My pension could wait. Couldn’t it?

This is a personal pension story. But why aren’t pensions personal stories? It’s money that most of us rely on once we stop working formally, usually as we get older, so it’s deeply personal. And how we get to this point isn’t linear and it’s not always easy. And this is particularly so for women.

Women are still more likely to take time out of the workplace to raise children, return to work part-time, or then earn less as they try to fit work around family life. All of that has consequences for their pensions. Less time in paid employment and lower earnings mean less going into a pension — and less time for that money to grow. A double whammy.

I was 26 and, after a period of maternity leave following the birth of my first child, I decided not to go back to work and instead stay at home to raise my child. I received a letter from my employer with a question about my pension. Did I want the cash now or to leave it as it was? The number wasn’t high, but it was there tantalisingly laid out in a letter and in that moment, with not much in the bank, I took the cash. My pension could wait. Looking back there was nothing obvious in the letter that said if you leave this here it could be worth ‘X’ in so many years’ time.

Little did I know then that I wouldn’t pay into a pension again for a further 14 years. I wasn’t being reckless, thoughtless or irresponsible. I was married, raising our children and my husband was the breadwinner. I did work during this time but always to fit in around the children; a job share running a deli with my friend, a small business selling luxury food hampers. These were great fun, but realistically only paid pocket money designed to keep me sane in the quagmire of toddlers, nappies and playgrounds.

Clearly none of these jobs ever came with a pension and it was also at a time before auto-enrolment existed anyway. And part-time work matters because of the way it works. Employees need to earn more than £10,000 a year in a job to be automatically enrolled. Among people who don't meet the eligibility criteria, only 35% are saving into a workplace pension, versus 88% of eligible employees.

During this time, I did keep up with ‘money matters’, thanks Martin Lewis, and after reading an article about National Insurance Contributions (NICs) I made sure to top mine up, but my husband took care of the pension that would one day be ours. Until he wasn’t my husband anymore.

Fortunately, because of the industry I was by now working in, I knew that making sure the pension was split during the divorce was vitally important. No one tells you that this is probably one of the hardest parts of getting divorced. Dealing with one pension provider is bad enough, getting them to talk to each other to transfer the funds over is almost impossible. But I persisted and eventually my share, we’re talking nearly two years, went into my workplace pension.

I’m lucky. There’s enough in my pension pot for me to know that I should be OK in retirement, and I’m now adding to it through my pension at Ink and topping it up when I can.

But crucially, I know that isn’t the case for many women. Some take the house rather than a share of the pension on divorce or come away with neither. Legal & General (L&G) found that 28% of women going through divorce waived rights to a partner’s pension, compared with 17% of men. Others return to work after years of homemaking on lower salaries than they might otherwise have reached, rebuilding not just their careers and earnings, but their pensions too. L&G says pensions can be one of a couple’s biggest assets after the family home, yet only one in five divorcees took pensions into account when dividing their assets.

Is there a lesson? I’m not sure. Women can make entirely rational decisions at every stage of their lives and still arrive at retirement financially disadvantaged because the system rewards continuity of paid employment.

I don’t think I made bad financial decisions. I kept an eye on money matters and protected my National Insurance record. But for 14 years, the work I had to fit around bringing up a family was part-time, flexible and relatively low-paid — and none of it built a pension.

Meanwhile, as a family, we were building a pension. It just happened to be in my husband’s name.

That arrangement made perfect sense while we were married. It became a considerable financial risk when we weren’t.

And that is the part I’m not sure we talk about enough.