Pensioners who listened to official forecasts of their pension growth may be in for a grim shock when they find out how much their savings will actually be worth at retirement.

To save yourself from the shock of small funds, consider filling in our pension enquiry form in order to take out a supplementary private pension.

Savers today have been told to expect their pensions to grow by up to 9% a year, while those who opened their pension plans in the 1990s have been expecting 12-13 percent a year in returns. Yet these official figures have turned out to be radically exaggerated compared to the actual rate of return that savers are experiencing.

A fraction of the prediction

Some savers are finding that they are receiving less than half, of what they expected to get back from their pension pot.

While someone who started their pension contributions 15 years ago would have been told to expect £106,000 at retirement, the real figures are closer to £47,474. Paying £200 a month would mean that they already paid in a massive £36,000 and have received just a fraction of the rate of return they were expecting.

If you are worried that this will happen to you, you can start saving in a government-regulated stakeholder pension to aid your income in retirement.

The problem of failing funds and low pension payouts affecting millions of savers has become bad enough that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) is stepping in to regulate. The FSA has said that it hopes to set more realistic forecasts than the current, overly optimistic figures in an attempt to save the next generation of savers from falling into this trap.
// Realistic expectations

One way to keep yourself from the shock of having much less than you expect is to use our pension calculator, which can help you take a realistic look at your retirement prospects.

Taking steps to understanding your assets is incredibly important, as experts say that most pensioners calculate their income expectations based on the official projections and not on how their pot is actually performing.

This means that since 1999, savers have been led to believe that their pension investments will grow between 5, 7, and 9 percent. However, official figures show that the average pension fund has returned just 4.4% in the past 15 years, meaning even pensioners expecting the lowest growth rate will be disappointed.

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