Episode Details

As we celebrate International Women’s Week, new research in UK has found that the average woman in her twenties today will retire with £100,000 less in her pension than men.

The BBC reports that the insurance and pension provider Scottish Widows found that women will need to work an extra 40 years just to close the gap.

The main reasons are lower average earnings, greater probability of working part-time or taking career breaks and heavier childcare burden.

The government said its pension reforms had helped millions more women save for retirement.

Scottish Widows research supports other findings that women on average save less than men. During the first 15 years of their working lives, women on average save £2,200 a year, compared to £3,300 for men.

The effects of compound interest means that saving for your pension as early as possible is crucial to your retirement. This applies to anyone saving for retirement. 

As a rough guide, every 5 years of delaying a pension savings plan means your eventual fund can halve in value. In other words, every 5 years you wait, means you will need to pay in twice as much to get the same result. 

When we are young, we think we have all the time in the world. But you may not have as much time as you think. 

For instance, if you are aged 30 now, you have roughly 30 years of working life ahead of you if you plan to retire at 60. Thirty years sounds like an awfully long time, however, if you break it down into pay or salary cheques, 30 years is really just 360 salary payments - 12 per year times 30 years assuming full employment.

Scottish Widows said if women increased their pensions contributions at the start of their careers by only 5%, they could close the pensions gap almost completely by the time they are retired.

Employees in the UK can join work-based pension schemes, which will go some way to providing a pension, but nowhere near enough for a comfortable retirement. Millions of people face poverty in retirement and will be forced to work into their seventies.

Self-employed and ‘gig’ economy workers are even more likely to experience poverty and must make their own pension provision.

If you have no passive income, you can never retire…it’s a simple as that.

What is passive income?

A guaranteed private, company or state pension or income from savings and investments, such as stocks and shares or bonds. However, the value of funds invested in the stock markets can go down as well as up!

Rental income from property can be passive, but probably falls into the semi-passive category as you may still need to do some work even if the property is managed by an agent.

More worrying for both men and women is the pensions timebomb slowly ticking in most western countries. State pension and social security schemes were designed in an age when people did not live very long in retirement and there was a higher ratio of people working compared to those in retirement.

And, these pensions schemes are not even funded, as benefits are paid from working taxpayers.

In other words, they are bust!

The chances of a young person starting work today receiving any state pension are pretty slim if not zero!

What can you do to beat the pensions timebomb?

The short answer is, start saving and investing! However, this is easier said than done when real incomes and job security are falling.

I’ve been there…struggling to pay the mortgage and bills whilst bringing up a family when I was working as a financial adviser early in my career.

As an adviser selling pension plans and investments, I met thousands of clients who could not afford to put enough money away for their pension and pay for everything else.

Even after economising and cutting out waste, many still had very little left over fo