Maybe pensioners don't want a minefield of financial options

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/21/pensioners-minefield-financial-options-pensions

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"Choice" is the buzz word around the changes the chancellor has made to pensions provision this week, but is choice really what those nearing retirement actually want? The changes affect those over 55 who have savings in defined contribution (DC) pension schemes, so someone like me, in my early 50s with a personal pension, is now hurtling towards a moment when all sorts of complicated financial decisions will have to be understood, and taken.

And while that suits some 50-somethings, it definitely doesn't suit all of us: the pictures used in the press over the past couple of days of "retirees" have depicted 80-somethings on a park bench, but it would be more apt if it showed a picture of a slightly harassed, overworked parent with two or three kids at university and, frankly, enough on our plates without having to take a huge financial decision.

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. Like many others of my generation I have also had my confidence badly dented when it comes to making big financial decisions by the whole endowment mortgage debacle. Whether or not to take it out was a choice; it seemed like a good one. Two decades on I am tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket as a result.

When you get down to the individual, there's only one question at the heart of pension planning, and it's this: how long am I going to be around? Giving us the chance to micromanage our own pensions, as George Osborne is now doing, means we – you and me – will have to make that call for ourselves. But how do we work it out given that life expectancy figures are constantly being revised upwards? Also, according to David Robbins, senior consultant at Tower Watson, there is evidence that we tend to underestimate how long we are going to survive.

We've all had, in minister Steve Webb's Lamborghini comment, a colourful image of profligate overspending by the recently retired; but the opposite problem is just as serious, ie the pensioner who ekes out his or her pot much more frugally than turns out to be necessary. I don't want to be either of these people, I just want to be sensible: and annuities, from where I sit, look like a very good bet indeed. And yes, of course they will still be available – but they might be a lot pricier, and if they're not what everyone is doing any more I am almost inevitably going to have to start looking around, doing homework I don't want to do, and perhaps making (another) big financial mistake. One that, unlike the endowment policies I took out in the 1980s, will be completely impossible to put right.