Rent2Travel

Well it’s the 13th March and finally been able to access all of your respective blogs (thank’s Laura for showing me)!

 Almost everything we have in our lives we can quantify, appreciate, understand, qualify the benefits of and generally respect on a day to day basis; with the exception of TIME. Most of us complaining that there is never enough hours in the day, days in the week. Friends saying things like ’cant believe its nearly April’ or ‘Christmas is only 2 weeks away’

Planning how we use our week is vital for many reasons but importantly it provides inner peace:

1) our personal inner feeling of being ’satisfied’ with what we have achieved in the week

2) providing space to think about where you are with your clients and what their needs are

3) allocating time to be creative about your business ideas and new inventions or compiling training material or maybe starting the book you have always dreamed of doing

4) blocking off an hour a week for your bookkeeping

5) Writing in the diary a swimming session or time with your friends to keep outside interests alive and reduce the possible feeling of isolation

6) educating your clients to pre book your time for the next three months in advance (if they all signed up to this idea it would provide a much healthier and more balanced work flow/activities/private life schedule and you with an opportunity of forward thinking). It also shows your client that your time is precious and extremely valuable and that you are in demand.

7) providing an action plan for clients with specific date deadlines will assist them in focusing their energies and also start to develop their time management skills.

I could go on for hours about time management, forward thinking and planning ahead, setting goals and deadlines for personal and client benefit but I wont.

What I will say is that its taken me over 25 years to actually start appreciating my personal time and how I use it, to not feel guilty about putting me first occasionally and learning to say ‘no’ without feeling guilty and as if I have let friends, family or clients down if I have not given in to their short notice and sometimes highly demanding expectations and time commitments. I still feel guilty about saying ‘no’ but I am certainly turning a corner and it is a refreshing and liberating experience. Some of my clients are also understanding and appreciating that time is a precious gift and that we should treat it with respect and learn to enjoy every moment we are given (as well as charge for it without feeling guilty

My original plan for my first Blog was to write about the wonderful places to visit within the UK either for a weekend break, short stay or a main holiday.

However (and goodness knows why) my mind wondered to how much time we take off for holidays in the UK, how many of us actually use our full holiday entitlement, leave on time and have a lunch break etc. Then it suddenly leapt to ‘well if we do not take our holidays when we are working what will we be like when we can finally retire!! How would we use our time?

Of course it then goes beyond the point of when we can retire; to how can we afford to ever retire and what can be done about it?

The Pensions Reform introduced last year April didn’t go far enough for ‘tomorrows’ pensioners. Yes, it tidied up the previous mishmash of pension savings rules and legislation but it has penalized peo0ple at the same time. It has limited the amount entrepreneurs can save. And it has done little to encourage those employees who should be saving more to do so. What we really need is reform that makes people take their financial future seriously.

It’s no surprise that within the financial services industry there was much excitement in the run-up to the so-called A-Day (which was the 6^th April 2006) – the date on which the new rules came into effect. But the general public failed to get as excited. A-Day was designed to replace all previous pensions legislation. Other than some transitional arrangements, the Government has effectively started pensions regime again from scratch. Now, anyone can save through any type of approved pension arrangement and all the rules are the same. Whether it’s a company scheme or personal plan.

On the downside people will be caught out as the A-Day reform has introduced an effective maximum size of GBP 1.5 million for an individual’s pension fund. If a fund creeps over this limit, it is severely taxed. The upper limit sounds huge but when converted to a pension it equates to an annual pension of roughly GBP 75,000 (a lot of money to a majority of us but also this is what a lot of people are striving for in their final pensions too).

Over time more of us will be caught in this especially as many salaries are racing ahead of inflation or national average earnings as employers compete for the best staff.

So the reform has made it difficult for the very well off to use pensions as their only source of retirement income. They benefit the least from the changes. However the more important issue is whether this reform will actually make us the mainstream public save more?? They are embarking on a new national pension scheme to be available by 2012. Working on the basis that there will be a compulsory contribution by us of 4% and 3% from the employer. Another form of indirect taxation!

Will 7% contribution be enough to provide ‘us’ with a decent pension? The answer is NO!

What are the options? Employer run pensions? Private contribution pension schemes? Any advice would be great

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