How a short pension can help early retirement around 55, and why annuities deserve a better press

One of the dilemmas facing the early retiree is how to minimize taxes. The extreme early retiree (<45) doesn’t have much choice but to pay tax on their savings to retire between their extreme early retirement date and the time they can draw pension income. You can avoid paying tax on the way in to a pension, but ISA savings are from tax-paid income. Now that Osborne has made pensions more attractive by improving their flexibility,  people need to start thinking how they are going to phase taking their retirement funds. That’s something you need to think about in you early to mid forties; at least ten years before the planned date of retirement.

I got a few of these things wrong, because I brought my retirement plans 8 years forward over a period of three years. In particular, consider very carefully whether you want to pay off your mortgage before retiring. Although I did, a mortgage is a flexible and low-cost loan. For most people not paying it off until you receive your pension commencement lump sum at 55 is the correct route, because it lets you smooth your income profile. Pay the mortgage down while you are working and before 55 and you will be better off in the long run but will probably take a severe income suckout in the gap between retiring and 55

There has to be the usual wealth warning – pensions are still complex, and people’s circumstances goals and risk profiles will vary a lot. DYOR and/or seek independent financial advice.  This is a tour of some of the high-level stuff. the devil is in the detail with pensions, but high-level stuff makes orientation easier.

Planning for slightly early retirement (55 and up)

In principle, planning is relatively easy for someone retiring after the Government’s mandated earliest DC pension drawing age, currently 55 but probably rising for anyone who is currently younger than 42. You basically save into a personal pension aiming at your annual desired retirement income * 20 by the time you are 55. I said the planning is relatively easy, doing it isn’t! Then you start drawing down the pension. If you want to leave it to your children after death then you carry on in drawdown, but if you don’t you can get some security against outliving your savings by keeping an eye on annuity rates as you age, and switching to one when the annuity return in terms of annual income gets above your investment return (~5% usually). This is usually around 65-70.

Planning for early retirement (45-55)

The planning gets harder for someone retiring before the Government’s mandated earliest retirement date. You have to save up from taxed income, preferably in an ISA. That’s been made a bit easier with the increased limits. Anybody who is in a position to retire early is different from the general working population, usually in earning more than average and probably also in spending less than average. Somewhere you need to open up a spending-earning gap. Unless you can get your spending down dramatically you’ll probably be paying higher rate tax on the money as you earn it to save across the gap

The same applies to me – all the money I’ve saved into my ISA and all the cash savings I have are from taxed income, and I was under the impression that once you’ve paid tax, that’s it. You don’t get to claw it back years later.

After the Budget changes, that’s no longer so. An early retiree’s tax status changes from

status	tax	NI	age	income from
working	x	x	< retirement	work
retired, pre-pension			<55	savings
retired drawing pension	x		55+	pension

One of the advantages of a DC pension is you can choose how much to draw down each year. You take 25% of the total pension capital as a tax-free pension commencement lump sum. Many people blow this on a holiday or other splurge, each to their own.

recommended splurge target these days

Some use it to discharge their mortgage on retirement, which has a hell of a lot to be said for it. But one of the other things you can use it for is to reduce the amount you draw down from the pension at the beginning, to less than the personal allowance of about £10,000

Such an individual’s stages look like this

status	tax	NI	age	income from
working	x	x	< retirement	work
retired, pre-pension			<55	savings
retired drawing pension + PCLS			55-60	10k pension DD + PCLS “DD”
retired drawing pension	x		60+	pension

That way you get a few tax-free years out of your pension. Note that I have made the assumption of at least a £250,000 pension capital, because drawing > 10k p.a. from any smaller amount would be unwise[ref]The PCLS takes it down to about 200k, and 1/20th of 200k is 10,000[/ref]. If you are drawing less than the personal allowance then you aren’t paying any tax on your pension unless you have earned income, in which case why are you drawing down your pension – ask your financial adviser about taking the PCLS from a DC pension at 55 and elect to draw down nil for a bit 🙂

It’s one low-risk way of improving your income from the pension, though investing the PCLS using an ISA and giving yourself a permanent tax-free increase in income is a good alternative. This is the one I have to take, because when I crystallise my pension I get both the income and the PCLS at the same time.

A change in tack for a pre-pension retired Ermine

That retired, pre-pension phase before 55 (or whenever you take your main pension income) is where you are living from savings or ISA income. It is precious, because you are a non-taxpayer. And there’s an opportunity opened now for you to claim some of the tax you paid on your savings back, indirectly 🙂

Non-taxpayers can save up to £2880 into a pension each year, to which the Government adds basic rate tax of 20%, ie £720 on £2880. You paid the tax when you saved the money in the first place. It’s a straight 25% gain[ref]the missing fifth that the taxman stole from you when you earned the money is returned, which is 1/4 of what you pay into the pension, hence a 25% bump-up[/ref]. If you do this for four years you will end up with a capital amount of 14400, for an investment of 11520. It’s a five for the price of four offer, though your first year’s contribution will have depreciated in value by about 12% due to four years of inflation[ref]my illustration is a bit pessimistic on that because it doesn’t discount end effects. For instance if I put in £2880 at the very end of the 2013/14 tax year, ie now, then presumably that cash has been earning interest for most of the year, so there are only two years and a month for inflation to erode it to mid-April 2016 when the operation ends. Likewise my last contribution goes in after April 2016, as soon as it’s gained the 2016 tax bung I close the SIPP and take the cash out[/ref]

You won’t get a 25% real return because charges are high on SIPPs – these plus the effect of inflation halve the return. I’ve computed this for a TD Direct SIPP. This isn’t the cheapest place you would go – a stakeholder pension from Cavendish is better value but TD already know me and I am hoping they will open the account before the weekend, so I can put in £2880 for the year 2012/13. The extra £720 HMRC will add (less the £345 it will have depreciated due to inflation by 2016) still makes it worth paying over the odds for. If they can’t get their act together then I’ll use the cooling-off period to back out and go to Cavendish with a stakeholder later on next year.

Charges and costs with a TD SIPP for 4 years

					total
inflation	3%	3%	3%	3%
tax year starting in	2013	2014	2015	2016
pay in	2880	2880	2880	2880	11520
tax added	720	720	720	720
TD open charge	0
drawdown cost
flex dd reg	75
close	75			90
annual (£40/0.5%)	40	71	142	211	704
running total	3560	7089	10547	13936	13846
profit	680	649	578	509
running profit	680	1329	1907	2416	1462
inflation depreciation	86	86	86	86	346
		86	86	86	259
			86	86	173
				86	86
total lost to charges					704
total lost to inflation					864
roi					13%

All the charges and the effect of inflation reduce the return to 13%, but it is a return without exposure to the vagaries of the stock market – just open your SIPP and either leave a lump of cash in it or use a money market fund that is sort of like cash. [ref]That is a stupendously crazy way of using a normal SIPP over decades, but for something that’s only going to be there for three years I don’t need to take stockmarket risk, though I will if a market swoon presents itself in that period[/ref] I would be able to take £3461 as the 25% tax-free lump sum and withdraw the remain £10384 as income without paying tax as the tax threshold should hopefully be at £10500 by the 2016/7 tax year.

There was a load of bellyaching from DB pension holders that they got nothing from Osborne’s changes. If you are a DB pension holder so crazed as to even think about transferring out to DC then stop right now and take a cold shower. To be honest, if you have a DB pension you should STFU and celebrate your good fortune in life and salute any tail wind that can help people out to make a DC pension work better for them. If you want to get the benefit of Osborne’s changes then you know what to do – damn well get out there and buy a DC stakeholder and stop whingeing.

Which is exactly what I am trying to do. I tip my hat to commenter Boardgamer who clearly located the on-switch of his brain a bit quicker than I did after hearing Osborne’s changes 🙂

Annuities, schmanuities…

Annuities have come in for an awful lot of stick recently, much of it unfair. From pensions A-day in 2006 nobody has had to take an annuity on retirement, only after they reach 75, and annuities are a hell of a lot better value at 75 because life firms figure you have one foot in the grave, and they know they’re paying out for fewer years than if you are 55. The screaming about annuities is only because people holler at their financial adviser that they want it SAFE AS HOUSES, not in the BIG BAD STOCK MARKET where their capital value marked to market MAY GO DOWN. CASH NEVER GOES DOWN – I WANT SAFETY.

