We have those ideas and it's hard to shift them.

Well, you laugh.

Pensions were brought in in the UK in around about 1910.

People's life expectancy back then, I mean, I think they set the pension age at around about 65 from memory.

People's actual... retirement age or life expectancy was in their 50s.

So they didn't even get to pension age when, so it wasn't designed to make you have an epic retirement.

It was designed to be unattainable.

Yeah.

Now, the research that you've done is about service only, so it's got nothing to do with return or fee.

No, it's got all of it in it.

It's got all of it, right.

And those 20 criteria take in what myself and Chant West, Ian from Chant West, we've come together to build the criteria for what we think super funds should offer members.

Now, the 20 criteria take in investments, you've got to perform above the median, right, for seven years.

You've got to have 14 out of the 20 criteria to get a tick.

Investments that are a diversified option specifically suited to a pensioner or someone in the pension phase.

Talk to me about what your research found there.

Now, the research that you've done is about service only, so it's got nothing to do with return or fees.

No, it's got all of it in it.

It's got all of it, right.

And those 20 criteria take in what myself and Chan West, Ian from Chan West, we've come together to build the criteria for what we think super funds should offer members.

Now, the 20 criteria take in investments, you've got to perform above the median, right, for seven years.

You've got to have 14 out of the 20 criteria to get a tick.

Investments that are a diversified option specifically suited to a pensioner or someone in the pension phase.

Talk to me about what your research found there.

terms of having a conversation about it and not having expectations that something might be coming your way that then doesn't and there's any tension there as a result of it, should you be open about it?

very family by family thing.

In my books I talk about how having a end of life conversation as early as you're willing to is a sensible thing to do so that people know where to find your paperwork, they know what to expect and you don't have unfair expectations from kids.

But I've seen the other side in families as well where somebody told everybody their intentions 20 years before they died and then the kids ended up counting their money for decades and you know there's nothing worse than watching kids compete To demonstrate how much they should get from the will while their parents are alive.

Love your parents for who they are, not for their money.

And enjoy their company.

But money gets in the way some of the times in these.

Just travel, travel, travel.

So at the

beginning of last year, I got really frustrated.

I was trying to get the super funds to listen to me talk about retirement and thinking members needed good service, members needed good propositions, members needed lifetime income, and nobody would talk about it.

Everybody was kind of like, oh, yeah, you know, well, you know, we'll We'll educate people when we need to, Bec.

Don't worry about that.

You know, you just go back to the newspaper.

And I got a bit fed up with kind of being brushed off.

But what's one thing or one exercise or one conversation that they could have this week that could put them in a better position to think about that?

Yeah.

The, um, the age pension only got over 9% in 2002, 2003, right? So before that, people were only contributing small amounts, so it only compounded at a slower rate.

But now we are seeing people are contributing 12%, which is really probably one of the best contribution rates in the Western world.

Other countries are struggling to push their contribution rates up to get to an adequate savings rate.

You know, they c- they talk about adequacy in the UK.

Mm.

Right? That will be the next generation of young people coming through who are 40 and below today.

They will be contributing above 12% all their lives or most of their lives.

And I'm just curious, Bec, you know, when you speak to members of your community, do you see that? Do you feel that social connection and purpose have become more important to them?

Yeah, very much.

But I also think there's a generational shift coming through what retirement is.

And it's why I've written two different books.

And they are different in the tone and the way I speak to it.

And that's because at 60 or 65, you can see the R word in your life.

If somebody says to you, you want to prepare for retirement now? You go, oh, yeah, I wouldn't mind a bit of that.

So look, Bec, before we wrap up, was there anything else that you wanted to discuss today that you think people should hear or know about?

Explain where these categories actually come from.

Yeah, they sound like marketing, don't they? And yet they're not.

The government has created the framework.

so that we can kind of compare policies across different insurers.

They still do things that sort of add bits on within a silver to make it look better than somebody else's or they try to add a few features.

But if you're on a silver policy, the same clinical categories are covered across every fund's silver policy almost.

So it allows you to compare silver with silver and then you might find there's some sub-branded elements within silver And there's a really interesting thing.

you think people can effectively reduce their cover one year, increase it the next and so on?

What was their response, their initial reaction when the tick hit the market?

Well, the ones that got a tick were really happy.

The six puns.

The rest, the first instinct was to deny and bury it, right, and hide it and get angry at me in their meeting rooms, I heard, you know, by gentle three degrees of separation.

A couple of them called me up and cancelled me, or one.

And that's okay because what we did was made them look inside at their own propositions And go, are we actually delivering or are we putting an advertising campaign on retirement and not actually doing the work to serve the member? And I don't mind if I cop a bit of flack in the process of turning the camera around on them.

What we did do was provide a very transparent criteria, different to every other award scheme, every other program.

So if a performance test doesn't really sit very comfortably with a managed account structure, and any performance test in any case would be a compromise of some kind or another, Beck, what do you think the potential consumer benefits might be of a performance test if it were able to be constructed in a sensible way?

Yeah.

Yeah, and look, if you look at my parents' generation, they're in their 70s.

The government provided higher education for that generation.

So there was a real compulsion for those who were going on to university to go on and do that university while it was provided and there was a sort of slipstream there.

And if not, people got married.

extraordinarily much younger, right? The entire social environment was different.

You know, you didn't meet your partner online.

There's a chance you could get sick or injured at any time of life, but it becomes a bit more pressing when you're in those retiree years.

But just the shifting culture over the generations and what people felt like they had permission to do, like you were saying before.

Yeah.

And look, if you look at my parents' generation, they're in their 70s.

The government provided higher education for that generation.

So there was a real compulsion for those who were going on to university to go on and do that university while it was provided.

And there was a sort of slipstream there.

And if not, people got married.

There's a chance you could get sick or injured at any time of life, but it becomes a bit more pressing when you're in those retiree years.