Think work is nerve-racking? Try coping with getting your pension!

I have had a 55-year career in the toughest newsrooms of Fleet Street, including Robert Maxwell’s Mirror. 

But that was easy next to my struggles with useless firms blocking me from my OWN retirement savings, says Charles Garside. He reveals his experiences and how you can learn from them.

We cannot choose the day of our arrival in this world, or (legally anyway) the day of our departure.

In fact, I have come to the conclusion that there are actually only a couple of big date events directly within our own life choices.

One: When to marry, though this decision can be made more than once. A former boss of mine is Rupert Murdoch. Five at the time of writing!

Two: When to take your occupational pension. This is, I’d argue, the only guaranteed unique, once-in-a-lifetime resolution we make, and it comes with huge consequences.

I was lucky enough to ‘retire’ at 65 when the state pension kicked in, though people now have to wait longer. 

But I deferred the pension pots I accrued, having worked on many Fleet Street titles.

Almost eight months down the line I am left seriously wondering if the pensions industry does all it can to frustrate, delay, obfuscate and generally increase the anger levels and blood pressure of their clients in the hope of hastening the demise of pensioners by shortening what’s left of their lives.

Clearly it would save them money – but surely not?

Perhaps I am just being the same cynical journalist I have been for 55 years. Nevertheless I now intend to live much longer just to spite them.

Having given written authority to the adviser to collate disparate funds from eight or nine firms, some acted as though it was their own hard-earned money being sought.

I do appreciate in this awful age of scams there is a real need for security but there is no need for abject failure to respond or for delays in sending out letters saying they enclosed ‘questionnaires’, which actually failed to include the questionnaire concerned.

Pension guides

Further delay followed, due to returned questionnaires being ‘lost’ in the post, despite copies being sent in the same way and on the same date arriving at their destination.

Emails were unanswered for weeks from generic email accounts or from people on three-day weeks, or working from home, or away on holiday and ‘not reading emails’. 

The real problem was, and I suspect many readers will discover the same, a majority of my pots were no longer with the company I had dealt with, as they had been taken over.

When I investigated one, I found it pretty well topped the list of complaints received by the Financial Ombudsman, on the latest figures I could find.

Most complaints centred on delays, lack of response, lost correspondence, etc.

Sound familiar? To be fair, a couple of companies were efficient while still taking proper precautions and a couple only contained enough money for an annual fish and chip supper but, hey, it is my money!

I went to London from the north of England in 1978 to be news editor of the London Evening News, which closed less than two years later, despite selling 550,000 copies a night. It was losing £17million a year and made an incredible 1,700 people redundant.

Like many young people the thought of pensions remained far off in days when getting and conscientiously doing a job was the overriding priority.

Only once did pensions figure in negotiations over work. In 1991 I was offered the job of deputy editor of The European, run by Robert Maxwell.

I had worked with his new editor, John Bryant, at The Times and agreed to be his deputy. Ratification of the appointment came in Maxwell’s huge office in Holborn.

He was in shirt sleeves and mixing the drinks. He asked about my pension and raved about the quality of their fund, suggesting I see the man in charge: the ominously named Mr Tombs. I declined.

By the time Maxwell mysteriously fell off his boat that year no pension payments had been made into my private fund, as agreed. 

Maxwell had plundered millions from pension funds in the biggest pension fraud in UK history. Thank goodness I did not transfer anything by way of Mr Tombs.

So my advice is this:

• Pension time comes earlier than you think.
• Always send documents by tracked mail.
• Stay calm, take deep breaths.
• Remember: it’s your money, not theirs.

Charles Garside news edited the London Evening News and later The Standard. He was editor and editor in chief of The European, deputy editor of the Sunday Express, managing editor of the Daily Mail, assistant editor of The Times, The Standard, The Mirror and MD of Radio Riviera in Monte Carlo. He also owned the Miller Howe hotel and restaurant on Windermere for ten years.