Be careful what you ask for. Safety, and insurance, costs money. That’s why annuities are so shit at 55 or 60. So don’t be a nutcase. You entered the stock market over years with your pension savings. You will have lifestyled your pension savings to reduce equity exposure as you come up to retirement. But if you are retiring into a world where the stock market goes down and stays down on its knees from the long-term CAPE10 trend for 10 years then that is a world where you’ve probably got bigger problems than your pension. Starving hordes running through the streets, lack of clean water, that sort of thing. That’s not a country for old men…

All the scaredy-cats will say BUT THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED IN THE DOTCOM BUST

even this mahoosive FTSE100 chart doesn’t manage to span an Ermine’s shortened career. And it doesn’t show dividend income.

Well, yeah, but the dotcom boom was way above the CAPE10. People retiring in Feb 2003  had been putting money into the stock market for the previous 30 years[ref]probably using ghastly with profits funds and shocking fees, but that’s a different problem, and has been largely solved now by regulation[/ref].

Yes, they retired with an inflated idea of what their savings were worth, and the guys retiring three years before got a much better deal if they annuitised on retirement. But they didn’t lose out – they got damn good value from their savings, assuming they saved at a high enough rate, targeting the right capital amount. They’d have seen a big overshoot in 1999/2000. Maybe they should have taken the hint and retired then. Or if they had lifestyled their pension savings (transiting to an increased bond allocation and downplaying equities as they approach retirement) they wouldn’t have seen much of the boom, but then even less of the bust.

In short, do it right, guys. This information isn’t secret any more, and is standard financial advice 101. I lost a shitload of money in the dotcom bust, because I started in ’97. If you retired in 2003 you probably were in your peak earning years from 1993, and were buying tons of cheap shares from the 1973 oil crisis onwards[ref]Current savers should note there is a school of thought flagging up that expected stockmarket returns may be lower in coming years than historically. The FCA has mandated change to low, mediaum and high projected returns on pensions from 5,7 and 9% to 2,5 and 8%[/ref]. You didn’t lose out that much overall. And you did much better with 30 years of pound cost averaging than a wet-behind-the-ears ermine buying over three years at the peak of the market then running into index ISAs 🙂

Annuities aren’t inherently bad, just stop buying the suckers as soon as you retire. Consider  a mix of drawdown and annuitise when you’re older. Nobody’s had to buy an annuity on the date when they retire for a long time. People say annuity rates keep on dropping. Yes, annuity rates for a new annuity at 60, say, are dropping. If you know a way to be 60 this year and still be 60 next year you’ve got hold of a secret that is worth a hell of a lot to a lot of people, you don’t need a damn annuity. The annuity rate for YOU as an individual will improve as the years roll by ‘cos you ain’t getting any younger[ref]it is possible to invent scenarios where this doesn’t happen, but your personal annuity rate will increase at an accelerating rate as you get older, the cross-point may shift from 65 towards 70[/ref]. You can test this with any annuity calculator. Tell ’em your age and see the rate. Then tell ’em you’re 10 years older.

People often blame annuities for a very different problem. Not saving enough money. We are starting with a capital value of roughly 20 times the annual desired retirement income, yes? If not, you’re gonna have to stay at work until State Pension Age or start robbing banks until it is 20 times your desired income…

The trick of delaying annuity purchase only really works for people who retire normally, say at 60. If you retire with a pension capital of 20 times the desired annual income and your age related annuity rate improves enough to save your tail at 70, then you’ll have half of your capital left. You’ve been running it down for 10 years if your capital keeps up with inflation and you use a safe withdrawal rate of 5%. Do that for 20 years starting 50 and you are outta cash by the time an annuity can help you. Early retirees have to be more conservative with their withdrawal rate because they are exposed to risk for longer. They need to avoid running down their capital too fast.

Annuities are a tool, often used in the wrong place – at retirement. You are swapping stock market risk for inflation risk if you do that, because few people have saved up enough to eat the answer of “what is the rate if I tick the inflation-linked button”. The value of money halves about every 15 years due to inflation, so most people will get to see that.

The other place annuities get a bad rap is you can’t leave them to your kids when you die. Diddums. One of the few benefits of a DC pension compared to a DB pension is you could leave the unused capital to your kids  if you croaked before 75 and hadn’t taken an annuity. Now you can leave it to your kids even if you live to 105 or more. Your job now becomes saving up enough money that you can live like old money – off the income from capital, not running it down. You need to work for longer to save up more if you want to feather-bed your offspring, it’s as simple as that. Osborne has given you the possibility, Now do your bit – spend less than 1/30th of your pension capital in retirement and you have a better chance than the 4 or 5% commonly regarded as a safe withdrawal rate..

Your Risk Profile

FinaMetrica sums up the problem space well

Many financial decisions are made in situations of uncertainty, and so risk is involved. Different people are comfortable with different levels of risk.

Unlike, say, height or weight, there is no unit of measurement for risk tolerance. A person’s risk tolerance can only be measured relative to others on a constructed scale, in much the same way as IQ is measured.

By using the FinaMetrica Risk Profiling system, you obtain an accurate assessment of your risk tolerance in terms that are meaningful to you and your advisers. Your Risk Profile report will guide you and your advisers in your financial decision making. In particular, the report provides the basis for your instructions to your advisers on the level of risk you would prefer.

The reason annuities matter is that when people come to retire and take a DC pension, they are faced with a major life change. I have been through some parts of this, but many things are softened for me because I have a DB pension that I could live on if I took it now.

You retire in your 50s at the earliest, well, as far as retiring on a DC pension and getting to take it. For many people in their 50s, if you give up your salaried job you will find it very hard to find another one at the same level of pay. The reasons for this are complex, but generally

• you have experienced notable career progression
• 50 is an early time to retire, not many opportunities arise where firms would want to replace someone of that age with someone of a similar age
• you are more settled housing-wise but still often have dependent children, so moving is more of a wrench, meaning you have to look locally, restricting opportunities
• your experience fits a particular organisation, for instance although my general knowledge of engineering has a wide application elsewhere in industry a lot of my skillset is specific to The Firm, which is busy trying to get rid of its old gits. It’s definitely not hiring any more on the payroll 🙂

So retiring is a big move, it’s often a one-way ticket, and it’s stressful, even if you have enough money. People get fearful and conservative when in an unfamiliar stressful situation. And then your independent financial adviser walks along, glad-hands you, and sits you down with a cup of coffee. Then he says to you, right, Mr Retiree, how do you feel about risk? Say I were to tell you that the value of your stock market investments could fall 50% in one year, but it would probably not stay down. Well, he doesn’t actually do that, he opens his PC and gets you to do something like this online risk asessment or this Finametrica test

So there you are, you’ve just had the send-off from your workmates, you are going to enter a new phase of life, you have butterflies in your stomach, and now someone asks you how you feel about losing money, bearing in mind you aren’t going to be earning any more for the foreseeable future and probably the rest of your life. And what most people say is

HATE IT HATE IT, NO WAY.

What is this stock market you speak of that can chew through my money like that? Why would I give it house room?

So the IFA closes the laptop, looks you in the eye with an easy smile, and says Right Mr Newly Retired, that’ll be an annuity for you, Sir. Then goes through the spiel, looks on the open market and off you go with an annuity, and almost zero stock market risk. And I find that for an Ermine, for every £100,000 pension capital I can buy about £5000 as a level annuity payable annually from age 55.

No I don’t actually think that rate is too bad. It’s not a billion miles away from the 5% safe withdrawal rate from a stock market investment, and you’ll never outlive it. Trouble is, that every 15 years the value of this pension will halve. There again, 12 years after I am 55 the state pension will kick in, so the first bullet will be dodged[ref]How much that will help you depends on your pension income. If it’s £5000 then it’s a massive uptick. If your pension income is £100,000 then it’ll be lost in the noise[/ref], and that is inflation-linked to some extent. Now if I tell them I am grizzled of fur, 10 years older and I’d like it paid from 65 I get £6000 as a level annuity. Take a spin round the clock again at 75 and I’m good for £7500. Which was roughly the logic of why you had to buy an annuity at 75 at the latest; it’ll still be a damn good idea if you are a little bit short of money.

Talking about the risk assessment, in the interests of honest journalism I took a couple. And discovered I might have been rather too hard on the scaredy-cats, because it is possibe this looks very different to me. You can take the Finametrica test yourself at no charge. FWIW this is my result

An Ermine’s risk profile I’m not having you on with April Fool – Finametrica is an Aussie company and they are 10 hours ahead of us

It’s lethal, more than one standard deviation away from the norm. I took the Scottish Widows one

Your Details

Name : An Ermine

Results

Attitude to risk: Very Adventurous

Score : 84

The chart on the right shows where your attitude to risk fits:

About Very Adventurous Investors

Very Adventurous investors typically have very high levels of investment knowledge and a keen interest in investment matters. They have substantial amounts of investment experience and will typically have been active in managing their investment arrangements.

