What Women Really Told Me About Money, Pensions and Investing

Over the last few weeks, lots of you have completed my short quiz about money, pensions and investing. I’ve been looking through the answers, and there’s something I found really interesting. When I asked how confident you feel about your finances, many of you said fairly confident. But when we got into some of the individual areas, particularly pensions and investing, there were still plenty of questions. And I think that’s an important distinction.

You can feel quite comfortable managing your day-to-day money and still not really know what’s happening with your pension. You can be good at saving but have no idea whether investing is something you should be considering. You can have several pensions from different jobs and keep meaning to work out what they’re all doing.

That seems to be the reality for a lot of women.

“I have a pension, but I don’t really know what it’s doing”

This was one of the most common answers when I asked about pensions. Almost a third of you said you have a pension but don’t really know what it’s doing. Others said they have several pensions and it all feels a bit messy, while some weren’t even sure whether they had a pension at all. And when you think about how we accumulate pensions over a working life, it’s perhaps not that surprising. We change jobs, pensions get set up, paperwork arrives, and then life carries on. It can be particularly easy to put them to one side until you reach midlife and start thinking a little more seriously about what you might want the next 10, 20 or 30 years to look like.

Suddenly, knowing what you actually have becomes much more important.

Investing still feels confusing

There was a similar theme when I asked about investing. The most common answer was simply: “I don’t understand how it works.”

There were worries about losing money too, as well as a feeling from some women that investing isn’t really “for people like me”. For me, that shows just how much of a barrier the language around money can be. If nobody has ever explained investing to you in a way that makes sense, why would you automatically feel comfortable with it?

You don’t need to know all the terminology. But having a basic understanding of what investing is, how it differs from saving and what the risks are can help you feel much more able to make informed decisions about your own money.

You told me what you want to know

One of my favourite parts of the quiz has been reading what you actually want help understanding.

You said things like:

• “Where to start, and the steps to take.”

• “£, not %.”

• “Break things down into bite-sized chunks… layman’s language.”

• “How to make what I’ve already got work for me.”

And I think that sums up what Menopause Money is here to do. Not to bombard you with financial jargon or tell you what you should be doing. But to make money conversations easier to understand, so you can look at your own finances and feel better equipped to decide what matters to you.

Confidence doesn’t mean knowing everything

One of the biggest things I’ve taken from the results is that feeling fairly confident with money doesn’t necessarily mean having all the answers. There might still be a pension you’ve been meaning to look at. You might still wonder whether you’re saving enough for retirement. You might have heard people talking about investing and thought, I really should understand more about that. That’s completely normal.

And at this stage of life, when retirement might be starting to feel a little closer, and your priorities may be changing, those questions can become more important.

So over the coming months, I’ll be using what you’ve told me to shape the things I share through Menopause Money - breaking down pensions, saving, investing and planning for the future into straightforward, manageable conversations. You don’t need to become a financial expert. You just need the information to feel more informed about your own money.

And if there’s something you’d particularly like me to cover, I’d love to hear it.