Too many impossible choices in retirement pensions

Government and people concerned about older people are beating themselves up about why people don't have better pensions - the answer, they should be beating themselves up because they've made it too complicated.

My head is spinning after talking with our independent financial adviser (I looked him up on the Financial Services Authority website to check that he was registered - can you do that for social workers? I'm not sure).

When I started in local government, it was clear: you contributed and the employer contributed and at the end you got a reasonable pension that reflected the progress you'd made during work life. Now, forty-odd years later, I have that local government pension, transmuted into a teacher's pension, covering a third of my work life, and will get an infinitesimally small state pension which nobody could live on. I also saved a bit, and have two other money payment pensions (see my earlier post about how these work).

Here are the 'or' choices, basically:

I could buy annuities for either one or the other, or both or combine them and buy one annuity. I would have to choose one or two providers of the annuities.

Or, if they were big enough, I could set up a fund of the money and draw it down when I needed it.

Or, I could defer them and buy the annuities later or set up a draw-down 'platform' to take them in stages later (thus involving myself in having to make continuing decisions about it for the rest of my life).

Or, I could add to one or the other or both of the funds to make them bigger and better.

And/or I could add to my wife's remaining fund to make that bigger and better.

I make that the original possibility and at least 11 ors: you count them and see if you can find some more, you probably can. And my wife has a similar number - another six or seven ors because she has one less pension fund to worry about. All in a situation where there is no certainty what is going to happen to the economy.

All of this nonsense has been set up, as far as I can see, to enable a few very rich people (richer than I ever wanted to be), to fiddle around with their affairs to extract money from the tax system and make their children richer still.

Or (this is another type of or) what the politicians are going to do. If I live the statistically average period, my decisions will have to cover the next 20 years of my life and I won't have much chance of earning to respond to anything that goes wrong. That means probably five successive lots of politicians tinkering with it. And they will be doing it in their political interests, not in the interests of my security.

In two words, it's obviously im-possible to decide.

The only answer must be a sensible size of retirement pension for everyone, responding to some degree to the economic circumstances of your life and career. That's what the next generation needs: it's obviously too late for me and my generation. And we are supposed to be the lucky well-off baby boomers. I think not, especially if you're not good at making decisions.