In general, Very Adventurous investors are looking for the highest possible return on their capital and are willing to take considerable amounts of risk to achieve this. They are usually willing to take risk with all of their available assets.

Very Adventurous investors often have firm views on investment and will make up their minds on investment matters quickly. They do not suffer from regret to any great extent and can accept occasional poor investment outcomes without much difficulty.

Yeah, right guys. Flattery will get you everywhere. FWIW I tried to be reasonably honest with the questions, though I did veer a little on the steady-as-she-goes when in doubt. It amazes me that I am such an outlier, more than one standard deviation off the mean. People normally get more conservative with risk as they get older, according to FinaMetrica.

The important thing here is that you should take one of these before your IFA does your pension, so that you have some chance to inform yourself about the options. Because otherwise our newbie testee, when faced with a whole load of questions where he doesn’t understand the question never mind the answer, will always go for the safe option. It may not reflect his views if he were better informed. This is a big decision, and if what you say points at the annuity way, you only get one shot. There’s absolutely nothing wrong in that, but it should reflect your view of the world, not your unawareness of the concepts. Oh and don’t pump up the answers just to make yourself look hard. It’s you who is going to have to live with the consequences. IFAs reckon that most amateur investors invest way above their risk tolerance. They would say that, wouldn’t they as they are talking their book. Nevertheless, when you look at the way private investors run for the exit just after a market crash they may have some point.

There’s probably also a good case to be made for you having run an ISA or a SIPP for about ten years before your retirement date, where you have some skin in the game – ie losing half the value would spoil your week, though not ruin you.

That way you get to see what a market crash looks like. You may think that you’re hard and can sanguinely whistle a dancing tune while there’s red all over your screen and where it said you had £200,000 yesterday it now says you have £100,000 and would Sir like to sell? If your feverished hands reach for the YES, DO IT NOW before I lose any more money button then you are not the Right Stuff. If it’s the ‘away with ye,  take me to the screen where I can add more money from my debit card and take advantage of this mayhem to buy low’ then you are probably the Right Stuff.

That’s the long story of why annuities have such a terrible name. They’re still right at times for the timid and may help those who are a little short of savings.

 

the misery of metrics and measurements destroying job satisfaction

Yesterday I chose to get wet in Ipswich town centre to demonstrate about Mr Gove.  Okay, that’s bull, but I was roadie for the day as I ran the PA¹ for the NUT strike demo about pay and conditions, and Mr Gove.

The NUT rally. Can’t work out why this iPod photo is such bad quality; is it me or do mobiles always take crap pictures?

I’m not a teacher and don’t have kids so he isn’t specifically my problem. However, some of the themes sounded familiar. In particular the rise of collecting ‘data’ for performance measurement systems and the trends of micromanaging the shit out of white-collar jobs was exactly the sort of thing that pissed me off about work. I wrote about digital Taylorism in 2010, and the NUT’s Jon Parker indicates the issues that sound similar – listen to the crowd response to ‘data’ being collected pointlessly²

There’s a case to be made that The Firm was trying to squeeze their old gits out of the place, which is why they employed pointless pricks to produce software systems to piss people off. This doesn’t seem to apply to teaching, however, where it seems the working environment is such that 2 out of 5 teachers quit within the first five years, there’s presumably no imperative to thin the ranks at a time when Britain is experiencing a baby boom and somebody presumably has to teach them.

Now some of the changes to the workplace are the result of secular trends like globalisation and technology, which at least does somebody some good even if the end of the boat Western workers are in is sinking. But the stupid pursuit of pointless performance metrics making jobs a misery seems to be 100% own goal. Not only do we have to employ useless patsies  to collect the pointless performance data to piss people off, but the measurers are usually paid more than the people who do the work being measured, because of the Peter Principle.

That’s the trouble with the homogenized management theories that come out of MBAs. Theories and fads go through companies like a dose of salts. and because we have people benchmarking along the lines of bollocks like ‘business best practice’ they all follow the same bullshit until the next fad comes along that is going to be the Holy Grail and sort out the crap that the last fad made. Let’s have a sample of bullshit MBA fads from my working life.

• Empowering employees
• TQM (total quality management)
• winning edge – mindset management
• investing in people
• managing my performance
• shareholder value (that’s 1 year share price hiking so the CEO can Maximise his Apparent Performance by buying today at tomorrow’s cost)
• Agile development (in a big firm?)
• six-sigma
• just-in-time
• business process re-engineering
• mission statement
• outsourcing
• Putting Customers First
• core competency

All of these can work well some of the time in specific instances. None of them work when applied across the board like velveeta. One of the worst things they must teach people on MBA courses is that there is a silver bullet. You see these wet-behind-the-ears young pups promoted into a situation beyond their competence as they wax lyrical about the next best thing that’s going to transform everything and have to keep a level gaze… Because you know that it’s never different this time, and it wasn’t different the last ten times either. One size does not fit all. And these berks have insufficient experience of the real world to have had that belief in the silver bullet beaten out of them in the school of Real Life™. Reorganisations are political, they are the new Top Banana and Chief New Broom acting like a tomcat³, spraying his mark on the organisation. They are not functional.

The teachers are just taking the same hit from performance management theory which is a Current Big Thing – tell people how shit they are doing, preferably every quarter, because you can manage expectations about pay that way. That’s obviously the way to motivate people to do better. That toe-rag Tom Peters has a hell of a lot to answer for. You get what you measure. Right. You can measure a pint of beer easily enough. How do you measure a teacher? A CEO? An income tax inspector? Ah, teachers, that’ll be exam results then? What about if they have to teach a whole bunch of stupid kids then, or the kids of parents that don’t really give a shit and probably shouldn’t have been encouraged by Tony Blair to have ’em in the first place? Ah, let’s measure how clever they are when they enter school. Right, so how do you measure how clever they are? Is cleverness the only dimension of success – maybe a reduction in sociopathic behaviour and not kicking the shit out of the municipal bus shelter is a good outcome too? How do you measure the civic street furniture not trashed by the little tyke because he’s inspired to do something else? Measurement always has a problem with the counterfactual and the road not travelled. And so on. I’m with Lord Kelvin when it comes to measuring things that have a numeric answer that matches with the aspect of reality you’re trying to get, but when it comes to people the belief that Tom Peters prosyletised that ‘measurement works’ seems to be responsible for a lot of hurt in the workplace, and some not  particularly great outcomes. If you link people’s pay to metrics you get those metrics, but you don’t usually get great performance. For example, CEO pay since the 1990s, NHS waiting lists and beds, Enron, the Global Financial Crisis, the list goes on.

Thankfully this is no longer my problem 🙂

---

1. Our farm isn’t on the electricity network but every so often we want to all get together and have a party so I have a music system of a couple of hundred watts  run off a 12V leisure battery. Using this saves having to wheedle a mains power feed from some local business or run a genny in a public place with all the safety issues. ↩
2. the dreadful distortion is because the recorder was overloaded, the Ermine delivered a better quality PA service to the crowd ↩
3. I have some trouble picturing Michael Gove as a tomcat, he’s a bit on a weedy side for a big old ginger tom ↩

calling all late 40s+ wannabe early retirees – your ship’s come in…

Martin Lewis, he of moneysavingexpert fame, considered the pension changes “both wonderful and horrid“.  Wonderful, because you now can take it all in one go subject to normal income tax rules, without all sorts of restrictions that mean you have to drip out the money over 20 years or so. And horrid – because you now can take it all in one go, so people may blow it all on this sort of thing

That’ll be a nice Lamborghini, and to hell with the money

as the pensions minister quipped.

Extreme wealth warning – everything to do with pensions is hard, counterintuitive and needs careful consideration

You’re on here because you have an interest in personal finance, right? Most people consider it dull as ditchwater – indeed I only sharpened up my act when I realised that getting my skull round this would enable me to quit an increasingly toxic workplace. Before then I was happy to rock up and work, do a reasonably interesting stuff  in return for beer and toy tokens. The Grauniad delivered this quite astonishing piece by Joanna Moorhead saying

When it comes to pensions, choice is not necessarily desirable – especially for those of us burnt by endowment mortgages

WTF? It is precisely because I was burnt by endowment mortgages (though reinstated) that I don’t trust insurance and life companies and was grateful that in pension provision I never had to think about them. If I had to manage a DC pot I would now be deeply grateful to Osborne for letting me escape the clutches of this dodgy bunch of charlatans.

