Foreign Perspectives

This is the first of two days of preparation for the project that we’ll start on Tuesday.

For me, it was the day to look at various aspects of communication, split into three quite distinct modules.

The observational approach looked at a recording of a discussion on “talking proper” which we worked through with the aim of picking out appropriate psychological theories to explain how the group members interacted. As usual with the qualitative approaches, we finished with an attempt at a reflexive analysis of our analysis.

Next up was a quantitive approach to analysing a different discussion. This looked at several different countable features of the discussion from rating scales, to counting gestures to how long each person spoke via interval sampling and highlighted the difficulty in getting consistency between observers.

Finally, we looked at the use of Chi-Squared to do a content analysis on a series of texts and finished off with a thematic analysis of a couple of newspaper articles.

It felt very much a whistle-stop tour of techniques which is, of course, exactly what it was intended to be.

Outside the communications strands, we had a short introduction to the computer suite and how we might search for articles for our project.

Last, but not least, was a choice between a lecture on thematic analysis (compulsory for those who started the main course in February) and the optional one on interpretation of dreams.

The Saturday was quite restful for me as I flew over to Bristol yesterday though the lengthy trip on the A4 bus followed by the much shorter one on the 18 made it quite a trek. It was a leisurely start today with a late breakfast at the Limetree followed by several hours wandering round Bath (which wasn’t as crowded as I had expected).

Registration at 2pm left me several more spare hours before the introduction to the residential at 5.45. Next was tea before the first lecture from our tutor which was basically a refresher of several concepts from quantitative and qualitative research but which showed that we all really needed a refresher.

After that we’d just to collect our usernames and passwords before they finished off with a little ice-breaker party though most people has slipped away before that.

This is the first year that it’s become truly possible to take control of your own pension. Up to now, most people with money-purchase (or defined contribution) pensions had to hand over their money to an insurance company and buy an annuity with it. Thankfully, that practice is ended and we get to keep the cash.

What’s stopping a lot of people is simply lack of understanding of what a pension is. In fact, it’s really quite simple: it’s a savings account that you use to build up a sum of money that will eventually provide enough income to support you in your later life. Despite all the changes, it remains a limited access account. Once you put the money in, you can’t take it out again until you’re at least 55. However, when you put the money in, you get a tax rebate so that, for a basic rate tax payer, every £1000 you put in becomes £1250 in the pension. Anything that you withdraw from it is subject to income tax but with an allowance that means that the first 25% you take out is not taxed, whether you take this out as a single large lump sum (as historically people did) or as a series of smaller amounts (in which case 25% of each withdrawal is tax free).

If you’ve had a few jobs over the years, chances are that you’ll have a small pension account for each one. Small pension accounts are generally bad news as the charges, particularly on older accounts, can be rather high. If this sounds like you, it’s best to investigate the possibility of combining the various accounts which will reduce the charges and let you take control of your pension.

Are you up to taking control of it though? The sums involved in pensions can be quite substantial and the sheer size of the sums can put people off managing the money themselves. If you’re comfortable with the amount involved, there are a range of Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs) around that will let you do that but equally you can choose an investment manager to look after the account for you.

Either way, you need to establish what your objectives are and what your attitude to risk is as that will determine just how the pension account is invested.

As with everything in pensions, the timescale for transfers can be surprisingly long. To move a company pension to a private one (which will normally require you to take professional advice) can take four months or more but even a simple transfer is likely to take a month or two. Mind you, that does have the advantage that it gives you a lot of time to think about how the fund will be invested which is no bad thing.

Up until last year, the clear answer was with an increasing proportion of bonds as you approached retirement. However, that advice assumed that you would be buying an annuity on retirement therefore the rising proportion of bonds was aimed at stabilising your pension fund as you got closer to the point of purchasing the annuity.

All that changed last March when the chancellor announced that you would no longer be required to buy an annuity and could continue to manage your pension fund as you saw fit.

But, what does that mean in practice? Well, you don’t have the cliff-edge of an annuity purchase therefore you can carry on running the fund as you would have done ten or twenty years earlier. This means, that you can carry on largely in equities and, in principle, should let you have a rising income over the years that you are in retirement. On a related note, since the fund will go to your dependents, there isn’t the push to spend it all as there would otherwise have been and, of course, you wouldn’t want to run out of money either.

What you can do depends a lot on your circumstances and temperament. For example, if you’ve got the average pension fund of around £30,000 then you’re quite limited. That’s not really enough to allow you to take many risks and probably only really enough to act as a top-up to your old age pension which, in practical terms, means that you might well be best with an annuity. Move up to £300,000 (which a surprisingly large number of people will have) and it’s a whole different ball-game. For a start, that’s well above the minimum that a range of investment managers will take you on and it’s enough to allow you to move more into equities i.e. to take on a bit of risk.

What’s key though is to know what your attitude to investment risk is. Could you sleep at night if your pension fund dropped 30% for instance? Could you convince yourself that it wouldn’t matter if it did? (and it doesn’t – it’s the income that matters on a pension fund, not the capital value)

I got a surprising email from Queen’s last week to say that I’d an unconditional offer for the masters course.

I say surprising, as I was still waiting for the Open University to produce the references which, supposedly, were essential. Moreover, I hadn’t weighed in with an official transcript for any of my degrees which I also thought was essential.

The only problem with this is that unless the offer of redundancy comes through for the first wave, I won’t be able to do it.