From the blog: This week a double decker bus is cruising down the country with one objective: to drive engagement with retirement saving.

As Pension Awareness Day arrives, there is even more focus on making long-term saving more interesting.

Scottish Widows’ 2016 Retirement Report shows that 23 per cent of people have no idea if they are saving enough for retirement, and 47 per cent of those in their 30s and 40s are saving inadequately or not at all.

Click here to read the full blog post

Scottish Widows’ 2016 Retirement Report shows that 23 per cent of people have no idea if they are saving enough for retirement, and 47 per cent of those in their 30s and 40s are saving inadequately or not at all.

Pension communication company Pension Geeks launched the September 15 Pensions Awareness Day in 2014 to alert the nation that it is not saving enough for retirement.

The bus begins its trip in Edinburgh and ends its tour in Brighton, stopping at four other major cities along the way.

At each stop, members of the public will be able to ask the on board team of advisers any retirement-related questions, “big or small”.

Source: Aegon

People clearly need to start thinking more about pensions, but planning for retirement can be seen as boring, complicated and even daunting.

So how can we get the nation hooked on, or at least interested in, saving for the future?

Pension Geeks is trying to tackle the issue through technology by being “dedicated to communicating in a language that is simple and jargon-free, in order to make pensions accessible for all”.

They are certainly not alone in using technology to reboot the nation’s attitude towards pensions.

Last year, the Department for Work and Pensions’ came up with an animated fluffy multi-coloured monster to teach, rather than terrorise, people about the dangers of ignoring workplace pensions.

Now Pensions is relying on the nation's love of television, employing former reality TV star Stacey Solomon to be the face of its campaign, in order to encourage smaller businesses to opt for its pension scheme.

Engaging younger people online, on TV and through social media may be the way forward when it comes to pensions, but it’s also crucial to “get the lingo right”, according to Tara Gillespie, vice president of investment consulting at Redington.  

The consultancy firm asked a group of 17-year-olds to explore how to get young people engaged in long-term saving and investing.

One of the key things that they said would help increase awareness was the fact that the word “pension” is “often associated with being boring, far away and for old people”.

The team of teenagers suggested rebranding the whole savings journey as “future funding”.

Ultimately, they said that “if we don’t feel like we ‘have’ to do something, but instead ‘want’ to do it, we are a lot more likely to do it”.

Topics