Please see the end for a note on the future of Weekend Reading.
Living in an investing and financial independence bubble – researching both all week, talking to FIRE-d contributors and readers, and occasionally wondering if I should take down the shingle on the Monevator door to go travelling myself – means some things that shouldn’t shock me still do.
How little most people save, for example. Or what a typical office worker pays for lunch.
This week’s eye-opener was a graph from Which:
I know most people have pocket-sized private pension pots. And also that the Monevator readership is unusual – by being substantially better off, or by being younger but on track to get that way.
I also know defined benefit pensions (the purple chunk in the graphic) are a huge deal for the current generation of pensioners – it’s just there’s not much we can usefully say about them and I’ve never been within a maritime exclusion zone of getting one, so they don’t feature much on Monevator.
I was still struck though by how small a contribution private pension savings (the mustard-coloured block in the graphic) and investments (in green) make to pensioner incomes.
Because those mustardy and green bars are our bread and butter on Monevator.
From our hundreds of articles on making such pots bigger to our growing coverage on how to spend them down, we’re focused on a strategy that barely registers in the typical retiree’s life.
Stately progress
Of course this should change a bit. Defined (occupational) pensions have all but vanished from the private sector. Millions of workers are now growing investment pots that will comprise a big chunk of their retirement incomes in 20 to 30 years.
But the sobering fact is for most Britons, the State Pension is and will remain all-important in retirement.
From the Which article:
The DWP’s figures highlight how vital the state pension is.
Almost all pensioners (98%) receive it, and benefits overall make up a large share of income – 58% for single pensioners and 40% for couples.
The state pension is a particularly important source of income for those in low-income households. For the lowest-income pensioners, benefits make up the majority of their income – 79% for couples and 88% for single pensioners.
By contrast, for the highest-income groups, this falls to 17% and 29%.
This is exactly why we don’t think the State Pension will ever be scrapped, incidentally.
Weekend Reading over email
Nothing good lasts forever. Just consider my long-lost six-pack. Or, indeed, my ability to get through a six-pack on a weeknight. 1
Well, that great random number generator of change has come for Weekend Reading.
From next week onwards, only the first Weekend Reading of the month will be visible to non-members on the Monevator website.
Logged-in Mavens and Moguls members will be able to browse it on-site as normal, like the special people they are. Mavens membership only costs a couple of pizzas a year, so perhaps this is your prompt to sign up? Thanks in advance!
If you’d rather not join for some reason, then for now and for the foreseeable I’ll also continue to send Weekend Reading to all email subscribers. Whether free email subscribers or members.
Everyone will also be able to comment below the article, even if they can’t read the article on the site.
- Simply subscribe via email to keep getting this weekly dose of investing links.
A majority of regular readers now get Monevator over email anyway. But I appreciate this shift will inconvenience a few of you – particularly non-members who like to use RSS.
Please know I’m not motivated by making the world a little worse for you.
A traffic jam
Most of you probably aren’t very interested in the decline and fall of the open Internet, I realise.
You can still find free articles to read, and using ChatGPT is fun.
I’m much the same myself. However the fact is this shift is destroying the viability of independent websites.
The big tech sites have seen their traffic fall by around 60%, for instance. US personal finance site NerdWallet has seen its traffic decline by 73%! We’ve seen our traffic scythed away, too.
If these traffic drops were because people no longer wanted guidance about buying their next TV or which credit card to get, then fair enough.
But that’s not the case.
People do still want and need information. However it’s the big AI tech companies that are giving it to them. And their AI models were trained on and still consult these very websites!
Instead of sending the original creators their readers though – and so affording them a viable business model – the AI companies capture 99% of the attention and most of the value for themselves.
Cue a devastated online media landscape.
I’ve been warning this would happen for years. Read this fresh article by Anil Dash if it’s all new to you.
Monevator lives on only because of our generous members’ support. Moving Weekend Reading to email probably won’t directly boost membership much, but it helps us be more in control of our destiny.
Beyond that, I’ve been sending hundreds of thousands of clicks out annually across the web freely for nearly 20 years with these roundups. Often to the same stable of websites. But for years now almost nobody links back. And link lists don’t do our search rankings much good either, for what little that’s worth these days.
So evolve we must. Let’s see how it goes.
Have a great long weekend!
From Monevator
How to choose the best global tracker fund – Monevator
Have a plan well ahead of remortgaging – Monevator
From the archive-ator: Do not sell [Six years ago…!] – Monevator
News
UK food inflation could hit 9%, trade body warns – Guardian
All the price hikes coming in April – Be Clever With Your Cash
FCA confirms motor finance redress scheme – FCA
House prices up 2.2% in March, but outlook uncertain says Nationwide – Mortgage Solutions
Why younger retirees are earning more from their pensions – Yahoo Finance
Half of UK households struggle to cover cost of essentials – LBC
Four ways Trump’s year-old tariffs have changed the global economy – BBC
Ranked: the fastest-growing major economies [Infographic] – Visual Capitalist
Super-rich may have hidden $3.55tn from tax officials, says Oxfam – Guardian
Waymo is doing more than 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week – Sherwood
Products and services
Disclosure: Links to platforms may be affiliate links, where we may earn a commission. This article is not personal financial advice. When investing, your capital is at risk and you may get back less than invested. With commission-free brokers other fees may apply. See terms and fees. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.
