Hi Rachel

A little bit of advice for today’s Spring Statement

Let me make it clear, I am not financially illiterate.

I have signed personal guarantees, met payroll, filled out tax returns and sat on audit committees. I understand risk. I understand reward. I understand compounding better than most of the bright young things who are no doubt running your office.

I also understand that, historically, equities outperform cash over the long term. That is not the point.

For three decades I paid into my pension on the understanding that, if I was prudent and did not blow it on handbags and nonsense, I could pass what remained to my children tax efficiently. That was the deal. Deferred gratification in exchange for stability and clarity thirty years hard graft in the making. Then the inheritance tax treatment changes from April 2027 and that assumption evaporates with one wave of a chancellor’s pen, pushing my estate into a different bracket overnight. You can’t plan for that.

Before that we had the lifetime allowance circus. Introduced, cut, frozen, abolished. Annual allowances reshaped. Tapered rules that caught out sensible professionals. Salary sacrifice eyed up. Thresholds frozen while inflation gallops away. Each tweak comes with a neat fiscal explanation about the NHS, schools, defence and potholes.

What never seems to be priced in is confidence.

All my advisers are in their thirties and forties. Delightful. Clever. Armed with software that produces projections to age 95 in soothing pastel colours. They tell me, perfectly reasonably, that leaving money invested inside a pension wrapper is still the most tax-efficient approach. They show me the charts. Over twenty years, equities beat cash. Over twenty-five years, even more so.

My pensions and savings have been in equities for thirty years, so yes, I know that. But they were moved out over a year ago. Because when you are 65, the horizon is not theoretical. It is your roof, your knees, your independence, your ill health or death. Why are you puzzled that at my age I don’t trust the government and world events to have a nice steady upward curve on my returns? The fluctuations are huge within time frames that are not relevant to me and so my cash needs to go somewhere cast iron and safe.

When I read yet another pre-budget leak suggesting pensions and savings are “under review”, I do not see a policy paper. I see my life savings being discussed as something you own and not me.

So yes, I know I would probably earn more by keeping everything fully invested in equities. But when the rules keep shifting, why on earth would I leave every pound where it is easiest for you to reach?

This is not ignorance. It is self-protection.

If you want people like me to back British markets and to keep capital working inside the system, then treat retirement savings as a contract, not something to be raided.

Stability is not a luxury for people my age.

It is the whole point.