I’m 34, with £1,600 in my pension. When can I retire in comfort?

Right, are we ready now? Then I can tell you why I’ve brought you all here.

Friends, we are gathered inside this column to celebrate an incredible milestone. I, Marie Le Conte, one metre and sixty-four centimetres in height, of an undisclosed weight, thirty-four and a half years of age, am now the proud owner of what I believe you people call “a pension”. There are, at time of writing, 1615 pounds and 11 pence in it. Please, do take a moment to note the pence there too. They’re important to me. I grew them myself.

Now, I’m sure you must be wondering: how did I, Marie Le Conte, one metre – sorry, fine – how did I accrue such immense wealth while still so young? What is my secret? Ah, I can share it with you if you wish.

My secret is: earlier this year I realised, with increasing panic, that I really, really had to pull my finger out and start thinking about my distant future, and I decided I had to do… something about it.

For all of my twenties and most of my thirties so far, my retirement plan had been, very sincerely, to be “rich or dead”. What was I going to do once too old to work? Easy! I’d either live on my millions or… eh, you can guess. Somehow, this stopped being attractive at some point, mostly as friends began looking like they were on the verge of a panic attack whenever I explained my scheme. 

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Two months ago, I decided to do the unthinkable: I opened a pension account. Now, most of my riches have come from the roughly six months I spent at the Evening Standard, some time around the 17th century.

There must also be a few coins left over from the year I spent in another newsroom after that, which I’m yet to retrieve, but all the years that followed were empty, as I have been self-employed since 2017. Since then, I have also added – please, hold your applause, you’ll only embarrass me – £550 to the pot.

If everything goes according to plan and I keep saving at this pace, then… actually, I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I did one vague calculation once last month and it looked so apocalyptic that I closed the tab in a panic. As far as I can tell, if I keep going like this, I will be able to retire at 102, and enjoy the rest of my days with a tenner and a Twix a month. It’s petrifying.

Still, it’s better than nothing, is what I keep trying to tell myself. Oh, and I’m really, really not alone in my predicament. As a report from Pension UK found earlier this month, over three-quarters of people currently aren’t on course for a “moderate pension income”.

According to them, a moderate lifestyle costs £32,700 a year for one person, and £45,400 for a couple. Unfortunately, only 23% of the working population are estimated to be reaching such a level. 

Now, this is deeply worrying in and of itself but – oh! Can you hear that noise in the distance? It sure sounds like a ticking time bomb to me, with the words “housing crisis” written in big red letters across the explosives. When people talk about pensions, they often assume that the people receiving them are either living in mortgage-free properties, or living in social housing – nothing in between.

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Soon, Britain will see its first proper wave of private renters reaching retirement age, as they weren’t able to buy while working, and the results of this may be cataclysmic. In my very own backyard – well, the floor of my building – one neighbour had to leave London altogether earlier this year as he just couldn’t afford to stay in the capital, despite having spent his working life there. How many more people will this happen to?

I’ve tried to keep this piece light because there’s frankly too much despair in the world already but I mean, I’m not a magician. This stuff really is very scary. 

Everyone knows that both this government and the one that may replace it soon have a lot to be getting on with, but solving the pension problem really ought to be near the top of the pile. If not, the governments that follow may well collapse entirely under the weight of their predecessors.

Oh, and in the meantime – does anyone know how long cake and champagne can hold for? I may put some of it in storage now, and get it out again in 40 years or so.