Today is Pensions Awareness Day but new research has indicated there is a large degree of ignorance around a key part of retirement saving.

YouGov found that despite the new pension freedoms introduced in April, over a quarter of people aged over 50 don’t know how much money they have saved in order to fund their retirements.

The poll of 1,001 people aged over 50, carried out for Retirement Advantage, showed that 18 months on from the one of the most radical overhauls of pension policy in a generation, one-in-four (26%) people didn’t know the value of their accumulated pension savings.

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The figures come as a double decker bus makes its way on a week long tour of the UK today espousing the benefits of saving for retirement for Pensions Awareness Day, which has been established by the company Pension Geeks.

On average, those that can estimate the amount they have saved believe that they have a pension pot worth just over £110,000.

Some 22%, however, stated that they have saved less that £50,000 into their pension and 12% reckoned their pension pot value to range between £50,000 and £100,000 in total.

The research also revealed men were more likely to know the value of their pensions, with 22% saying they didn’t know compared to 31% of women.

Andrew Tully, at Retirement Advantage, said: “The new pension freedoms place a huge amount of responsibility on people to manage their own financial affairs, who will make choices which will impact their standard of living in retirement. This is not something that people can be complacent about.”

Pension Awareness Day aims to encourage providers and employers to use simpler language around pensions and to look for more creative ways to communicate. According to the organisers, it is designed “to promote the importance of saving for the future and to alert the nation that it is not saving enough for retirement”.

Samantha Seaton, managing director at eValue, said: “Far too often saving into a pension is a nice to have rather than a must have because it feels so far away. We have to change how people feel about saving and, by bringing to life the benefit of saving for the long term, motivate people to act today to secure their financial future.”

Matthew Phillips, managing director of Thomas Miller Investment, said: “Thomas Miller fully supports the aim of Pensions Awareness Day to raise awareness annually about pensions. The simple fact is that as a nation we are not saving enough to be able to pay for ourselves in our retirement.

“We all have to save more and we just need to remind ourselves that from a planning point of view, the generous tax breaks that pensions give benefit everyone who is working.

The official campaign website stated: “According to a recent report by the government, almost 12 million people are failing to save enough for their future.
“This coupled with an increasing ageing population and uncertainty over the changes to the state pension, means that despite auto-enrolment being introduced to the workplace, it is clear there is still a long way to go in equipping people with the tools and information they need to help them save more.”