Sir Fred's Pension Pot

Even though I am retired, I continue to invest a small annual sum into a pension fund. I do this for tax reasons and as a way of building a small add-on pension to top up my income some time in the next few years to combat inflation. I am wrong to do this, of course, since we are about to experience deflation - so they tell us. Now I am sceptical. After all, the people telling us this are part of the group of experts responsible for the present mess - so we can't just accept what they say. Anyway, assuming that my pension fund does not totally disappear down the plug hole into the sewers of financial incompetence, my fund may one day pay me an extra £3,000 per year. I was thinking about this while reading yet another article about Sir Fred Goodwin's pension - is there any human-being who has ever lived whose pension arrangements have been so widely known or so much discussed? Sir Fred is going to get "over £650,000 per year." It later turned out that the actual sum is £693,000. Note that the extra amount of £43,000 per annum was so little it was hardly worth mentioning. But that £43,000 would need an extra pension pot of about £1m. In other words, the bit that we didn't need to even notice would require a pot of 20 x the national average pension pot. How many people outside of the daft remuneration schemes of the financial institutions and some local authorities can dream of a pension at 50 years of age that exceeds £40,000 per annum? Perhaps all will be well when we are enrolled in Gordon's great national pension fund in 2012.

Eric's mum says that she is looking forward to her increased state pension in April. She realises how lucky she is that inflation was running at 5% last September. If the cost of electricity and gas had not doubled she would not have got an extra £4 per week - and an increased fuel allowance. At the moment she is struggling a bit but she thinks that taking into account all the extra money, after April she will be able to switch the lights on again. I think she is being a little rash.