Of course, there are people who enjoy the personal finance sections of newspapers, and who love nothing more than poring over the small print of different finance options on offer, but I’m not one of them. I’m the woman looking for the switch for “financial autopilot”, and right now, with the changes to annuities, that looks suspiciously as though it might have disappeared from my dashboard.

Money is crystallised power, a claim over human work. All power stores are dangerous if you don’t think about them. It’s why people don’t carry petrol around in open buckets and you learn something unique and instructive if you drop a spanner across a car battery. Endowments were the autopilot choice for a young ermine and it appears a young Joanna. The older ermine learned from that when his career flicked out of autopilot, and so should you, Ms Moorhead. ‘Cos the ground is never far away, and it has an unhealthy attraction for things above it.If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Thinking is about ten times as hard with pensions than ISAs because of the decades it takes to get into them, and the hopefully over decades they will serve you. The Grauniad seems to be in jealousy mode all round at the moment, as they are bitching that you need a salary of £125,000 to make any use of the the New ISAs. FFS people – I have never, ever, earned anywhere near that much and I have zero income at the moment but I am damn well planning on using my full NISA allowance over the next few years. Dear Guardian, have you ever heard of that antiquated notion, spending less than you earn and saving money? You guys should try it sometime, instead of sipping your cappucinos and griping. No, if you spend your nice Guardian salary on consumer shit then a NISA is no use to you, but you get lots of lovely toys. Each to their own.

small changes make big differences

You don’t see an awful lot about pensions on PF sites because they’re hard, they are built up over secular¹timescales in general and small changes can make mahoosive differences. Let me illustrate this with an example. In 1988 I joined The Firm’s final salary pension scheme. It had a simple proposition – every year you accumulated entitlement to 1/60th of final salary, with a normal retirement age of 60. In practice than meant if you worked for The Firm for 30 years you would get half your final salary as a pension. The Firm expected pensioners to die at 80 on average, thus paying out for 20 years. You could retire at 50, in which case they would pay out over 30 years, 10 years longer than planned so they would actuarially reduce your pension by 50% – you lose roughly 5% for every year drawn before normal retirement age (NRA) of 60.

The Firm decided it wanted to reduce costs, so it closed this scheme to new entrants in 2001. In 2009 it decided it wanted to save even more money.  It appears UK law doesn’t permit firms to claw back pension entitlements already earned because they are part of your pay so they have to contractually honour previous years agreements. But they can change things going forward. So The Firm changed three things, and very few people spotted how much damage was done to their pensions. The Firm

• changed the NRA from 60 to 65
• changed the accrual from 1/60th to 1/80th
• changed the accrual from final salary to career average (each year’s entitlement is based on the inflation adjusted salary for that year)

Three small changes – HR obviously wept the usual crocodile tears and said it won’t make much difference for people retiring soon, and allowed people leaving up to three years from 2009 (just excluding an ermine – I was six months out of the grandfathered rights date 😦 ) to leave under the original terms. Now who is most interested in pensions? Old gits, who are about to leave. So HR shut them up by grandfathering them.

Let’s take a look at what that did to me

how the the changes affected my pension (rebased to 60 and a nominal 10k final salary)

Now I obviously surrendered some pension accrual leaving 8 years early, but the changes made that easier to do – I was giving up less. It’s also relatively simple to see that the total change is about 25%, which coincidentally happens to be the amount I was able to save in AVCs and will take tax-free as a pension commencement lump sum and invest myself in my ISA, effectively creating a tax-free DC pension to compensate for the loss due to retiring early. I will still have less because I will draw the pension a little early, though part of the reason for writing this is that has changed with Osborne’s changes. I may defer it for another year or so and use a personal pension, because as a non-taxpayer I can get a free 20% bump up on £2880 or ~£5700 and getting a 10-20% ROI on cash is difficult to ignore in a ZIRP environment 🙂 It isn’t a lot of money, but it’s worth thinking about.

Now imagine a 10 year younger ermine, entering The Firm just before the portcullis closes on the final salary scheme.

The younger ermine eats a much greater hit

The poor bastard takes the same hit as the old Ermine, but he has to suck it up to 60 to get the same amount as the old Ermine who pulled the big red ejector handle it in his early fifties! Now the younger ermine probably takes an even greater hit because of the career average change, which reduces the base salary on which the pension is calculated. And The Firm was craftily shifting more and more pay from consolidated rises to bigger bonuses, and bonuses weren’t pensionable.

Now the proposition of a final salary pension scheme is simple, so if small changes can make that sort of effect, the sort of thing the Chancellor has done can make even more effect on a DC pension. Let’s take a look.

Osborne’s Budget changes

To a first approximation, he’s lifted the restrictions on what you do with the money once you reach 55. The Government’s own summary is pretty good. People younger than  42 should beware that this age will be dragged up

this consultation also includes a proposal to raise the age at which an individual can take their private pension savings under the tax rules from 55 to 57 in 2028, at the point that the State Pension age increases to 67.

so if you are younger than 42 be careful. If you are much younger then expect this to be drifted up to 60. That is the evil heart of pensions – governments can change the rules after you have locked the cash away. If I personally were younger than 42 than from a purely financial POV I wouldn’t touch pensions with a bargepole, except enough to get any employer match, and perhaps to lose any 40% tax. But that’s me – YMMV. That’s not saying I wouldn’t save for retirement, but I’d use ISAs for that. However –

There are some things only pensions can do

This judgement isn’t as simple as it seems, however, because one of the advantages of a pension is that it can’t be seized by most creditors or held against you for many benefit claims. You may be doing fine and swimmingly at the moment, but globalization and technology are shifting the balance towards capital and away from labour. Pensions help you build capital safe from the backdraft of this. If I were a younger Ermine in my 20s but with the older head of now, from what I have seen I would not expect even a good job to last for 30 never mind 40 years. The power is shifting away from workers, the pace of change is too high and increasing, and the winner-takes-all effect is too high. Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over shows the way – reveiwed in The Economist. I would place greater effort on escaping the rat-race earlier and owning capital rather than relying on my rapidly depreciating labour. The time for consumer frippery and shitloads of debt is over. I have no desire to live like a Transnational – I am not ambitious enough and probably not bright enough.

Many people my age have been caught on the hop by this – the increasing routine and rottenness of my job, and the micromanaged incentives are the first reaches of this shift of labour to capital. When I see a business card that says ‘Consultant’ and I see grey flecks in the hair of the holder I mentally translate into ‘Unemployed’ – because so often it’s true 😉 It heartens me to see that in the UK PF community there are more and more people who are looking for financial independence at much younger ages than I am. I think these are cleverer people than I was, who are picking up the straws in the wind of the incoming shitstorm for jobs. Get on the side of Capital, because Labour is losing the fight, unless you can get on the side of the 1%, and let’s face it, the odds aren’t great 😉

Society will eventually have to shift. Look at some of the changes coming – the increase in the personal allowances, meaning an increasing number of voters will not be taxpayers. They will, of course, vote for jam today and for somebody else to pay. Look at the stats on tax income – over two thirds of the income tax take comes from people earning 32,000 and above. These are people who individually earn more than the median net household income for families with dependent children²

Pensions can help you with this, basically by locking up money against the incoming shitstorm and throwing the key out to your future self many years in the future. You can hitch a ride for your future self  on the side of Capital (if you use equities rather than cash) that, in current legislation, can’t be taken away from you³ and it doesn’t impair your ability to claim benefits⁴. Whether that is attractive to you depends on your view of the world and where it’s going, and to some extent your rate of discount of jam tomorrow compared to jam today.

So what did Osborne change?

There’s a common belief that you had to purchase an annuity with a define contribution pension but that was never true until you reached 75. Those with £20,000 of guaranteed pension income could take any amount of their money subject to tax and those with less than that amount of guaranteed income could draw down their money at a rate determined by annuity rates in capped drawdown. What he’s essentially changed is that anyone over 55 can take as much of their pension capital as cash, subject to normal income tax as opposed to the punitive 55% rate it used to be. But if you are taking £150,000 from your pension for that Lamborghini then you’re paying 45% tax on all of it, bud, so you better strike a deal for no more than £82,500. Previously it would have been 55% taxed, so you’ve have got 67,500. Put that way it isn’t such a stupendous change for high-rollers, though £15k probably gets you the walnut trim or the gold-plated gearshift knob.

