We're still making the same mistakes on retirement

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When I entered the field of retirement income in the late 1970s we had a pensions industry that was the envy of the world.

Then, in the early 1980s it all started to go wrong: The Government changed the rules of pension selling and those people not in occupational schemes were not actively making their own pension arrangements. Most of the pension plans coming to maturity now have some of the best returns and often benefit from excellent guaranteed annuity rates. But these are the old Section 226 policies, which the Government at the time thought were no good and these policies were replaced in 1988 with the 'personal pension'. In my view, this was a catastrophic decision. This led to millions of pensions b...

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