Live Now, Save Later

A qualitative examination of the attitudes and behaviours of young people (aged 16-29) towards saving, retirement planning and pensions. The research also sought to inform ways of encouraging and enabling young people to begin saving, particularly for retirement. Although the benefits of starting to save early for retirement are well-established, these are not felt to be well understood by young people, or conflict with other priorities for allocating income.

Summary findings

• Young people face a variety of barriers to saving for their retirement, particularly a strong desire to 'live for now', competing demands on their income and a poor understanding of the available pension options.
• The research highlighted a diverse range of attitudes and experiences, meaning that communications about pensions and savings needs to be carefully designed and appropriately targeted. Drawing on familiar, trusted sources of advice, such as parents and the media, is likely to prove effective.
• Proposals for automatic enrolment into a pensions scheme and personal accounts were mostly well-received by participants. Personal accounts may act to improve understanding of the need to save for pensions more generally, and the benefits of employer pensions. However, many young people will need persuading that they need to start saving before the scheme is introduced in 2012.

Reports

• Research Summary pdf, 93KB
• Full Report pdf, 992KB

Technical details

The project ran over two stages of qualitative research; the first stage involved 16 discussion groups with young people across six areas of the UK in November 2006 -- the areas were selected to ensure a geographical spread covering rural, suburban and urban areas. We spoke to individuals from a variety of backgrounds in terms of age, gender, ethnic group, work status and social group. We also ensured that we spoke to young people who were currently saving, either generally or for a pension, as well as those who were not.

These groups were supplemented by a series of follow-up face-to-face depth interviews with some of the group participants in December 2006 and early January 2007. The depth interviews aimed to explore issues on a more individual level, as well as see how views might change, following the initial discussions.