The rate you get for an annuity rises as you get older – annuity rates for people at 75 are much better than for those at 60 or 65 because they’ll be paid for less time. There is much to be said for starting off in drawdown and switching to an annuity later on. Most people haven’t saved enough into a DC pension, and this gives you a better chance of a decent lifestyle even now – the annuity is not dead at all. Once the annuity return beats out the return you get on equity investment it makes sense to switch⁵.

People hate annuities because they can’t leave them to their kids among other reasons…

But you don’t get to leave it to your kids. What seems to be behind a lot of the rumbling about annuities is that they die with you (they can look after a partner at some cost but that’s it). So the children get n’owt. Now the whole issue of capital and inheritance needs sorting out by some future British government, and it won’t be pretty. I’m personally of the opinion that inheritance is an abomination in a notionally democratic and meritocratic society. It harks back to older societies where capital accumulated very slowly so it was the only way to build a business – over generations, and it all smacks of the privilege of kings and nobles. There were no startups before fossil fuels. It may be the most natural thing in the world for parents to want to favour their children, but IMO a 100% inheritance tax where the entire estate escheats would be an incentive for those parents to sort their shit out while they are alive, and it would go some way to not embedding privilege. But I can say that because I am child-free, if that weren’t the case I would probably line up right behind the old buffers of the Torygraph who think that inheritance tax is a terrible thing, because having children does that to you 😉 Somehow society needs to sort this out in a world where it is increasingly difficult to make your fortune in a working life, because increasing inequality lets the 1% bid up the price of essentials like housing. God knows what the right answer to that looks like, but it doesn’t seem to me to be the direction we are going. History shows that aristocracy does work, but needs a lot of serfs…

It’s important to note that one of the reasons annuities looked such horrible value in the last five years is that the Government’s policy of printing money and keeping low interest rates meant annuity providers couldn’t offer decent rates – the underlying gilts just didn’t give people the returns they wanted at 55 or 60. Osborne’s been a good guy in not forcing you to take an annuity, though remember you didn’t have to do that anyway. But he hasn’t improved your ability to get a low-risk income at a price you want to pay. You can stay in equities, as you always could with drawdown. But you are still SOL if you want to avoid the volatility of equities. You are going to run out of money if you didn’t like the annuity rates on offer when you retired and you can’t stomach the rollercoaster of the stock market. There ain’t anything better on offer at the moment⁶ – as a cautious saver you have to do Your Bit to pay off the National Debt.

NASA tells us we are doomed

There’s a NASA report that paints a bigger picture, basically they are of the view we are Doomed

…. appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature

The bit they seem to be missing is that the Elites are busy eliminating the need for a lot of the workers… The Ermine is not an optimist by nature, but I have learned that the bear case always sounds smarter. This is because things go titsup in a big way, and they can be imagined – at the moment it’s robots and globalisation stealing out jobs, climate change, it’s easy to picture them. What is harder to see is that people chisel away continually at improving the upside. 99% of them fail, but the incremental up-shifts add up, but they fly below the radar because they individually don’t look that much. Who would have guessed that improved computer networking would spawn whole new industries like web designers and security experts and MOOCs and improved living standards for what we used to call the third world by letting them work for us⁷, and high-frequency trading etc? After all, we had networking before – I recall Novell Netware, where the piss-taking bastards at Novell would charge you a licence per connection⁸, and added a piece of code to explicitly kick people off if more people connected to a server. Then TCP-IP came along, eliminated such monopolistic gouging and ate their lunch. Then in ’94 Berners-Lee developed the WWW and here we all are. None of those developments looked earth-shattering at the time.

At the moment the Chinese are working on thorium nuclear reactors that address many of the the hazards associated with nuclear power, though they will no doubt have problems of their own.It may or may not go somewhere, but if it does, then it will be a win for energy and for knocking back global warming, simply by taking out a lot of China’s coal-fired power generation. In general, positive change comes in small chunks that steadily mesh together and add up, whereas things that go wrong come in great big unexpected lumps that generally give us the feeling of OMG we’re all going to DIE. And the atavistic caveman in us looks at the great big shadows of our fears cast against the wall and it makes better copy. Bad news sells, and nobody’s managed to ever sell a good-newspaper yet.

Pensions get a lot more interesting when you get past 45

One of the primary risks younger people face in using pensions is that they’re saving a lot of wealth is a locked-up place that Governments can easily target, since Government sets the rules. A future Labour government could go back to annuities – I’m not saying they have thought of it, but them might. There is a general downdrift of the amount you can contribute to a pension (£40k if you earn more than that) and there is also a general downdrift of the total amount you can save in a pension and get tax relief, the Lifetime Amount which is currently £1.25 million. That sounds a lot, and I, for instance have nowhere near that much but for someone in their 30s now it’s not unreasonable to aim for, because the value of money roughly halves every 15 years. In thirty years’ time that would be worth about £312500, at a 5% withdrawal rate that would be a pension of £15625 p.a.

You can see the direction of travel of pension allowances at HMRC, and it’s not positive. A whole lot of these problems go away as you get closer to drawing the pension, because, recognising that people can’t take money out of a pension to conform to changing legislation, they often let you protect your savings against changes. The quid pro quo for that is that you stop saving into a pension. Totally and for the rest of your life. That’s not so bad if you are in your late 40s or fifties and drawing at 55, after all HMRC indicate you are limited to a pension of about 56k at 65 so you are hardly on the breadline, you just have to stop paying into your pension for a few years, pay a bit more tax and use ISAs but if you are a young buck at the top of some financial institution, Doing God’s work, say, then your dreams of retiring to round the world yachting and golfing will need you to find some other way of saving for retirement. If you are that rich you’re not reading this, and anyway, you can afford to pay for the relevant financial advice on what to do.

taxpaying wannabe early retiree old gits, your boat’s come in

If you are a taxpaying old git, however, you are all of a sudden much better off, particularly if you have savings or are prepared to borrow money. Drive your salary down to the personal allowance by putting everything above that into a personal pension. Do that for a couple of years, and then when you stop work extract this money but leave your main pension deferred (ie still in accumulate mode) – the first £13k a year is tax-free⁹. Obviously you need a big spreadsheet and do a lot of what-iffery to play off any loan/mortgage not paid off against the tax bung, and it only works if you can slow your rate of withdrawal to less than the personal allowance. There’s no point in saving 20% tax to pay it again later.

ageing 40% taxpayers and child benefistas – this one’s for you

However, if you are a 40 or 45% taxpayer than you can make out like bandits  – squeeze yourself down to the 40% tax threshold and accept you pay 20% tax on the way out. It’s free money 🙂 Well, it isn’t, it’s a way to stop the Government stealing your money, and I wish I’d had this available to me. Fill your boots, and if you are a child benefista than you can go get that too. It’s welfare for the better off…

one of the obvious things for a non-taxpaying old git to do

Is save £2880 into a personal pension, saved as cash. In a curious fit of minor generosity, HMRC then up this to £3600. In my book that’s a profit of 25%. Do a couple or three of years of that and you end up with a profit of about 10%, because inflation will knock off about 5% of the return. And my DB pension gets 5% bigger because I draw it less early. I initially started looking at this to see if I should do some of that this tax year, but there isn’t enough time to see what exit charges are like – all the pension providers’ websites seem to be based on annuities and the like. So I will forego my free bung of £720 for this year from HMRC because a few days isn’t long enough to get this right.

I researched pension costs at Cavendish Online which seemed to be an often suggested good value broker on MSE. For a simple and quick in-out you will probably favour a stakeholder rather than a personal pension, because costs appear to be lower, and non-taxpayers are going to be playing with £3600 a year at most. A personal pension gives you some more flexibility of investment choices, and a SIPP is the most flexible. You pay more charges are you go up the hierarchy. What I couldn’t determine was the exit charges.

There is still a while till I get to 55. After than an immediately vesting pension plan (IVPP) seems explicitly designed for non-taxpayers, and hopefully by then these will return 75% of the capital as cash, rather than as an annuity. To be honest I would expect some future Chancellor to block that particular loophole. Unless they take pity on all us impoverished non-earners on the assumption that we are all poor, rather than enterprising – once I discovered how much income was taxed turning it into wealth before it got stolen became a priority.

I don’t have enough expertise to know much about the issues for younger folk – the big risks of Government fiddling are high, but on the other hand the protection from creditors is a great plus point. Shit happens in a working life – the big ones of Redundancy, Divorce, Disease are always with us. Death hopefully less so – one of the reasons the retirement age is drifting up is because you young’uns will live 10 years longer than me, and probably in better health.

