With apologies....

With apologies to my actuarial and marketing friends......

Two people are flying in a hot air balloon and realise they are lost. They see a man on the ground, so they navigate the balloon to where they can speak to him. They yell to him, "Can you help us – we’re lost."

The man on the ground replies, "You’re in a hot air balloon, about two hundred feet off the ground." One of the people in the balloon replies to the man on the ground, "You must be an actuary. You gave us information that is accurate, but completely useless."

The actuary on the ground yells to the people in the balloon, "you must be in marketing."

They yell back, "yes, how did you know?"

The actuary says, "well, you’re in the same situation you were in before you talked to me, but now it’s my fault."

Translating Pensions

Well done to Louise Farrand of Pensions Insight for her blog on pension phrases she would ban. I agree ‘On-Boarding’ is not a verb and never should be!

It got me thinking…..

How do non-pension people understand the jargon we throw at them? Maybe they don’t.

Here’s my own selection of pension phrases that may have very different meanings for the population at large. There’s a few you may have to think about first. Any more suggestions?


Abatement – A posh flat

Accrual – The opposite of kind

Actuaries - Flying performers

Amortisation – French for love on a train

Blended – A milk shake

Commutation – Travelling to work

Concurrency – A payment method using large shells

Discontinuance Basis – How shops sell end of line products

Fiduciary – Fido’s friend sees Harry (think about it….)

Glide path – Slipping over on a night out with the lads

Longevity Swap – Exchanging time share apartments

Middleware – Clothes worn in Lord of the Rings

Mortality Drag – Dangerous car racing

Offsetting – Losing at tennis

Pre-Crystallisation – Going into a jewellers shop

QROPS – Wheat

Tactical Asset Allocation – Winning on a games show

Targeted Return – Winning on a games show

Time Weighted Return – Getting fat

Wrap – From Pret

Yield – Wrestling manoeuvre

Zombie Fund – Clothes purchased for Emo wardrobe

Giving it the Bird

Congratulations Pension Expert. You valiantly resisted birdie jokes alongside the article on the RSPBs underpinning of their pension scheme. Only three were in evidence: The RSPB ‘hatching a plan’ 'broader flightpath' and 'migrating assets'.

However, I have no such qualms. It seems to me the RSPB have avoided nesteggs, shunned feathering their nest, seen the wood from the trees in their flightpath and adopted an early worm approach with regard to the recovery period.

Their approach could act as a beak-on for other plans. I noticed Tom Dines was the author of the article. Trust he's eating chicken tonight. Okay, not the best bird jokes, I know. Guess I may not tweet this one. :-)

Why We Provide A Pension

Here's a good reason why we work so hard to ensure there are pensions for people.

 

REPOST: The Pig Has It

In honour of the appalling cover to Professional Pensions, 27 March 2014, here's a repost of an earlier blog:

Go onto Google Images, type in ‘pension’ and then see what comes up. Actually, I can tell you what comes up. Ignoring news stories, in the first 100 or so images there were 10 pictures of cash in a jar, 19 ‘beautiful couples’, 12 eggs in and out of baskets, 4 moneyboxes, 6 road signs and a few deckchairs. And twenty-three piggybanks. That's right. Twenty-three pigs.

Is that the best we can do?! Is that a good summary of our ability to convey ‘pensions’ in pictures? You see, if you go behind the picture on Google, to the sites, they almost all lead to providers, consultants and clients pension funds.

Surely we can be more imaginative than a piggy bank? If a picture paints a thousand words, aren’t we falling a bit short with coins in a jar? So come on AHC, Likeminds, Shilling, Ferrier Pearce and all you other pension communication companies…..not to mention the internal departments in actuarial firms…. where are the new ideas? What can we convey that doesn’t include a piggy bank held in the hands of a beautiful couple in a deckchair under a road sign?!

Failover or Fallover?

Another new word has just entered the pensions dictionary. Quoted in Pensions Age, Dixons Retail group pensions manager Gerry Phillips, talking of the new Profund Cloud service said “the automatic ‘failover’ capability within the service provides assurance to clients that service continuity will not be compromised”.

Failover? Does he mean the software security? Or is it a misprint and he’s talking about the new systems ability to ‘fallover’ at any moment?!

Google to the rescue on this one. Apparently it’s a technical term for a computer switching to a standby system if the first one fails.

So what happens when my failover fallsover? Good job I’ve got backup then….

I Need A Picture, Any Picture....

DAY ONE:

Correspondent: ‘Hello. Is that the Incisive Media graphics department?’

Graphics Department: ‘Yea.’

C: ‘Oh. Well. Erm, a bit of a rush job. You see I have to fill two pages of the next issue of Professional Pensions, but, well, the article is only a page at the most.’

GD: ‘Yea.’

C: ‘It’s a feature. You know. One of the bits we try and fill the magazine with. When we’re a bit short of news.’

GD: ‘Yea.’

C: So, can you help? I need a couple of big pictures to fill the gaps. Kind of half a page each.’

GD: ‘Yea.’

C: ‘Great. The article is on where multi-asset managers invest. So there is reference to US treasury bonds. And to emerging economies. Does that help?’

