THIS week I need to talk to you about pensions.

Have you thought about accrued benefits? What are your feelings on drawdown schemes?

And more to the point, do you have the slightest idea about what any of this means?

I never thought I would get to my mid-fifties (and therefore not that far from having a pension) and find I know less about pensions than I did when I was 18.

And this is after spending two hours with a financial adviser last week.

He might as well have been talking Japanese dialect or quantum physics, because more than once I found myself thinking the easiest thing would be to cash in all our money and blow the lot on fast cars and expensive holidays. Or put it on the horses.

Herein lies the ultimate dilemma of the capitalist system we are currently locked into.

Only a tiny percentage of people have the kind of brains that relish trying to get to the bottom of things like pensions, and we have no option but to put our hard-earned cash in their hands.

Pensions, especially, are supposed to be about people’s real lives and their aspirations for the future, but there doesn’t seem to be much humanity behind the numbers and the jargon.

So when I should have been listening to what our adviser was saying about annuities (whatever they are), I couldn’t stop myself making up my own glossary for the words coming out of his mouth, which he thought were making sense.

For instance...

  • Accrual: somebody who should be reported to the RSPCA.
  • Commodity: a strange chair converted to a toilet.
  •  Deferred member: consult your doctor as soon as possible.
  •  Employer contributions: paper clips and rubber bands you nicked from the office.
  •  Frozen pension: a retirement plan for Disney animation characters.
  •  Glide path: evidence of how slugs have planned for their retirement.
  •  Growth rate: the charge the council makes for your allotment.
  •  Hybrid pension: one powered by a combination of petrol and electricity.
  •  Managed fund: a whip-round for your boss.
  •  Opt-out windows: Apple computers.
  •  Pay as you go: putting money aside for your funeral.
  •  Pension credits: the words that scroll up at the end of your pension.
  •  Period of grace: the long wait before you can start eating.
  •  Portfolio: a seaside resort in North Wales.
  •  Unsecured income: money that needs to be tied down when it’s windy.
  •  Vested rights: laws protecting people who wear outdated underwear.
  •  Winding-up: what happens to clockmakers when they go bust.

    Seriously, though...

    If I understand one thing about pensions it’s that it’s a headache for the government, who somehow have to persuade more people to take out private schemes and solve the problem of the ‘ageing population’ we keep hearing about, whom the state pension will struggle to support.

    But neither politicians nor the financial industry have so far made any progress with the challenge of humanising it all, so private pensions are actually declining.

    Even if we could get our heads around all that jargon, there is an even bigger elephant in the room.

    It’s impossible to make decisions about pensions if you can’t convert the numbers into real life.

    All I want to know, at my age, is whether the pensions we’ve been paying into will mean we will be able to afford a slice of cake if we decide to go out for a cup of tea in our retirement.

    But all you’ll get is more numbers, more jargon and more confused.

    So if any financial advisers are reading this, get in touch. I would love to know what your money is on in the 2.45 at Kempton.