Has everybody invested their ISA money?.

Granny23 and Elegran - really supportive posts there!

Since DH had to give up work with surgery for a perforated bowel and was then diagnosed with lymphoma , he effectively took early "retirement (without a pension until this year and then very small) and I have had to dip into the saving at regular intervals. Yes I wish I had saved more, but the return has become risible.I eventually gave up on my ISA when I thought they had made a mistake of one decimal point on the interest - but no, it was right, it had gone from 5% to 0.5% I know there are better deals out there for the first year, but then you are back at next to nothing. You keep bleating on about how poor you are Frank - use some of that money - LIVE A LITTLE!
Granny23's story is sadly typical of a lot of women of our age. The equality our DDs enjoy didn't really come in time for many of us.

Granny23

You do surprise me about working for a bank and not being able to join the pension scheme.
My wife joined as a graduate in 1970 and was admitted to the bank pension scheme on joining.
Sadly she passed away before she retired.
Under the terms of her scheme I was entitled to half her pension from when she would have been 60 in 2008.
Immediately when she passed away I was given a letter saying the pension scheme would contact me early in 2008 to arrange payment of the pension.
I don't know what they meant by early in 2008 but we got to March and I contacted them.
The bank first said she had never worked there but I sent them copies of all of the correspondence we had received from the pension scheme from day one.
I think the trustees were a bit shocked I had all the letters but they then came back with an offer which was about £3,000 a year short.
They had missed off some of the years of her service and had missed off her bonus sacrifices and AVC's. She had taken the option for the resultant pension's from the bonus sacrifices and the AVC's to have a widows pension element.
After a while they came back offering half of the standard pension from when I would have been 60 6 months later than when she would have been 60 but and omitted the AVC and Bonus Sacrifice pension.
When I queried it the bank said it had changed its policy and was no longer paying pensions to widows / widowers resulting from bonus sacrifices and AVC's leaving the pension about £1,200 short. They also said I was the only widow / widower who had ever contested a pension figure. The woman said the pension money was usually regarded as unimportant to a widow / widower.
I then wrote to the chairman threating legal action if they did not pay and he did come back agreeing the money should be paid.

Frank

Oh Frank you really astonish me. If you are in fact a real person and believe me I have my doubts. You come across as being cold and calculated and totally money orientated which is sad.

Even the very nature of this thread (same old same old) in which you assume everyone has plenty of money (like you) when actually many are struggling to get by through no fault of their own.

How dare you imply that someone should have taken out a private pension when you have no idea of that persons personal circumstances?

For goodness sake change the record because the one you seem to keep on playing has lost its appeal and is quite frankly boring !

And I thought I repeated myself far too often…

j08, Yes I am well aware that stocks can go down as well as up - and we have had our clonkers. I invested one Isa worth of money into Royal Bank of Scotland, I banked with them and found their quality of service exceptionally good. Pity their investment decision making wasn't as good as their branch banking.

And we do it ourselves. I am an economist. DH has been dabbling in penny shares for 20 years. We never buy anything financial described as a 'product' and we do not chase huge returns, if it looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true. We stick to shares and unit trusts, which are baskets of shares, and that is all.

What I find puzzling about Frank is why he always has to battle people over everything. Does nothing ever go right?

FlicketyB

I do have to agree that pensions and tax cause me a lot of problems.
My employers said it was the fact I had changed companies 4 times in my career in the same group combined with the fact I started to pay in to the AVC scheme from the first day I joined which has caused confusion.
I have also had 3 different tax offices involved with my pensions which caused some confusion but I have been assured that will improve as they are trying to centralise everything.
Every year I have a call from my own employers pension scheme saying I am being overpaid. I joined 3 days before the rules changed which was the date which counted although the paperwork was not processed till after the rules changed.
If I had not shouted up all the time I would be about £100 short per week.
Also if I had let my father's ex have her way I would be down on a house.

Frank

Oops - nearly got to the end of a post without mentioning the house there - as if.

Dear Frank,

Some of us have, and some of us haven't [plenty of dosh.] A series of serious setbacks, resulted in us having to knuckle down to three lengthy projects over the period of twenty four years. We've renovated a derelict hay loft and built a decent home from what was a large, ramshackle storage shed. Our present home was built from scratch, and we were responsible for ALL the carpentry and interior/exterior decorating. We've also lived, for some months, in three caravans...the last having no hot water, because the peat deposit from the burn caused problems with the Ascot. No complaints. Some people go through far, far worse and still cannot keep a roof over their heads. We consider ourselves to be extremely fortunate. Our savings are evaporating at a rapid rate. Hence the hoped for sale of our present wee "dream home" by the sea. Next step...possibly back to a caravan, maybe use of someone's spare room. Who knows. Ultimately, we shall move into an even smaller home and continue to count our blessings.

I worked for 4 different companies, who had me in pension schemes, 2 paid my contributions back when I left. In the 12 years I was with the one that provides my occupational pension I moved jobs, each time to a different part of the company. My pension was spot on and my redundancy pay, I was made redundant into early retirement, despite various transfers of money between redundancy payoff and pension.

The pension scheme did put me on emergency coding, which the Inland Revenue didn't notice, nor did I for a year or two, but when I spoke to IR they were very apologetic and my money was repaid within two weeks.

