Has everybody invested their ISA money?.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

And I thought I repeated myself far too often…

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 !

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

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 and Elegran - really supportive posts there!

Thanks Granny23

Very well put Granny23.

And, Frank, the story that Granny23 tells is one of the reasons that women who attend exercise classes purely for female members get quite annoyed when men think that they have a right to be there too. They are often the same women who were considered inferior to men for years, and now have something of their own.

Frank you should remember that most of us on GN are women and over 60. When we started work it was not considered essential or necessary for women to be included in pension schemes as it was expected that we would marry and be covered thereafter by our husband's savings and pensions. For example - I left school and worked for one of the big high street banks for 3 years as a probationery clerkess.
[I had actually applied for an advertised post as a Bank Apprentice, been interviewed as such and passed the bank's entrance exam, easily beating several male applicants, only to discover 6 months later when I enquired about day release to college for my banking exams that I was actually only a 'probationery clerkess', simply because I was female.]
Then I had a medical and was admitted to the non-contributary pension scheme for just over a year until I married and was immediately classed as temporary (non pensionable) staff. I was also not entitled to a staff mortgage at 4% and we had to find one elswhere at 11and7/8%. Nor did I get bonus payments nor share issues to staff. I continued to work there for another 4 years and indeed earned two 'above salary' increments for increasing responsibilities. When I left to have DD1 I asked about my one year's pension fund and was told it was not worth anything as you had to have at least 3 years continuous employment to qualify - I had worked there for over 8 years!

8 years later, I returned to part-time work, not at the bank who did not employ women with children, but at the local university, where I did not qualify for the pension scheme because I was a part-timer. Later I worked part, then full time in the voluntary sector - no pension schemes there. I was 50 before I started a private pension and only did so because I discovered that self-employed DH's modest private pensions which were intended to keep us both in retirement, would die with him if he failed to live to 65 for one, 70 for the other.

I'm sorry I have written so much but know it is difficult for younger people to grasp the inequalities that existed for women back then (the 60's). That is just part of my own story - suffice to say both of us worked two jobs to put our DD's through Uni and to save a sufficiency for an independent retirement. Our parents lived in Council houses, so no big inheritance for either of us. We thankfully did not have to cope with divorce, disablement, longterm illness, just one redundancy. You have been thrifty and responsible Frank but you have also been VERY lucky, I hope you realise that most others are not so fortunate.

This year's ISA ? I only got round to doing last years a few days before the end of the financial year. With the interest rates so poor It is hardly worth the effort. NS&I please bring back index linked.

Yes, I do know jane. Ta.

jo8 Yes the value of stocks can go down, but you still get dividends from them, which is usually more than the interest on a cash ISA.
You can minimise risk by investing in a wide range of stocks and shares.

j08 you've just reminded me of the money we lost in shares in the dot com crash ... :P

Yes FlicketyB. But stocks can go down as well as up.

Hope you've got someone who knows their stuff handling it.

If only I had the money to save...

But ISAs are not limited to cash ISAs. You can invest larger sums, if you are fortunate enough to have them in stocks and shares. We are fortunate enough to be able to do so and nearly all our savings are protected in a wide mixture of individual shares and unit trusts. The returns from these are higher than from cash ISAs and are an important part of our retirement income.

Anyway ISAs are a joke! The maximum investment level is pathetic, the return even more so (tax free or not), the system is abstruse plus you have to monitor it yourself to make sure they don't change the goalposts. So I wouldn't lose sleep over it if I didn't make the deadline in time (shivering in my well-worn boots).

Frank, your question to Soop is a bit of a nerve!

We've had our life savings completely depleted twice - once when our daughter needed medical care (a hip replacement at age 15 and a revision at age 19) that was not covered by private medical insurance (and we weren't living in a country where free health care was provided) and then again we started over at 50 when we fled our home and left South Africa due to soaring levels of crime plus a whole range of other factors including job loss due to affirmative action - we sold our home (investment) at a loss. We were lucky to seel our home, others in our street abandoned their homes. Not that I have to explain to you, but you really do need a reality check.