These pension changes are particularly transformational to wannabe early retirees – ie those who want to retire in their mid-fifties rather than at 60 or 65, and particularly those who are paying 40% tax. If this includes you, you would do well to try and look at these changes from every angle to see how they could help you reduce your tax bill or delay the point at which you take you main DC pension. I haven’t had time to give this enough thought. Unlike Joanna Moorhead, I’m prepared to put some thought into how to make this work for me.

What about those Lamborghinis and BTL sky-rocketing house prices then?

There are two dark fears raised. One is that people will blow their money on frippery, and the other is that people will charge into BTL and jack up the price of houses again.

Lamborghinis, cruises, consumerism gone wild

Guess it’ll help the economy in the short-term ;). I’ve always been puzzled by how people go mad when they retire normally (60/65) and spend on a big blowout holiday. Your capital is at its highest potential at the point of retirement, a lot is going to change and you don’t know how it will feel to live off capital. That 25% PCLS is part of your overall wealth – it isn’t ringfenced for stupid spending. It’s a very, very different feeling to living off income. Blowing a lot of it at that point always struck me as a really strange thing to do – if you wait a year then you will have chilled, plus you’ll actually know whether you really want to spend a lot of money on the extravagant dreams of a cubicle slave thinking ‘Anything but this’. Booking the cruise while you’re still working seems odd. But I am different from other people. According to the BBC it appears not to be too bad a problem in Australia where they have this sort of thing already

Hordes of greying BTL investors jacking up house prices.

The average DC pension amount at the moment is £17,700 and about 320,000 people a year currently start drawing DC pensions. It’s probably not enough to seriously shift the needle on the dial, compared to daftness like Help To Buy

Final wealth warning

I’m not a pensions expert, and indeed had to research all this about DC pensions since the Budget because there seemed to be an opportunity. I can afford to screw up there, because this is only a small piece of my retirement planning to try and bag some free money. This post is tossing out some ides. Some may turn out to be hogwash. For God’s sake take advice if changing anything about pensions, or very, very seriously DYOR. After all, I bottled on £500 of potentially free money because I came to the conclusion I don’t understand the opportunities yet. That’s okay. It’s hardly a life-changing sum and it’s better to get it right that save £500 and pay £600 in charges! Be careful out there.  I am sure that somewhere in this septic isle there is a bunch of ne’erdowells crafting a website with a dodgy proposition to separate these newly freed pension amounts from their rightful owners…

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1. in finance secular means over periods longer than the typical boom/bust business cycle of about five to ten years ↩
2. ONS Statistics on the average family income, UK [/ref] in the UK ↩
3. Divorce is one exception to this ↩
4. I believe this was not necessarily the case for Universal Credit. However, it looks like Hell will freeze over and the devil will learn to dance before Universal Credit is launched, so I’d lump that in with the general uncharacterised risk of Government Fiddling ↩
5. as is usual with pensions there is a whole shedload of issues that complicate this in favour of annuitising earlier, in particular your attitude to risk and your health. ↩
6. You need to learn or take advice about getting the mix of asset classes right because the volatility of a 100% equity allocation is probably bad for the old ticker of a retiree 🙂 Although mathematically it gives you the best chance giving some of that up with a stocks:bond mix for a smoother ride is probably called for. ↩
7. that’s hellaciously First-World centric, and it’s transiting to we will all work for our Transnational Corporate Overlords, since the erstwhile Third World is busy taking the fruits of their labour and turning into Big Capital. The First World’s first-out-the-gate advantage is being competitively thinned out. ↩
8. or you could be fleeced per server. Either way they had you by the short and curlies and needed to be destroyed by the Invisible Hand ↩
9. That’s £10,000 personal allowance plus ~£3k tax-free PCLS ↩

why is the ISA season now, and what’s with the new 15k limit then?

Hooray for an increased ISA allowance of £15,000. Now to be honest, through most of my working life, saving that sort of cash each year wasn’t really on the cards – more pressing forms of savings, in terms of paying off the mortgage, and in later years pension AVCs came to the fore. However, I have to do something with my AVC fund when I get a hold of it, and a few years of £15k allowance gets the job done a little faster. I’m kinda puzzled by the July start – does that mean I have to avoid contributing in April, but I’m sure that’ll get clearer in due course. The increased personal allowance is always welcome.

And it seems that the artificial division ‘twixt cash and share ISAs will be abolished. Which is great – after all I want to hold a single ISA without buggering about shifting my old Cash ISA into my Shares ISA. The cash ISA is only a small rump from back in the day when I was trying to hedge against being ejected from The Firm in short order.  I’ve thought often enough about combining it into by Shares ISA, since I can’t get excited about 1% interest in a 3% inflation world, but an early retiree has to carry a large cash float. Plus there are reasons to worry about holding a lot of cash with a S&S nominee provider.

Why do people use ISAs in such an odd way?

Go on. Try getting one of these in London, or anywhere else, for less than £1. It was easy 30 years ago. That’s how well cash holds its value!

Four out of five ISA savers use only cash accounts. WTF is up with that? Cash is the most tedious, evil asset class, with its mendacious promise that it’ll never go down. Well, duh, yes, the number at the end doesn’t go down, but the real value decays like fresh fish. Cash dies at about 4% a year, presumably because they print that much more than the increase in goods and services that the cash is chasing. Particularly in troubled times like the seven lean years we’ve gone through.  They added insult to injury by devaluing the currency making everythign foreign dearer – from shares to iPads, though this seems to be starting to recover of late. In short, as a long-term asset class, cash stinks IMO. As an example of just how much, when I started work you could get a pint of beer in London for less than a pound. You try doing that now. As a rough rule of thumb, the value of cash halves every ten to fifteen years. This is not an asset class you can trust. The shocking volatility of stocks makes them look less trustworthy, but in the long run (>5-10 year mark) they tend to drift up in real terms, if you include dividend income. Whereas I have never known a ten year period where the value of £100 at the end has been anywhere near as much as it was at the start. The interest you’re paid on cash is an attempt to make you feel better about that bad behaviour – and then they bloody well tax you on the compensation for the loss of value due to Government behaviour, just because they can. All a cash ISA does is stop the tax bit, but time and time again I hear people say they prefer cash ISAs because they are risk-averse. Bollocks. It’s just a different kind of risk, a disguised one when the number at the bottom doesn’t fall by the value of each unit does. That’s still risk in my book, and a dishonest underhand one at that.

Savers will be able to shield almost three times as much money from tax without taking the risk of buying shares

Torygraph.

Nary a whisper about the risk of it almost guaranteed to be worth less as time goes by unless interest rates exceed inflation, been a long while, that… My pension AVCs, held in cash since I left work, will have decayed in real value by 10%. Now I can’t honestly ask for people to play the violins in the background because I saved 42% tax on that and got a 20% bung from buying in a mix of FTSE100:global stocks in ’09 while the pound was being devalued by 25%, so the ermine is okay with leaving 10%+ on the table. But I do that because I have to, it’s definitely a bad idea to hold that much in cash, so exactly why 80% of ISA savers  electively hold such a rotten depreciating asset beats the hell out of me. The one thing cash gives you is optionality, but in return for the favour it leaks through your fingers over the years. I have never, ever, known any way of saving cash[ref]a historical exception was in the good old days when you could borrow money from a credit card at 0% without any fees, but then any interest you can get on somebody else’s money is a good rate :)[/ref] where I could even match inflation, with the one exception of my NS&I Index-linked savings certificates, which I loaded up on just before they withdrew the blighters.

The other area where it seems my fellow-citizens are mad is what the hell is with this Torschlusspanik about ISAs now? You’ve had eleven flippin’ months to use your ISA allowance! For starters if you are saving cash from earnings, why save it elsewhere and then into an ISA in the last three weeks, though retaining optionality and the fact you can get a better interest rate outside an ISA has something to be said for it. But for an S&S ISA? Okay, so I stiffed myself this year and last by filling up the ISA early in the year so I had to sell some of The Firm to make space for opportunities as they came up – Direct Line last year and Royal Mail this year, so you want to pace yourself. Steady as she goes monthly S&S ISA saving as you earn the money is a match made in heaven for dollar-cost-averaging – particularly if you are investing in something that’s going down the toilet. Emerging markets spring to mind at the moment 🙂 Contrary to popular belief buying when things look bad is often good for your wealth, provided you have the required intestinal fortitude,  here, here, and here 🙂

So, ISA savers of Britain, when you get your grubby mitts on the new 15k allowance, it’s time to slap yourselves around the collective chops with a wet fish, and ask yourselves some searching questions, like

• why are y’all[ref]okay, four fifths of you all[/ref] saving cash, in a ZIRP environment?
• why do you leave it to the last minute? Why isn’t the ISA season in April, when you have a year ahead of you and can take advantage of saving the money as you earn it[ref]obviously if you earn £200k+ you can load up your ISA in the first month, but most of us struggle to fill an ISA in a year 🙂 Steady as she goes seems to obvious way to go in that case[/ref],  rather than March? Particularly the 20% that use S&S ISAs – you might as well get, your money working for you six months earlier on average.

