Teenage Take over – part 1
Teenage Take over – part 1
- March 1, 2023
- Written by Luke Quinn
- 1 year ago
- No Comments
The teenagers take over!
Hi this is Jess and Luke, two teens declaring a teenage takeover! We’re determined to learn the truth about pensions, what they actually are and why any teenager would ever need to think about them. Because at the moment it all just seems like a bunch of muddled mess to us.
So, let’s start at the beginning, we’ve known each other since we were born, spent days on the beach, hours in the sea, weekends camping and years of adventures together, but the only time we have ever talked about money with each other (or anyone really) was when we went out to Smith and Western at the start of the February half term 2023. And even then it was only because our parents had prompted us to. That was when we decided we wanted to know more.
(Tbf Luke has a bit of a jump on this pensions stuff as he tried to do a teenage takeover before… but we all know things are just better with a female involved…so this time it’s a joint project!)
Here's our story...
At the start of this (soon to be) legendary journey we searched the web for pensions news and what came up shocked us to the core…
Mum (Karen) talks about the need to save, how pensions are important and can make a difference to the planet. And we mean she literally bores us to tears on this. All the time.
Well, that’s not what the newspapers say! Here’s some of the top news stories relating to pensions headlines:
“Hypocrite MP launched a 30 year war on our pensions but will retire with comfort and ease.”
What about “Ohio public pensions lose $36 billion in 2022, will take years to recover”
Or “Britain’s biggest banks see value of staff pensions fall by £65 billion after rising rates and fall-out from mini-budget decimates assets”.
This is not the sort of thing that sounds as positive or as necessary as we’re told by Mum (Karen).
What we do know
At school we aren’t taught about money and how to spend, earn, save, borrow or invest it. We aren’t taught what it means when you say investments and we’re just reading up about it. Why aren’t we told clearly that your money can end up in companies that make bank off (I persuaded Mum to keep this – it means get rich) of unhealthy habits like: alcohol, oil, tobacco, firearms and gambling.
Most people our age don’t really know what a pension is. And have even less of a clue about investments. This is problematic because if we don’t understand from the beginning, when we finally work out that our money ends up with companies that we really don’t support, we’ll probably knock it on the head and stop saving. And by everything we’re told by Mum – this is a bad thing. But not everyone has a Mum (Karen) giving them constant grief.
We need to know more
In school you learn a lot, some relevant to life, some not so much. A lack of education about money is a big issue, if we’re not taught the how, where, why and when of saving and investing, we’re left clueless. This is probably why so many young people end up racking up huge amounts of debt, wasting money on all sorts of random stuff and feeling completely overwhelmed about how to pay for the future.
That's a lot of cash
When we started researching pensions we learnt that to retire at 60 years old you need £600,000-£750,000 in your pension to give you an average income, which we also learnt is about £30,000 a year. That’s 17 and a half model 3 Teslas or 12,502 PS5 controllers (from an official site). That seems like a massive amount.
We’re going to be working together to look into pensions and give a teenager’s view (we have signed a contract to do a monthly post about pensions – so you’ll see a lot more of us now)! We’d love to know where you pensions people think we should start our learning journey? Drop a comment…