Pension meltdown - Collapse may mean longer working lives

THE impact of the downturn in world markets on pensions and endowment mortgages was bleakly spelt out yesterday.

According to the long-term view of Ark Life, an arm of the AIB Group, people who took out pensions in the late 1980s may eventually be faced with the reality that their realisable asset may be worth half their expectations when they took it out.

Now those who opted for endowment mortgages may find themselves having to top it up, at a time when they were rightly looking forward to a comfortable windfall. In the case of pensions, the impact will be felt in schemes, which are other than defined benefit ones.