There’s n’owt as queer as folk, eh? Are we all such well-trained little consumers that we are suckers for the ‘closing down sale – everything must go‘ pitch rather than actually working out what we want an ISA to do for us? Let’s get our money put to work and gainfully employed sooner rather than later 😉

Capitalism, crowdfunding and gadgetry

Capitalism brings up thoughts of great big phallic buildings, a concrete forest of tall buildings thrusting towards the light to eclipse the others in a Darwinean struggle for urban domination. Loads of folks in sharp suits talking important stuff into mobile phones.

God v Mammon contest – Mammon has the edge when it comes to size…

That gherkin in particular dominates the skyline, it’s not just the sheer size of it, but the symbolism is all Wolf of Wall Street

more tall buildings in the Wolf of Wall St

A couple of finance guys from the Square Mile party.

Couple of guys from a Square Mile press release

Seems to be a lot of guys, FinanceRomance sheds a bit of light on some of the issues. Maybe all this testosterone is why the buildings have a certain profile 😉

still there, rising…

And that’s all good. Finance is something that Britain happens to be good at[ref]yes, we did have a major snafu a few years back, but it seems we sort of survived that, and animal spirits seem to be back[/ref], or perhaps I should say the future city-state of London is good at. Must unearth my birth certificate and apply for dual nationality when it secedes, and hope citizenship is jus soli. We’re good at it, and we have scale, but let’s face it, share-owning capitalism isn’t that widespread in Britain, because, er, you need capital to make it work for you. And you still need to be a pretty big fish to list on the LSE.

Gonzo capitalism – no tall buildings and yachts needed

However, there seems to be a curious form of capitalism rising, called crowdfunding. I’d already come across this phenomenon in the electronics small biz area. Getting a small run of electronic items made is dear, because you have fixed non-recoverable engineering costs for making masks for the printed circuit boards and assembly. These are sunk costs before you even start the project, they aren’t dependent on how many items you make. I’d used radio modules from Ciseco and they used kickstarter for one of their projects.

Crowdfunding gets a bunch of ordinary people together to put up some of the money in small bite-sized chunks. It’s gonzo capitalism – or alternatively capitalism going back to its roots. The Stock Exchange originally started a few hundred years ago with a bunch of people coming together to share risk-funding of projects that were too big for any one individual to take on. I like the story that they got ejected from the original place for being too rowdy – looks like the high jinks that seem to go with the territory nowadays started a long time ago!

Crowdfunding the Calf at Foot Dairy’s move

The Ermine came across this again because I got to dig out my old MiniDV video camera a couple of days ago. This is seriously ancient, steam-driven technology from about ten years ago, and it was pressed into service to shoot a crowdfunding video for the Calf at Foot dairy, which has been given short notice to quit the place they’ve been for the last year and a half.






It’s been an awfully long time since I worked at the BBC and saw how people pulled a programme together, and I was an engineer, not a creative sort. It’s no easy task to try and tell a story using video – you’re always fighting the tendency to run too much material and overrun. Plus the Ermine no longer has a working TV in the house, and much has changed in the 10 years since I last worked with video – HD has arrived, and computers and progressive scan seem to have muddied the waters. Culturally, it appears that attention spans are much shorter. Obviously what I needed was new video camera, but what the hell, I will see if I can tell the story with the junk that I had.

Because in the end the story is one bunch of humans relating a tale to another bunch. The technology is part of it, and it would be a lot better with a HD camera. But there are some universals to video – hold the camera steady,  preferably with a tripod, don’t hosepipe , do not zoom on-screen. The elements of story-telling haven’t changed much from the original three act drama told around prehistoric campfires.

A lot of the challenge here wasn’t technical. I grew up in a city, FFS. I am really, really scared of cows, indeed any animal bigger than myself. And cows are HUGE…

Cows. They’re big. And they’re coming to  get me!

Crowdfunding seems to take two forms. The sort that the Calf at Foot use, and the sort used by Ciseco to get enough interest to do a prototype run is in fact fundraising to do a specific job or project. It’s the kind of co-operation that previous generations used for a barn-raising – everyone chips in a little to help get something to happen. In some ways it’s closer to a retail bond, but with the coupon paid in kind. These are relatively easy to qualify and secure against the natural fears of fraud because of the transparency. With Ciseco, if they achieved their target, you get a circuit board or kit, if not you get your money back. With Fiona’s dairy move, you get to see that the cows are up near Lowestoft rather than out near Hollesley – in this case it’s a straightforward support of the specific project, rather than a purchase as such.

However, there is an equity form of crowdfunding that is in its infancy, that is closer to shares. There are strict conditions around both forms, but particularly the equity variant. After all, what do you get as an equity shareholder? You get a share in the company, and sometimes a share in the earnings of the company. Many of the equity crowdfunding projects are hard to measure value, and they are startups, so they are unable to produce money that the shareholders can take out of the company as income, just as in general you don’t go to the AIM looking for dividend stocks. Of course, this applies to stocks and shares too, but it’s particularly hard to qualify risk and do all the due diligence associated with qualifying counterparty risk. After all, over half of startups fail within the first three years. The FCA seems to require investors declare they don’t have more than 10% of their free capital [ref]free capital excludes property and pensions. I am pleased to see that the FCA has adopted the Ermine’s policy – your house is not part of your financial capital assets. It’s official, and you read it here first :)[/ref] in equity crowdfunding.

Nevertheless, it is heartening to see that there are attempts being made to democratise capitalism, that it isn’t all about massive buildings, that people are looking for ways to increase access to small scale funding. It’s to the stock and bond markets like Zopa is to the banking and savings market. And it’s where some of these large institutions had their roots. After all, building societies got their name because in more cash-straitened times, people banded together to raise the capital to build houses. The crowdfunding website Abundance Generation draws out this parallel in their blog. One of the things the original building societies got wrong is the concept of one member one vote (OMOV), which gave rise to carpetbaggers taking out a lot of accounts with the minimum amount of £1 or so. They then used their OMOV votes to force a demutualisation and get a hold of the fossil wealth accumulated by the building society. The moral of the story is allocate voting rights by invested capital, but the problems weren’t obvious in the 1700s. I don’t know how equity crowdfunding works, but if you see OMOV as an investor avoid. Or open lots of accounts funded with the minimum amount for lots of voting rights 😉 OMOV is one of the problems with consensus decision making. It hamstrings it – in the end people who put more in should have more say, to build an effective system. Dunno where this goes with democracy, perhaps we have to live with the Churchillian democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

One of the pluses of being in charge of my own time – I can say Hell Yeah if I want to

I don’t know if this is the way of the future, or it is an evolutionary dead-end of the tree of capitalism. But it was an interesting diversion. And it’s one of the things that is a joy of being retired. It didn’t cost me anything apart from a couple of late nights to start with nothing and end up with something that might help someone take their cows to pastures new. An Ermine is capricious. If something tickles my fancy, I’ll have a go. If it doesn’t, I’ll pass. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to make a coherent story out of this. Of course the result could have been better if it were made by some indy video house somewhere. It would be better if I used a modern video camera, it would be better if I’d had more time and less coffee. But it’s probably good enough, and I learned about crowdfunding, something I had no idea about. I don’t personally have any application for it, but I have to say, looking at the projects on crowdfunder and kickstarter, that there are a lot of small enterprises that are in the extreme bootstrapping phase.

Although I worked for a year in a 10-man SME firm at the start of my working life I didn’t realise it was so hard out there for entrepreneurs. I also ran a multimedia firm on the side for a few years, but that was purely selling the products of mind – I took on commissions but didn’t have the cashflow issues that are associated with doing real stuff, where you have to buy the supplies and services  to make the product. I have a renewed admiration for the grit of Britain’s SMEs!

