Bectu is going to keep nagging freelance members to get a pension because freelancers in the UK generally have shockingly underfunded retirements. There are lots of other posts on this site about pensions if you want to read into this.
But in the meantime, there is a really useful website – ‘Picture Your Future’ – that allows you to calculate what different levels of retirement income mean in terms of your standard of living.
So if you are single, and you want to be able to spend £47 on your weekly shop, have a three-year-old car that is replaced every ten years, spend two weeks a year on holiday in Europe (and a long weekend in the UK as well), have £730 to spend on clothes and shoes, and be able to buy decent birthday presents for loved ones, you are going to need to plan to have an income of £20,800 a year.
If you have no retirement provision, you will see that it’s not a particularly pleasant existence – so – again – START WORK ON YOUR PENSION if you haven’t got it sorted already.