Turning pennies into pensions

By Steve Bee

LONDON (Citywire) - I don't know why I'm attracted to stories of this sort but I've just read the most fascinating tale of a bloke in the US who's just bought a brand new Chevrolet Silverado pick-up truck and paid for it with small change.

Apparently the guy, a Mr Jack Jones of Cincinnati, is aged 70 and he has always dealt only in coins all his life. His son is reported as having said that his father always gave him coins as long as he could remember as he didn't ever trust banks or paper money, reasoning that ‘paper money will burn, but it's hard to damage coins'.

According to Biff Arnold, of the Jake Sweeney dealership where the sale went down, he'd never seen anything like this in his 19 years in the business. Basically your man Jack Jones walked into the showroom, put down 16 coffee tins full of coins and said 'I want that Chevy truck.' Not surprisingly, I suppose, it took the staff over an hour and a half to count it all.

For no real reason whatsoever while I was reading the story I couldn't help thinking about a reply to a question about pensions that I'd read recently in Hansard. I know, but when everything you're looking at is so surreal your mind starts to make all kinds of connections (It happens to me all the time in fact - that's the problem with pensions).

Anyway, the question was asking what the effect of the Pensions Bill changes would be on the finances of someone earning £10,000 a year. Apparently, someone earning that amount would only benefit by an extra £100 a year income if they forgo 4% of their earnings for 20 years and save in the government's new Personal Account pension scheme that is to be launched in 2012.

Now £100 a year is not that much money; indeed it's less than £2 a week, according to my calculator. I got to thinking that you'd have to be bringing in that kind of money for a fair bit of time before you had enough to splash out on a new Chevrolet or whatever.

In fact £2 a week isn't even enough to buy a newspaper every day is it? That's just got to be worrying hasn't it? I mean, are we being told that some people might be better off in retirement by cancelling their daily newspaper rather than saving for 20 years in this pension scheme? It appears we are.

That being the case it led me to thinking that making economies and putting the savings away in a tin on the sideboard might not be such a strange thing to do after all.