I was pretty happy with myself at 28 with a pension up and running - plenty of people my age who I know haven't even got one, and that usually because they don't know the first thing about them.
I did hear once, probably from a pension fund manager, that you should contribute half your age when you start a pension, as a percentage of your gross salary, into your pension fund until you retire. By that calculation I should have been putting away 14% - i was doing closer to 25%.
When he'd advised me, Phil had pointed me towards Trustnet as a place I could track the performance of my funds. He'd given me a sensible selection - Fidelity's European and South East Asian funds, Invesco Perpetual's High Income (an investor's classic), Newton's Oriental fund, and Scottish Widows' generic North American fund. I'd added, for a reason I still do not recall, JP Morgan's Emerging Markets fund.
Being into the whole thing, I did what any new investor does and tracked the performance of the funds on almost a daily basis. I wanted to see my next egg grow and grow, and feel safe about my impending retirement (in 37 years time). What I saw was not encouraging - I saw ups and downs running into hundreds of pounds, with profit and loss percentages running in double figures and oscillating wildly. To compound matters, I was running a "virtual share portfolio" in Google Finance to see if I personally would be any good at this investing lark. It didn't oscillate wildly.
I began to look around me, at individual's I knew personally who worked in the pension industry. I started to ask "do i actually want to entrust (and pay) Bloggs to arrange my future?". Bloggs was often knocking off work earlier than me and dealt with more hangovers per month that I had in a year. I had also played with some spreadsheets as part of an arbitrage exercise and began to learn the impact of single figure percentages, compounded over years.
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