What happens if you overpay into an ISA? – Be Clever With Your Cash
Monzo and Revolut take banking battle to the playground – City AM
Get up to £1,500 cashback when you transfer your cash and/or investments to Charles Stanley Direct through this affiliate link. Terms apply – Charles Stanley
Best bank account switching deals in April – Which
Can you get a mortgage on a low income? – Be Clever With Your Cash
Get up to £3,000 cashback when you open or switch to an Interactive Investor SIPP. Terms and fees apply, affiliate link – Interactive Investor
This Premium Bonds alternative offers a £250,000 jackpot – This Is Money
Traditional farmhouses for sale, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
Has the world become more uncertain for investors? – Behavioural Investment
New rules could affect your State Pension if you live abroad – Which
Chekhov’s gun – Fortunes & Frictions
What the 4% rule creator thinks today [Podcast] – White Coat Investor
How to own the best stocks – A Wealth of Common Sense
Does it really make sense to retrain as a plumber? [Paywall] – FT
Ode to a 2009 Honda Accord – The Belle Curve
When your dreams outrun your dollars – The Net Worthwhile Weekly
Simple living in Suffolk again – Simple Living in Suffolk
What’s the value of one day? – The Root of All
Naughty corner: Active antics
Is the US housing market starting to crash? – Of Dollars and Data
Strategy is entering its desperate stretch [Paywall] – FT
Alpha out of extreme portfolio construction – Morningstar
Kindle book bargains
Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan – £0.99 on Kindle
The Moneyless Man by Mark Boyle – £0.99 on Kindle
Red Roulette: Inside China by Desmond Shum – £0.99 on Kindle
The Panama Papers by Frederick Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer – £0.99 on Kindle
Or pick up one of the all-time great investing classics – Monevator shop
Environmental factors
The UK’s most successful growth industry: organised waste crime – Guardian
The ins and outs of plug-in solar panels – This Is Money
More than 1.3 million tonnes of fish taken from UK protected waters – Greenpeace
The green utopia in Columbia that tried to reinvent the world – BBC
Trump move threatens endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico – Guardian
Robot overlord roundup
How one man used AI to design a cancer drug for his dog – via Instagram
OpenAI is now valued at $852bn. That’s about five Disneys – Sherwood
AI is pushing up the price of computer gaming – Guardian
Claude’s popularity with paying customers is skyrocketing – TechCrunch
Meta’s sunglasses left this reviewer feeling like a creep – Guardian
Data on AI use from surveying 6,000 company execs [Research] – SSRN
Tech and war mini-special
The human cost of compressing the ‘kill chain’ – Guardian
Is it 1914 in America? – New York Times
Loaded dice will blow up in our faces – Spencer Jakab
Not at the dinner table
In Hungary, the first post-reality political campaign – The Atlantic
The Ozempicization of the economy – Kyla Scanlon
Basic Income’s roots in 18th Century England – The Conversation
The facts show immigration doesn’t cause crime. People just don’t believe it – MSN
Moscow is benefiting from the Iran war, for now – CNBC
A repudiation of US values – Abnormal Returns
Donald Trump’s badly-timed Iran war narrative – Drezner’s World
Off our beat
The horrors that could lie ahead if vaccines vanish – Pro Publica
Child’s play – Harper’s
Seeing like a spreadsheet – David Oks
Why are UK energy costs so high? [Podcast] – Chatham House
How the war in Iran hits farmers in California – L.A. Times via MSN
Why Florence started the Renaissance – Uncharted Territories
The centuries-old origins of current fairy fiction – BBC
Making peace with your inner critic – Abnormal Returns
Remote work can blunt the fertility decline – CEPR
Incentives matter: Nazi edition – Klement on Investing
Long odds and unseen differences – Seth Godin
And finally…
“The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”
– Proverbs, King James Bible
Like these links? Subscribe to get them every Saturday. Note this article includes affiliate links, such as from Amazon and Interactive Investor.
- Note: that’s just a rhetorical flourish. I’m barely poisoning myself with more than a couple of units a week these days.[↩]
A Weekend Reading from last December began with the words
‘There’s a growing sense – I’d argue a reality – of intergenerational inequity in the UK, as with many other developed countries. Whether the old having so much more than the young…’
Which, in fairness, was followed a few paragraphs later by
‘ Handy if the age aspect is a red herring, and really we’re just looking at greater wealth inequality.’
Perhaps the observation in today’s article:
‘The sobering fact is for most Britons, the State Pension is and will remain all-important in retirement.”
suggests that the latter is true.
Keep up the good work @TI (and indeed @TA, @Finumus, and all the rest of Team Monevator).
This change has been a long time coming, both with Google search enshitification post pandemic and then with the wholesale SaCT (Software as Content Theft*) business model for LLMs.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, I know, but, given the way the digital world has and continues to change (not always for the better), it’s unfortunately a case of ‘There Is No Alternative’ (and there’s likely no going back to the pre LLM landscape now). If it can’t go on like it was then it had to change. Or as Lampedusa puts it in The Leopard, things have to change to stay the same.
Just thank you for all the amazing work which you put into this site every day for nearly twenty years.
*Just one in every 70,000 Perplexity AI searches results in a link back to the original site being explored by the end user. Ridiculous. Tbf they’re an extremity, but right across the board the amount of website traffic from real people following Google AI/Gemini ‘augmented’ search summaries and after LLM directed queries is way (way) less than from pre 2022 search. 🙁
Great links as usual thank you.
I hope the state pension survives, but sustainability has to be a concern.
I don’t know the numbers in relation to the demographics, but I understand the numbers of pensioners v workers is going the wrong way and will continue that trend for the foreseeable future.
And the triple lock can’t be maintained much longer surely?
I think difficult decisions have to be made to protect the state pension and ensure it is viable for the long term, unfortunately I don’t think we have the politicians who are able to make those difficult decisions!