Good afternoon. Mike here, taking care of TCWU whilst the Edinburgh cats smash another HomeGame out of the park. Loads to come on that next week, but for now I’ve got a couple of pension related things on my mind.

First up, dashboard. MoneyHelper recently released the first public trial version of the Pension Dashboard. As part of the sign up process you are asked not to share details of the designs and services, and being an honest man I won’t, but wow. Registering was easy using my Government One Login, and from there it quickly found everything I’ve accumulated over what I loosely call my career.

I like to think I’m pretty on top of my personal finances, but it still found a pension from about a million years ago when I was stacking shelves for £1.49ph. I can’t imagine this is going to make much of a dent on my cashflow plan, but for whoever that provider is they are about to get a RFI from me, and almost certainly a transfer out. And that my friends is my main conclusion from looking at the dashboard – it has the potential to wake up millions of people, with a decent whack of them moving away from their million-year-old pension contract they had long forgotten about. I do hope those providers have staffed their admin and transfer out teams appropriately…

Second up, this article on BBC News caught my eye – “Why Gen Z are opting out of pensions” reporting the alarming news that the percentage of 22 to 29-year-olds opting out after auto-enrolment has risen from 6.6% in Q3 2020/21 to 11.5% in Q3 2025/26. Although the article has Gen Z in the title all age groups display a similar increase and overall opt out rates are now the highest they’ve ever been, above the levels we saw during the pandemic.

Despite having a pension that is a million years old I can just about remember what it was like to be that age. And more importantly my children are the age of some of the people quoted in the article so I can really relate to the pressures they are facing. Housing costs are brutal, and the cost of living is getting worse.

It’s easy for us so-called experts to wheel out a compound interest chart and declare case closed but when you’re choosing between this month’s rent and a retirement that’s 30-odd years away, the chart loses every time. We are dealing with humans and real life here, and for many people at the moment life is tough. The dashboard may well jolt awake those of us who already have a pension (or six) knocking about, but the harder job is the people quietly heading for the exit. If we want them to stay, we need to stop lecturing and start showing, preferably before the dashboards of 2056 are looking very empty indeed.

And to close, pretty sure this won’t be the only Abbey Road related musical link between now and February, but I reckon Massive Attack with Elizabeth Fraser doing Teardrop will be hard to top.