Saving for today. And tomorrow. How to boost households financial resilience now, and living standards in retirement

British households aren’t saving enough. Pensions auto-enrolment has got far more of us saving for retirement, but too many of us are not on track for a comfortable old age. More immediately, too few of us have access to rainy-day pots to help us through an unexpected shock. Traditional approaches to encourage people to build up this kind of savings, focused on tax incentives, haven’t worked. And there are tensions not only between saving more for retirement or to boost financial resilience today, but also with consumption that has been squeezed badly during the cost of living crisis.

How do we manage the trade-offs between saving and consumption? Can we save more for our pensions, without leaving people with even less rainy day savings? And what lessons can we learn from approaches that have worked and led to Brits saving more?

The Resolution Foundation – in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust – hosted an in-person and interactive webinar to debate and answer these questions. Following a presentation that outlines the Foundation’s recommendations for building a cohesive savings system, we heard from leading experts on the issue of savings and financial resilience in the UK.

Read the report: https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/precautionary-tales/ 

View the event slides: https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/events/saving-for-today-and-tomorrow/