this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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me_irl
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I'm 50; when I started my career pretty much everyone a little older than me had pensions and I arrived right as the pensions were being phased out. It was a running joke when they would talk about pensions and I would say "what's a pension?"
So my age group will be retiring in 15 years, not 30 years. Almost everyone I know my age has a meager 401k and nothing else.
The streets are going to be flooded with people too old to work and no retirement income in much less than 30 years...
56 here, I'm in the UK. I have 4 separate 'private pensions', from the four different companies I've worked for, adding up to fuck all. Basically I'm going to have to work until I'm 67 in order to collect my state pension of £1,049.22 a month. This will allow me to survive on cold baked beans out of a tin, before I freeze to death because I can't afford to turn on the heating.
Why do those private pensions not amount to anything?
I didn't get the benefit of a final salary pension. I have also not worked long enough at any particular company to really benefit from a big pot. The longest I've worked for one company is ten years, I think the company was paying in as little as possible. When I looked at a forecast for the pay out from that one, it was about £100 a month.
You should consolidate those 4 pensions into one pot and take more control of it. There's an extremely high chance that the employer provided pension is performing poorly and not growing as fast as it could be. They pick the lowest risk by default so growth is massively stunted.
It's pretty easy to open an account on something like vanguard and transfer those pensions in, you can then have control over how that money is invested - usually they make you pick a "risk factor" where highest risk has highest potential growth and lowest has lowest potential for crashing, but the TL;DR is over a 15 year period even if there's a crash you'll come out on top because it averages out.
Essentially what I'm saying is pool your pensions together and pick the highest risk factor for the next 8-10 years, it's a bit of a gamble but it's a better chance of that pot growing into something actually useful than you have right now.
Because a lot of pension plans are very disappointing. They for example offer a 'guaranteed' minimum intrest of up to 2 % per year, but don't forget the 'management costs' they charge. That's very very low compared to regular inflation. Pension funds exist to make pension fund managers, traders and banks rich (now, not later) and so that the government can point at them and say "it was your own responsibility!" instead of offering ALL weak and old people enough to cover basic needs. And that's to "motivate" as many people as possible to work as much as possible. If relatively young right now: you're probably better off putting money away in time deposits with higher guaranteed intrest than putting it in pension funds. Or ETF/random stock picking for those who feel lucky. The state subsidies to choose pension fund instead of time deposit or direct market investments is in many cases also misleading: you get tax cuts when depositing into the pension funds, but you get taxed when you get paid out at pension age. All differs a lot in different countries, but the core of it is pretty similar all over I think.