Think work is stressful? Try dealing with retirement! says CHARLES GARSIDE

I’ve had a 55 year career in some of Fleet Street’s toughest newsrooms, including Robert Maxwell’s Mirror. But that was easy alongside my struggles with useless firms blocking me from my OWN pension savings…

We cannot choose the day of our arrival in this world, nor (at least legally) the day of our departure.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are really only a few important dates that are directly related to the choices we make in our own lives.

One: When to marry, although this decision can be made more than once. A former boss of mine is Rupert Murdoch. Five at the time of writing!

Two: When to take your company pension. This is, I would argue, the only guaranteed unique, once-in-a-lifetime resolution we make, and it has huge implications.

I was lucky enough to be able to retire at 65, when the AOW came into effect. Nowadays, however, people have to wait longer.

But I put off the pension pots I had built up from my work on many Fleet Street titles.

Nearly eight months later, I seriously wonder whether the pension industry is doing everything it can to frustrate, delay, obfuscate and generally raise the anger and blood pressure of its clients in the hope of hastening the deaths of retirees by shortening their remaining lives.

It would clearly save them money, but wouldn’t it?

Maybe I’m just the same cynical journalist I’ve been for 55 years, yet I now plan to live much longer, just to spite them.

After giving the advisor written permission to collect money from eight or nine companies, some pretended to want to collect their own hard-earned money.

I realize that in this terrible time of fraud there is a great need for security. But there is no reason to forget that there are random responses or delays in sending letters stating that ‘questionnaires’ are enclosed, when in fact the questionnaire in question is not enclosed.

Further delays followed as returned questionnaires were ‘lost’ in the post, while copies sent in the same manner and on the same date still arrived at their destination.

Emails from general email accounts or from people who worked three days a week, worked from home or were on vacation and “didn’t read emails” went unanswered for weeks.

The real problem was, and I suspect many readers will discover this as well, that most of my pots were no longer with the company I was doing business with, as the company had been acquired.

When I investigated one, I saw that it was at the top of the list of complaints received by the Financial Ombudsman, based on the most recent figures I could find.

Most complaints were about delays, lack of response, lost correspondence, etc.

Sound familiar? To be fair, a few businesses were efficient and still took the right precautions, and a few only had enough money for an annual fish and chips dinner, but hey, it’s my money!

I moved to London from the North of England in 1978 to become news editor of the London Evening News, which closed less than two years later despite selling 550,000 copies a night. The paper was losing £17 million a year and making an incredible 1,700 people redundant.

Like many young people, the idea of ​​retirement was still a long way off in the days when finding and diligently performing a job was the highest priority.

Only once did pensions play a role in the negotiations about employment. In 1991 I was offered the job of deputy editor of The European, headed by Robert Maxwell.

I had worked with his new editor, John Bryant, at The Times and had agreed to be his deputy. The appointment was confirmed in Maxwell’s vast office in Holborn.

He wore shirt sleeves and mixed drinks. He asked about my pension and raved about the quality of their fund, and suggested I meet the man in charge: the ominously named Mr. Tombs. I declined.

When Maxwell mysteriously fell off his boat that year, no pension payments had yet been made into my private fund as agreed.

Maxwell had plundered millions from pension funds in the biggest pension fraud in British history. Fortunately I did not transfer anything via Mr. Tombs.

So my advice is:

• Retirement comes sooner than you think.
• Always send documents by registered mail.
• Stay calm and take deep breaths.
• Remember: it’s your money, not theirs.

Charles Garside edited the London Evening News and later The Standard. He was editor and managing editor of The European, deputy editor of the Sunday Express, managing editor of the Ny Breaking, assistant editor of The Times, The Standard, The Mirror and MD of Radio Riviera in Monte Carlo. He also owned the Miller Howe hotel and restaurant on Windermere for ten years.