Samantha Gould, Financial Adviser and Head of Campaigns at NOW: Pensions, comments: “Money is a universally important subject that we almost always shy away from talking about. It’s never too late – or too early – to encourage good saving habits, learn about budgeting and planning for the long term. My Money Week is a great way to do this, by taking the conversation to young people and helping them to make good financial choices from the start.
“So many young people enter the workforce with no knowledge of the nuts and bolts of pensions, let alone how important they are to their future prosperity.
“Raising awareness with campaigns such as My Money Week is an important step in guarding against pension misunderstandings becoming detrimental to savers’ long-term financial wellbeing. The far-off concept of retirement can feel intangible, particularly at the start of people’s career. Saving little and often over time, and early on, makes a massive difference further down the line.
“Understanding the importance and impact of pension saving is particularly true for young women. Differences in career and caring patterns compared to men, combined with current auto-enrolment rules, can make huge difference to the type of pension we might enjoy in old age. Our annual Gender Pension Gap report (2024) found that women need to work for an extra 19 years – or start saving from the age of three – to be able to retire with the same average pension pot as a man.*
“Currently, auto-enrolment into workplace pension schemes doesn’t apply to under 22-year-olds, or those earning under £10k. Both men and women can still choose to save even if they don’t meet these thresholds, but if existing age and earnings restriction for auto enrolment were removed entirely, an additional 885,000 young women would become eligible, which is approximately 100,000 more than men of the same age.
“We welcome the recent changes to law to enable some of these changes – but we need a roadmap to explore how to bring this into effect, otherwise millions of savers continue to risk losing out.”
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