NEST: Self-employed want help with retirement saving
Three-quarters of self-employed workers agree it is important to save for retirement, and more than half want help with it, according to NEST.
The government-backed auto-enrolment provider's report Supporting self-employed people to save for retirement - published today (10 October) - revealed 50% of self-employed workers are not confident about how they will fund their retirement, while 55% said they would welcome more guidance on how best to save.
Just a quarter of those questioned were currently contributing into a pension, and more than half (56%) supported the idea of automatically diverting a proportion of their income to saving for retirement.
NEST Insight head of research and innovation Jo Phillips said: "Although most self-employed people say they want to save for retirement, many struggle to do so in practice. Encouragingly, most are open to help, guidance and encouragement to get on track with saving for later life.
"We know that self-employed people are a highly diverse population and it will be tricky to find a one-size-fits-all approach. By asking self-employed workers what they want, we've taken a significant step forward to discovering what those solutions might look like."
NEST has now started a series of trials to test ideas to help the self-employed save for retirement, including building in simple ways to save within the personal finance and accounting platforms they already use, as well as looking at how to communicate more effectively via channels they currently use for financial guidance and advice.
Pensions and financial inclusion minister Guy Opperman said: "We want to boost the future prospects of millions of hard-working self-employed people, including younger and lower-paid workers, and that's why we're trialling various approaches which could help them plan ahead financially for later life."
In December last year, the Department for Work and Pensions unveiled plans to develop and test new ways to include 4.8 million self-employed workers in pension savings "imminently", which also planned to cater for those with irregular incomes.
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