RACHEL RICKARD STRAUS: We need a state pension dashboard NOW

When can I retire? It’s a question I suspect even those of us who enjoy our jobs think about from time to time, especially on Monday mornings after a nice summer weekend.

But for such a common and important question, it’s surprisingly hard to answer.

Of course you can check at what age you become entitled to state pension. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle.

That won’t tell you what you really need to know, which is what age you’ve crept enough to achieve the retirement lifestyle you’re aiming for.

To work that out is a serious faff. First, you need to track down all the retirement pots you own.

Workers hold about 11 jobs over the course of their lives — with different plans for each — so that’s a lot of pensions to keep track of. It’s no wonder we’ve lost sight of more than £26 billion in pension pots between us.

Then you need to know how much you have saved per pension.

You do this by taking a close look at the pension statements that your providers are obliged to send you each year.

But they are often already outdated when they arrive on your doormat, and are not always easy to read.

Moreover, there is a chance that you will not receive yours at all, because it is so easy to forget to provide old pension providers with new contact details when you move house.

You can also check your statements online. But it involves setting login details for each pension scheme and navigating often inconvenient websites.

Next, you’ll need to get a state pension forecast to find out how much you’re on track to receive each year.

You can find these at gov.uk/check-state-pension. However, forecasts are sometimes flawed, so review yours carefully and challenge the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) if it looks incorrect.

Armed with all this information, you should now have the basic tools for figuring out what kind of income your savings could generate when you retire.

You can go to an online retirement calculator that should spit out a number when you enter information about your retirement savings. Most pension providers offer one.

All this is very much worth doing – but hard. What if I told you that all this can be done for you? Imagine if you could just log into one website and see all your pensions in one place.

Well, that’s exactly what’s coming. Unfortunately, only three years later.

The pension industry and the government have been working together for years on a pension dashboard, where we should be able to see all our pension information in one place.

In 2016, the financial watchdog advised that one should be available in 2019.

The government agreed, but since then the dashboard has suffered delay after delay. Last week it was pushed back again – this time to 2026.

It’s not an easy project, as many providers have to work together and provide masses of data. And it has to be right from the start or we don’t trust it. But missing the deadline by seven years is hugely disappointing.

We can’t afford more delays. We know that most employees don’t save enough to reach the retirement they dream of. But it is very difficult to solve that when people have no real overview of how much they have – and therefore what the shortage is.

I’m sure once we face the yawning gap between how much we have and how much we need – written there in black and white and in pounds and pence – that might be just the kick-up needed to make us more let save. I hope it won’t be too long before, when you find yourself fantasizing about dropping nine-to-five, you’ll be able to log in and see how far that dream is from reality .

However, there are some retirement terms that need to be postponed. We at Money Mail are so relieved that the DWP finally listened to us and gave employees more time to increase their state pensions (see pages 27-29).

Thank you to the readers who contacted us with your frustrations about trying to get through to the DWP. We feel for you and, as always, are here to fight your corner.

r.rickardstraus@dailymail.co.uk