Jayne Dowle: How Ministers make putting your feet up a major feat

A few years ago I had a plan. Two plans actually. I have a private pension accrued from my early thirties working full-time on a newspaper, and as a part-time university lecturer, I pay into the teachers’ pension fund. That’s quite a hefty contribution every month, but everyone says I’d be a fool not to, so I grit my teeth when I look at my pay-slip.

It fascinates – make that galls me – to recall that when I first took pension advice, in my twenties, the salesman convinced me that I would be done with work and packing my backpack for India when I was 55.

It was the early 1990s, and I was working for Mirror Group shortly after Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht, so you can see why I was interested in opting out of the company scheme. But that particular pension turned out to be so rubbish, I managed to cash it in on the grounds of mis-selling, and spent the money on a trip to America instead. So although I lost any illusions about pensions long ago, I kind of imagined being able to wind down sometime around my mid-sixties.

I still did, even a couple of years ago, when I took control of the private pension, a modest lump sum which appeared to be gradually losing, not making money, and sought independent financial advice on reinvesting it. For a few weeks, I felt empowered, in control of my own destiny, like one of those gently greying models in the adverts, toasting their good fortune on their timeshare balcony.

So you can’t accuse me of having my head in the sand, especially when you consider that a quarter of those adults interviewed by the retirement income specialists MGM Advantage had yet to accrue any kind of savings pot for their retirement at all. But I don’t feel in control any more.

Unless my maths is even worse than I thought, it looks like I won’t get longer than a few weeks off at a time until at least I am at least 67. And if I ever do actually retire, I’m looking at an income with a sum total of around three grand a year. Even with my Mrs Scrooge ways, that’s not going to keep me alive. And I can’t imagine that by the then there will be any State left to top me up.

Unless I suddenly stumble upon thousands upon thousands of pounds I’d forgotten about, I am certainly not going to find myself in any kind of position over the next decade or so where I can “up my contributions”, as those pension salesmen so cheerfully put it. Not with two kids to bring up, and possibly – God help us – put through higher education.

Now this is me, one individual, and I have even managed to think about and make decisions about my pensionable future. But it doesn’t mean that I am sorted. Far from it. And I suspect that many of you will be the same.

So it doesn’t help, not one bit, when we are lectured by government Ministers and told that we will be a public burden in our old age, and that we must take responsibility for ourselves. What else am I doing, but “taking responsibility for myself”? But unless I stop paying the mortgage, or turn off the gas and electricity, I simply can’t see a future without work of some kind.

And you know what, right now, work itself isn’t what I am really worrying about. I don’t want to suddenly stop typing in 17 years when I turn 60, and do er, what, for the next 20 or 30 years? I’m not the kind to sit and knit, and I know plenty of sixtysomethings who still want to work and enjoy it. But for them, until now, it has been a choice. I’d like that choice too, but I suppose choice is going to be a luxury I will never be able to afford – just like the timeshare balcony.

I once had a vision of gradually winding down, working part-time, keeping my brain and body active but without the stress of knowing that I had to keep going simply to keep poverty from the door. This of course, all assuming I still had my health, a factor which the Gradgrinds seem to be blithely unaware of when they are telling us that we’re in it until we’re 70.

I can’t even solve my own pensions crisis, never mind the nation’s. But I think it is time for some decisive, pragmatic and compassionate action from the Government, action which remembers that we are all individuals. And most of us are individuals without family money, share portfolios and comfy non-exec directorships on the boards of large multi-nationals to ease us into our reluctant dotage.