Merryn Somerset Webb

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Welcome to Merrin Talks Your Money, the personal finance edition of Merrin Talks Money.

In these bonus podcasts, we talk about the best strategies for making the most of your money.

I'm Merrin Somerset Webb, and with me, senior reporter and money disorder for John Steffek.

Hi, John.

Now, John, you and I both have pensions.

We both have defined contribution pensions, not defined benefit pensions.

And we have those because like the majority of people in the UK, maybe that's not really true.

Like a lot of people in the UK, we're employed in the private sector.

It's definitely not the majority of the UK, is it?

Might come back to that another time.

Anyway, we're employed in the private sector.

That means we have defined contribution pensions, which means that between us, us and our employer pops the money into an account.

And it's looked after, hopefully, during the period of our employment.

And then when we retire, we have a lump sum of some sort and we can figure out what to do with it.

Now, there are various companies that offer this to people, this ability to have their defined contribution money managed.

But one of the biggest in the UK is the publicly supported Nest pensions.

Neither of us have our pensions in those.

Those are not the ones used by our employers.