Let it grow….

I have my own small allotment area locally that brings me great satisfaction. I took up this hobby for multiple reasons but mostly to learn how to grow my own vegetables/fruit and a place to go and relax.

At the very start, I accepted that mistakes would be made, that sometimes things wouldn’t grow or go the way I had hoped. I also accepted that I wasn’t completely in control of how to nurture the garden (like the weather, pests etc).

I also made a conscious choice to allow my allotment to be relatively imperfect. Unlike many things in life (I can be a perfectionist), I don’t get stressed about weeds growing in some parts, or mud in others. If something isn’t going right, I am not afraid to start all over again. The journey is one that I just accept as it is.

I had planted a few drills of potatoes earlier this year. After I returned from holidays the stems of them looked like they might be dying or suffering from blight. The area around the potatoes looked grim and I thought I would be digging up a load of rotten potatoes. Well, the good news is when I dug them up, they weren’t just healthy, they were massive and bountiful.

Well, if you apply the same thought process to pensions, sometimes people feel their pensions are in a bad place if the value has gone down (particularly after a significant drop in value). But once you are not digging up encashing your pension, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be getting a bad return. It is important to remember that neither you or me or pension companies or investment managers are in control of the factors that influence fund performances. We can only try to navigate the conditions as they arise and hope that we end up with healthy spuds returns at the end of our journey.

There is also another element of pensions that I feel applies here. People who have a basic understanding of investments (where values can fall and rise, but usually over the long-term, pension managed funds do better overall) can usually accept that there are factors beyond their control. Things like pests inflation and weather interest rates can be very difficult to foresee but panicking after these events usually leads to bad decisions being made.

If you can accept that the journey to and after retirement has good/bad weather during that timeline, you stand a better chance of allowing your garden pension to recover in the bad times.