GD: ‘Yea.’

C: ‘Great. But try not to just use pretty pictures. OK?’

GD: ‘Oh.’

C: ‘I mean, avoid the Taj Mahal when you’re portraying an emerging economy. You’ve done that quite a bit.’

GD: ‘Avoid the Taj Mahal pictures. Erm. Okay. That was what I was thinking though.’

C: Well think again. We go to press tonight so I will have to trust you….’

DAY TWO

C: ‘Hello, graphics department?’

GD: ‘Yea.’

C: ‘I thought we agreed to no pretty pictures? But for the US government bonds section, you’ve used the US treasury building.’

GD: ‘Yea.’

C: ‘And for the emerging economy picture, you’ve used the Golden Temple.’

GD: ‘It’s not the Taj Mahal.’

C: ‘Well at least the article is buried in the middle of the magazine. No one will notice the awfully trite pictures.

GD: ‘Oh dear.’

C: ‘What?’

GD: ‘Er. Well…. We copied the Golden Temple onto the front cover as well…’

C: *Sigh*. ‘No one will notice….’

The Pig Has It

Go onto Google Images, type in ‘pension’ and then see what comes up. Actually, I can tell you what comes up. Ignoring news stories, in the first 100 or so images there were 10 pictures of cash in a jar, 19 ‘beautiful couples’, 12 eggs in and out of baskets, 4 moneyboxes, 6 road signs and a few deckchairs. And twenty-three piggybanks. That's right. Twenty-three pigs.

Is that the best we can do?! Is that a good summary of our ability to convey ‘pensions’ in pictures? You see, if you go behind the picture on Google, to the sites, they almost all lead to providers, consultants and clients pension funds.

Surely we can be more imaginative than a piggy bank? If a picture paints a thousand words, aren’t we falling a bit short with coins in a jar? So come on AHC, Likeminds, Shilling, Ferrier Pearce and all you other pension communication companies…..not to mention the internal departments in actuarial firms…. where are the new ideas? What can we convey that doesn’t include a piggy bank held in the hands of a beautiful couple in a deckchair under a road sign?!

GOPM RIP, long live.... ?

Sad that AHC have pulled out of their networking, in particular Grumpy Old Pension Men. But they have to concentrate on client work. I wish them well.

What next? It think the concept of GOPM is a good one. A tongue in cheek look at pensions news with some serious comment as well. And all in 5 to 10 minutes. It's still on Youtube if you want to take a look. So, maybe Brian and I can reinvent GOPM? Let's see....

In the meantime, as I've left AHC, this site has changed too. Pensionweb has gone, Pension Quirks has arrived. Pensions can be fun! Yes, really.

We're up and rolling.... the second 'Grumpy Old Pension Men' is in the bag.

In the mean time, the first one is getting some good reviews. See it here:

Grumpy Old Pension Men

RISK

First written 16 February 2012

In the pensions industry, we work with risk all the time. Investment risk, trustee risk registers and, of course, good old insurance risks. However, there is another kind of risk……

There was a very cautious man
Who never laughed or played
He never risked, he never tried,
He never sang or prayed.
And when he one day passed away,
His insurance was denied,
For since he never really lived,
They claimed he never really died.

Anonymous poem from Developing the Leader Within You by John C. Maxwell.

Happy Hugs Day

First written 14 December 2011

Today is ‘Happy Hug Day’. It started as an annual event in Korea but thanks to social media it’s going worldwide.

So in the interests of promoting those feel-good moments, here’s a  few happy hugs for the pension industry….

• A modestly genuine hug for Steve Webb, the Pensions Minister for knowing his subject and being honest despite the politics.
• Some really big genuine bear hugs for the little guys –in terms of company size-  in the pension industry that punch well above their weight… Avgi Gregory at Muse, John Watson of John Watson Design, Helen Boylett-Smith at Lorica, Fred Jaffe and Trevor Cook at MPPF….. and so many more, not forgetting my wonderful friends at Anthony Hodges Consulting.
•  And finally a pretend hug or two for the lady who keeps getting on the news and creating pensions panic, and those very nice union chaps who use pensions as an excuse to strike about all sorts of other stuff.

And if you’re reading this, consider yourself hugged.

The Happiness Index

First written 1 December 2011

The latest results from the Office of National Statistics happiness survey – carried out earlier this year and interviewing over 4000 adults- shows money doesn’t make for happiness. The survey shows that as a nation we have a happiness index of 7.4 out of 10. The same score as last time, despite a real downturn in the economy.

So maybe it’s not such a big deal as to what happens to the Euro or whether George Osborne has got his maths right. Perhaps investment managers will be forgiven for backing the wrong stocks and shares.
In that context, it’s not pensions that will concern the UK population (despite the Public Sector fling yesterday), but what really does seem to be valued- jobs. Those out of work had a much lower happiness index number. Not a surprise; we want to be valued; we want to be able to provide for others. We are all of us ‘people’ people and that comes well before money.

One other possibility…. In a seemingly unrelated story in today’s press, research has found that some espresso’s served in some coffee shops are up to 6 times stronger than in other coffee shops. Maybe the ‘happiness’ interviewers were selective in their locations!