FlicketyB

I think things were OK where I worked if you had not done slightly out of the ordinary things like pay AVC's at age 21 and sacrificed your bonuses for pension at a very early age. I paid the AVC's to get 40 years pension by 60. I joined at 21 as I went to university
Unfortunately I think people were doing things like adding post it notes to my pension records. Putting it in polite terms they were a complete mess.
Also some of them pre date the computer.
The people who looked after my pension records up to when I was 45 had all left when I retired.
I never worked in the pensions department so there is no way I could have realised what was going on.
A similar thing appears to have happened with my wife's pension.
Obviously it was not my fault this has happened.

Frank

Granny23 your story reminded me of those very unfair days when women earned less for doing the same job as a man.

I had to lie at an interview in the early 1960s and say I didn't have a child because I desperately needed a job.

I worked in fear of someone finding out I had a baby. My first husband had run off with my best friend and left me destitute.
I had no where to live, went to stay with my mother but the landlord found out and said if I didn't leave he would through my mother out and me.

I try not to think about that time in my life it makes me so unhappy even today years later, I don't know how I managed to survive those awful days.

jeanie99

All I can say is they should have forced your ex husband to pay for the childs care using deductions from wages etc.
I made sure my late wife and 2 daughters were ok and I still do although to some extent as well as helping my granddaughters.

Frank

Frank - who is this 'they' who should have forced Jeanie's ex to pay? In the 60s there was no legislation to help in this situation nor legal aid to allow a destitute abandoned wife to employ a solicitor. Back then everything worked on the assumption that a decent man would always support his children and would make provision for his ex-wife on divorce. However, many men were not decent and even today it is difficult to enforce payment of child support from a reluctant man - some go to great lengths - going abroad, becoming unemployed or self employed - to thwart a court order.

Frank - I repeat again that you have had a charmed life (and I do not begrudge you the fruits of your labours and thriftiness). What is annoying is when you, who have lived your life in a comfortable middle class bubble, tell people what they 'should' have done 40/50 years ago, often citing options which were not possible for them because they were female, disabled, had no parental support or whatever. I could not go to university not just because my parents could not afford to support me until I was 21 but when my mother had to give up work following an accident, I had to leave school and start work at 15 to replace her missing wages in the very tight family budget.

Funnily enough, I have no chip on my shoulder and have led an interesting, varied and enjoyable life. In fact I rather pity you with all your worries about extracting the last penny from your investments, keeping your house in the family, care home fees, wills, battling with income tax and pension people. When you have just enough to get by on you are spared these worries and can concentrate on enjoying what you do have.

Granny23

I just find it annoying that people are so dishonest.
If a person is entitled to have NHS funding for care homes that is what they should get without argument and social workers should not be telling people to sell houses etc when it is unlawful.
I can understand errors with pensions but I do get astonished at the lack of interest in getting errors rectified.
A lot of mergers etc had happened and one of the pensions people said they were dealing with 31 different schemes as well as peculiarities like mine.
What did annoy us about the house was the lady was told I was a half owner and then watched me pay the bills to have it bought into a top class condition using money from the proceeds of my house and then wanted me thrown out.
Also she said in the end she did not like dogs do why did she befriend Dad knowing he was a dog owner?.
Really I think she must have known at the start there were going to be problems.

Frank

HUNTERF You are going to make yourself ill if you continue to dwell on the same thing in this way. Put the whole incident in its proper place – that is, in the past. The woman is dead, the house is yours and no one is trying to take it away. You will drive yourself mad if you keep going over and over the whole story virtually every day.

Not to mention driving the rest of us mad too!

Better out than in.

Frank, we're here for you. Please don't spoil your well-deserved good fortune by your reluctance to forgive and forget. If I dwelt on the unfair hand that we were dealt in the past; the reason why we now need to move yet again from a home we love, I would be deeply unhappy. Live what life you have well. And

soop you remind me of a friend who says "Happiness is wanting what you have".

There is a wonderful new book by a South African author "White Dog Falls from the Sky" - and in it she describes an informal settlement ("squatter camp") with the words "What can you not build a house from?"

Love the quote, Grannyknot

soop that reminds me of something I heard recently: "if you can't have what you love, love what you have"

So many women have had difficult lives and had no choice but to put up with it. Young women today will never have to suffer worse treatment just because they are female but we don't keep moaning about it, we just get on with our lives. I could list lots here but I don't expect my problems have been very different from many others.

I strongly dislike this patronising attitude Frank, please try to think what effect your words may have on others.

Movedalot

Movedalot Perhaps you are so sanguine because you have three sons. Given the gender pay gap that still exists, young women are still disadvantaged if not actually suffering as such simply because they are female. Social attitudes aren't any better with two women a month murdered by their partners or ex-partners. And that is only in this country. The problem of rape in India has been widely publicised recently and on gransnet we have discussed such things as honour killing, forced marriages, genital mutilation and inequality under the law in some countries – to name just some of the reasons women suffer because they are women.

OK absent I dared to post so I suppose I should have expected you to pull my post apart. If you really don't believe that social attitudes have changed we must be living in different worlds. I was talking about employment, pensions etc. like the other posters but of course you decided to interpret my post - again