One of my professional bodies – the Chartered Institute of Insurance (CII) have published some research which reveals an alarming savings deficit at an estimated £9trn… yes that is trillion. Such a number reminds me of primary school days when children would try to express something big in a kind of made up sort of way. This is a trillion pounds sterling though. Something that despite our own pension provision will surely affect us all due to the State having to cut its purse strings at some point in the future. Nine trilllion pounds. £9,000,000,000,000 is what nine trillion looks like.

As a bright client you are probably thinking to yourself… hang on that’s not a trillion, that’s a billion (a million million).Yes you’d be right…but we are working on an American standard now and by we, I don’t mean me, I mean the planet – or at least the UK, which decided to adopt the US/French version of counting. This dates back to a former Chancellor, one Denis Healey way back in 1975 saying that UKplc was adopting the American usage of the term (even though it is wrong!).

At a time when we really need clarity over our national sums, I am having to follow the errors of others in this respect. Like many of my generation, I’m stuck somewhere between imperial and metric and the UK’s inability to be one or the other.

These rather mind blowing (or mind numbing?) statistics provide concern in an ageing population, where many of 31million people expected to retire over the next 40 years are “non-savers” and are relying upon inheritances that they invariably will not receive due to the rising cost of long-term care into which one in 4 people enter – or an estimated 8m people. So somewhere at some point the sums are not adding up…for society, which is simply not saving enough (because we tend to live lifestyles that we can’t really afford).

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