It All Makes Perfect Cents — Retirement?

WORDS: JILL KERBY

Nah… it’s long term working that you might want to plan for. I’ve been thinking

a lot about retirement recently. My own and other people’s and how it doesn’t

look like it might happen quite the way I imagined…

The positive, 2.4% investment return from Irish pensions funds in March — the first

month since August 2008 that they’ve been in the black — was hailed as one of those

little ‘glimmers of hope’ that so many commentators have latched onto these days.

(That expression is President Obama’s who was elected not just to lead his country but

to cheerlead for it as well.)

After a 65% drop in the ISEQ over the entire of 2008, it was probably a good assumption that Irish pension funds, some of which have a fifth of their exposure to the ISEQ, would

see a little uplift after the government announced it was buying all the banks’ toxic debt. That news has lifted the ISEQ, and at time of writing it had nearly reached 2400. It’s not much — the market was over 6,100 year ago — but I suppose it is… a glimmer.

But there’s a big dark chasm to jump between a typical drop in pension funds everywhere

of about 30-40% and a profitable retirement. Like with our dodgy banks, we share with the rest of the Anglo-American world a serious pension shortfall and the baby boomers are now not just up to their oxters in personal debt mainly due to property-related overconsumption, but are now stuck with inadequate and falling pension values and are also losing their jobs

at the fastest pace ever; last March’s figures in the United States showed the percentage

of 45-55 year olds out of work doubled from last year to 6% today. (Official unemployment is now 8.5% in the US.)

Read more about Retirement? in the June 2009 issue of WMB, on newsstands now!