Yes if you choose annuity but you can also buy those with regular cash so it's as relevant here as price of tea.
Pensions are more tax efficient and offer a better option of investments (companies) than what is effectively fiat interest going into a lottery pool.
If you have cash in premium bonds you might die young then pay inheritance tax.
Better give your kids cash earlier to live off or invest to avoid this, and so they can over-stuff their pensions ;). Not many people think that far ahead (60 year horizon)
Some young adults in my life have grandparents who just hit this point, and are trying to set up gifting money to the grandkids in the form of brokerage accounts.
The first line of the Wikipedia article on pensions is more accurate than wherever you’ve pulled that from:
> A pension (/ˈpɛnʃən/; from Latin pensiō 'payment') is a fund into which amounts are paid regularly during an individual's working career, and from which periodic payments are made to support the person's retirement from work.
A pension is a financial instrument. There’s no need to purchase an annuity, which means a pension organised correctly can be passed on to your children or spouse, and there’s no lottery or gamble angle.
The wikipedia definition is strange. A pension is not a fund. A pension fund is a fund! (There is also a wikipedia page for that!)
Apart from that how is “regular income paid by to someone who no longer works“ different from “periodic payments made to support the person's retirement from work” anyway?
Because you missed the original distinction, which is that an annuity — a product purchased using your pension savings where all the value is lost when you die — is not the same as other pensions, where for example you have stocks and shares paying dividends, in a pension wrapper, and those pass on to your estate when you die.
The word pension is overloaded. A SIPP is a pension, the state pension is a pension, and people refer to their annuity as pensions too.
> A pension is not a fund. A pension fund is a fund!
The word fund is being used in two different ways here. A pension is a fund, but is not a Pension Fund.
The wikipedia page you mention says that "The common use of the term pension is to describe the payments a person receives upon retirement, usually under predetermined legal or contractual terms."
I'm familiar with retirement accounts and pension plans in a number of countries but not in the UK. I see that in the UK "pension" is often used a short-hand for "pension scheme" (it seems a relatively new development which I've not seen reflected in dictionaries).
For what it's worth, the wikipedia page for Personal_pension is redirected to Personal_pension_scheme: "A personal pension scheme (PPS), sometimes called a personal pension plan (PPP), is ..."
What is about HN where numerous posters do not believe that investing in the US or EU stock markets is better than completely random outcome, like roulette red/black? Man, this place is weird sometimes. What the fuck are you investing in for retirement if not stocks? Sea shells!!?? I hereby quote Brandolini's law:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
> What is about HN where numerous posters do not believe that investing in the US or EU stock markets is better than completely random outcome, like roulette red/black?
Err, you could start by not making wild inferences and replying to assertions that weren't made.
A single investment is basically gambling. Where it moves is largely impossible to predict or (for a nobody like me, who wouldn't have the means to engage in market manipulation) control. You can reduce the randomness/risk by spreading out your investment across multiple stocks. That's just the central limit theorem. For the market as a whole, on a long enough timescale, the historical aggregate trends upwards, but is still effectively random.
> What the fuck are you investing in for retirement if not stocks?
I can be critical of something and still acknowledge the reality that I am effectively forced to engage with it. I generally invest in a few index funds to reduce the variance and mental overhead, but it's still there.
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In one way it's much worse than "mainstream" gambling: its value depends on society holding the shared delusion that stocks (both in general and yours in particular) are actually worth something. That leads some people to become incredibly invested in maintaining that delusion, since they know what's at stake for them. This thread could be considered an example of where that mentality leads.
And as you said yourself:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
