said: “I think I realised in my mid to late 30s that I wasn’t saving enough. I’d had a permanent role for a few years that had paid into a pension for me and I’d got a good chunk, but once I went freelance it stalled, then stopped growing altogether.
“I sat down with a financial adviser who went through some illustrations with me, and it wasn’t great news for the retirement I planned.”
Drew, who recently supported the Get Britain Pension Ready – a campaign run by annuity comparison service Annuity Ready to help people get information about financial options in retirement – says the state pension will be an “essential” part of his retirement planning, although he now has a £100 standing order every month towards his pension, and tries to put more in when he can.
