BAD FORM

I got an envelope through the post the other day. Now, because of the chaos which had just erupted in my professional life, I didn’t actually open it until late in the evening and it contained one of those ‘official looking’ letters from the people administering the pension fund from one or other of the companies that I once worked for which has since spluttered its last and died.

One of my more practical shortcomings in this life we all lead is that I have absolutely no interest in matters financial. I have no interest in transferring from one power company to another in order to save myself 50p a week, or driving three extra miles to shave a penny off my litre of petrol, or hanging on to my supermarket receipts because their cheese cost 2p more than it does at their main rivals.

My philosophy when handling the major financial dealings of my life has always been that you should deal with what you have to at the time and then you should never, ever have to think about it again. This, I feel, specifically refers to financial horrors like mortgages and pensions and loans.

Set them up, pay the rate agreed, and never have to consider filling in a form ever again.

I always believed that this was what the “Financial Advisers” and other dubious so-called “professionals” were there to deal with. They did the paperwork so I didn’t have to, and I could (as I have) forget all about it and get on with something less interesting instead, like earning the pennies to pay the piper, or whatever other metaphor I’m choosing to scramble there.

I despise paperwork. I always have.

So, despite the fact that they may very well have a point, I have resisted the many automated telephone calls telling me that I may have been mis-sold this or that because, in the great scheme of things, I can’t remember the details (even if there are any) and am generally of the opinion that whatever benefits there might be are bound to be offset by something or other, and the great balance of life means that I’m never likely to come out ahead of any of these deals.

I got mind-blisteringly angry about my mortgage a few years ago when it turned out that, after paying into the endowment scheme that I’d been advised to back in the 1980s, for the best part of a couple of decades, the “international banking crisis” or “the falls in the stock market after September the eleventh” or whichever other excuse these idiots chose to bandy about, meant that I might very well end my twenty-five year payment plan owing just as much to whichever of the building societies now held my papers as when I first started paying them off.

Reluctantly, I made phone calls, filled in as little of the paperwork as I could get away with without reading any of it in any great detail, and posted it back, all the time really resenting the fact that I had to deal with any of it. This, I believed, had all been sorted out years before and should not have resurfaced in my life ever again to have to be dealt with.

I feel much the same about this latest form. If the people who were supposed to be dealing with my pension and who should have been supplying the data to these administrators haven’t got some of the specific details, then how the hell do they expect me to have them? It was, after all, their job to know about these things. The current lengthy form asks me to supply “documentary evidence” of specific details from a job I left fifteen years ago...

Even the tax office accepts that you can throw away paperwork after seven years, and seeing as I’ve moved house twice since some of the dates they mentioned, and we had a massive clearout about five years ago because the piles of old paperwork hanging around in plastic carrier bags was getting, quite frankly, ridiculous, I really doubt that I could provide all that much “documentary evidence” of what I did last week, never mind during the 1990s.

As always, I resist the urge to scribble all over their form something flippant like “This is your job, not mine” or the more pithy “Go **** yourselves”. Maybe I’ll just write that on the “copy of this form I’ll retain for my records” even though they didn’t actually supply a copy for me to retain and I’m going to have to resurrect the “copy” facility on my dusty old printer.

Maybe I’ll scan the copy that I send them – if I get around to sending it - and store it on my hard-drive so that whoever steals my next computer can make that disappear forever, too, and so I’ll be unable to supply even that as “documentary evidence” at some future date, too…

I do also get quite annoyed by boxes on such forms asking me to confirm what “AVCs” I paid (whatever they might be), and by copious “explanatory” notes written in a language which means nothing at all to me, or questions about what my “Final Pensionable Earning” might be, as if I would know. After all, surely the records of the people who paid me back then would have more details about what they were paying me than I’m ever likely to...? (“Not enough” would be my usual answer by the way). Surely they are the people would also have more of an idea who my “Transfer-In” was “Received from” than I do and should be the ones having to supply such details.

What this all adds up to, to me, is another load of “weasel words” from a bunch of people who’ve already spent my pension on a new yacht, or on their big house overlooking the Thames, and who want to allow me to retire in much the same state of abject poverty as I’ve spent my entire working life in so that they can hang on to whatever piece of me they took.

Oh yes, I know that I could be in less “abject poverty” if I scrabbled around trying to save little crumbs here and there by juggling the power companies, the telephone companies and the supermarkets and took tiny advantage of whatever pennies they try to distract us all with whilst still raking in the millions and keeping them for themselves, but, somehow I really don’t think that’s the point.

For me the point is that, once upon a long ago, I filled in some paperwork and trusted some people who were supposed to know what they were doing with part of my salary each month. That money was supposed, over the course of my working life, to be safely squirreled away so that, come the glorious day when my tired and wrecked body, exhausted from all the years of working, paying my taxes and supporting the economy through my labours, was finally cast onto the scrapheap of life, I would still have a few quid left to live off.

I get the distinct feeling that somebody, somewhere, didn’t live up to their end of the deal, and yet they’re still trying to make out that it’s my fault and make it my problem.