It isn’t all about your camera

Oh yes, and one in the eye for consumerism. A lot of consumer goods like cameras and the like are sold with the promise that this gizmo, feature or gimcrack will make you creative. And I’m sort of susceptible to some of the siren song. But I don’t need the latest, I probably do want to upgrade to HD if I do more video, but ebay will probably be my friend – you can get now for about £150 what you’d have to pay £500 before. But what I do need is the ability to set the exposure to manual. And a camcorder sound is junk – I shoot separate sound with an audio recorder and separate furry microphone and resynchronise in post, so all I need of the camera is some sound to sync to. Eliminating any quality cares there saves me a load of cash.

I did experiment with an iPod, my stills cam and with the last gadget I bought before I went into save for retirement mode, a Flip cam. All of those are great for shooting first-person simple stuff, and facebook here’s my mates mucking about in a bar, but they just don’t let you shift perspective. All of them can give a better rendition in that first-person up to 10 yards away scenarios that my 10-year old camcorder – two of them can even do HD. But I realised why they make me angry when trying to do anything else – the auto gain kills anything in the shadows and the lack of zoom is a massive handicap. A truly talented artist would probably be able to work within those limitations, but it would take them time. I ain’t got that sort of talent. But I’m not so gormless that I need face-tracking.

So I learned something and had some fun. I saw a new form of capitalism in the making. And the cows didn’t crush me!

Doom and Death Spiral Deliberations

I used that title a while back, in that curious Summer of Rage in 2011 when the stock market was taking a hammering and the yoof were rioting on the streets of London for the right to the correct sort of trainers and bigger flat panel TVs. Feels odd to exhume the title for a time when stock market valuations are running high and animal spirits seem to be on a bender of irrational exuberance. We’re three years on from then. People are being boring in pubs about house prices, though we don’t so far have much retail buzz about the stock market. Presumably because Joe Public is taking such a pasting in the cost of living crisis, and even the relatively well-heeled Lucy Mangans of this world grizzle about downward mobility.

The engine of consumer spending is spluttering and dying

I enjoyed Lucy’s piece for it’s internal contradictions. F’rinstance

Our lives may be becoming more precarious than our parents’ or grandparents’ but we have tasted the good life and we want to keep it for ourselves and our children. And we still have the time and energy left for a fight. We may even discover in ourselves a greater empathy for the poor and the beginning of an understanding that impoverishment is not always the choice or result of personal bad decisions we vaguely – and our politicians fervidly – believe it is.

Lucy Mangan – downward mobility

Lucy Mangan of the Torygraph. “Going down” as the operator used to say in the Harrods lifts when I lived near there in a crummy student dive.

I’d agree with Lucy’s assessment that the ‘middle classes (as defined by the torygraph)’ lives are becoming more precarious. But a lot of that is due to taking on stupid and mahoosive levels of debt – the travails of Shona Sibary with the ridiculous flipping of houses to extract home equity in times of plenty has something to do with it, along with the general living larger than life on somebody else’s dime. There is a shift of power going on from labour to capital, and some of that debt is going in keeping up the pretension of being richer than they really are. That sort of impoverishment is the result of bad personal decisions and her parents and grandparents wouldn’t have tolerated it – or even found it possible in a time of credit controls.If you want to be middle class, you need to have middle class values, and living within your means used to go with the territory of being middle class.

I don’t have as much income as I did when working. I could borrow money on credit cards to do the stuff I spent money on while I was working. But guess what – I try and live within my means, and that means doing things cheaper or doing without. The whole credit card thing would be a seriously bad personal decision. It doesn’t mean don’t use credit cards – but it does mean pay the blighters off in full each month. Just like the middle classes used to do in the late 1970s!

I was tickled by

We need to use our remaining capital – both social and financial – to demand change from governments, to avoid tax-evading and semi-monopolistic companies and shop at smaller, more local shops who still use humans rather than automata, and to set up local educational and financial institutions that better suit our needs. Set up a new game, with new rules. But in the meantime, while we work out what they are and where best to place our pieces, I shall be shopping at my local Lidl rather than at Waitrose,

That’s the trouble with the middle class these days, they have no values. Lucy moved within two sentences from realising that the social contract includes using smaller shops that employ her neighbours to shopping at Lidl, which saves her money but doesn’t even share the profits with some faceless shareholders never mind some of the employees 🙂 You really ought to at least finish the paragraph before you undiscover “one for all, and all for one”.

The middle class are hosed. It take unique and rare skills to pull out of a vicious circle, and to do it, the middle classes will have to jettison a lot of things that are dear to them. I just don’t think they have the integrity and moral fibre to take the hit – after all Lucy’s moved from corner shops to Aldi without realising the irony. With consistenty and integrity like that you don’t deserve to win. The problem in the future will not be keeping up with the Joneses, Lucy. It is going to be keeping out of debt slavery. Know your enemy….

Values matter

I’m personally of the view that having values matters a lot more in personal finance than absolute income. I’d say this is behind a lot of the struggle the middle classes are having – they have embraced consumerism and lost their way a bit. Middle class people were much poorer overall in the London I grew up in than they are now, but they seemed to have a stronger set of values, in particular debt other than mortgage debt was frowned on. Credit cards had an uphill struggle when first launched in Britain and had to emphasise the flexibility of rolling a  month’s worth of payments into one payment in those days of handwritten cheques. Hence  “Access your flexible friend helping out Money” rather than the way they advertise now, which is full of offers to buy now  pay nothing for a year etc. The rot soon set in with “Access takes the waiting out of wanting” – fast forward thirty years of this and we have Lucy Mangan grousing about downwards mobility. Once upon a time the middle classes knew that you only borrow money  to purchase assets or increased productive equipment and not for consumer spending, but it’s been a long, long time since that attitude prevailed.

The Ermine is fearful

I was looking at my TD account, which currently looks great, and spent a little bit of time trying to imagine the sea of red and the bottom line about half of where it stands today, and really picture what that looks like. You need to do that every so often to remember that a lot of the value in a portfolio is illusory. Over the long term it does tend to reflect the value that the asset is creating, but over the short term it reflects fickle human opinion. As the GDP chart shows, there’s no earthly good reason why valuations should be so high now. Granted, there was no good reason they were as low as they were in 2009 so only about half the difference is probably real, which is lucky – I thought I was doing okay before 2013 and didn’t buy anything new of note that year.

Of note is that the yield from the HYP will probably rise[ref]the yield will rise because the stock prices tank – I’m not saying the dividends will rise[/ref] – dividend payments tend to fall less than the market value. Now being mindful that the bearish argument always sounds smarter I came across an interesting chart of GDP growth over time – hat tip to Flip Chart Fairy Tales

GDP growth

So you then take a look the recent US and UK stock market performance

Vanguard US and UK, rebased to GBP. Obviously the timescale is only the very end of the GDP one.

And you go obviously, ho-hum, the rise of the stock market is obviously a leading indicator of…the pole-axeing of GDP? Clearly the good people driving the price up[ref]yes, I know, that’s you and me, though in my defence I don’t expect it to be up here, certainly don’t want to buy at this price and couldn’t find anything worth buying last ISA year[/ref] are smoking something powerful. The usual explanation is the shocking devaluation of the currency and everybody running to equities because all the QE, money-printing, what have you is debasing the value of money to inflate away the debt so people are trying to buy anything halfway real to dodge that.

It’s hard to know what to do with this sort of doom and death spiral deliberations. The correct response to the last one was to go out and buy with both hands. The correct response to this one is to try and get used to what that 50% suckout looks like. And then go and buy – but what? I am looking a diversifying away from the dev world and that seems a reasonable way to get a long term edge from this current point. The dev world has served me well so far, but the imbalance stinks. Fortunately now isn’t a bad time to buy some geographical diversity, with the pound being less of a basket-case and creeping up. But stock markets are more correlated than ever nowadays, a bear market in the dev world is a bear market in AsiaPac. Something (globalisation?) seems to be phase-locking markets world-wide, giving a we’re all in it together aspect. There’s obviously the barbarous relic, gold, it may make sense to aim for a longer-term holding of about 5%, but its shocking medium-term volatility makes it a tough call. It’s not a bad time to buy, nowadays. RIT is the man to go to for a level-headed assessment of the details and how to do it. Unlike RIT I’ll wing it tax-unwrapped, since gold doesn’t pay an income 🙂 Its role is a swing producer of ISA funding should the doom and death spiral come to pass.

 Nathan’s right. There be fins in the water IMO.