On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:45:01 -0700, Vet Tech wibbled:
Not really...
And if your pension has > 5% of its value in BP, you want to be taking your pensions company/advisor and using them to plug the wellhead.
I didn't say I had any BP shares in my pension fund.
That aside, many people in the UK will have. Anyone who intends buying a pension annuity will get less as the annuity provider almost certainly will have a significant holding in BP because of its size and dividend. Any one with UK unit trusts will also be affected.
Even if you don't have a private pension (or any equity holdings) you also will be affected indirectly because of the following:-
If BP were to go under ( or be bought out by say the China National Oil Co) then the effect on the UK would be very significant.
Anyone who can't understand that (or who doesn't care) is most likely to be someone with a gold-plated index-linked civil servant pension.
Either that or they need to get out more and get a better understanding of basic economics.
VT
Most of the other 40% goes to the US...
BP might be "under valued" acording to the markets and thus a possible target for being bought but how many share holders will be willing to sell at or even 50% above the current share price?
Also bear in mind that oil is US$70/barrel, there is no shortage of money in the oil companies. As you say BP pays out =A312 billion in dividends, whats that as a percentage of profits? Lets say 5%, that gives us =A3240 billion. The current bill is about 1.5 billion, less than 1% of those profits.
Yes the end bill will be huge but that is going to spread over a good number of years and I suspect BP will be claiming a significant amount of its costs from its US contractors that operated the Deepwater Horizon and provided the BOP etc... The lawyers must be planning their extended vacations in Bermuda right now.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Vet Tech saying something like:
Solidarity with a bunch of greedy fuckwits who caused that? What about the corner-cutting wanker employed by them?
Get stuffed, you selfish bastard.
. As you say BP pays out =A312 billion in
Net profits of BP are around 20 Billion per annum so they are paying out 60% as dividends. If BP collapsed or was taken over by a foreign bidder then the effect on the uK would be huge. Think of Cadburys and then multiply by 200.
At the current price there is a buying opportunity. But like all bets the reward is proportial to the risks.It's certainly a better bet than England winning the WC ;-)
VT
It's selfish bastards like me who pay taxes that pay for your benefits and your medication!
Keep taking those pills and lets hope you get better soon.
VT
Try to join the debate old chap rather than let your inherent prejudices obscure your vision.
Make a meaning contribution occasionally and thereby achieve some credibility.
On the otherhand it might just be better to go back on the medication as the OP suggested.
Anyone with a gold-plated index-linked government pension who still thinks it will be paid when they reach retirement is living in cloud cuckoo land, and hasn't done the sums.
Hint - nowhere near enough funds exist - the liability is over
3 times the debt we're currently worrying about, and currently represents a cost of about £30,000 per taxpayer. Worse still, it doubles every 10 years, and the number of taxpayers is dropping, so it will cost each tax payer £100,000 in ten years time. It just isn't going to happen... it would be completely impossible.
Do you mean this- "The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which triggered the spill spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, caught the energy world by surprise. The operator, Transocean Ltd., is a giant in the brave new world of drilling for oil in deep waters far offshore. It had been honored by regulators for its safety record. The very day of the blast on the rig, executives were aboard celebrating its seven straight years free of serious accidents.
But a Wall Street Journal examination of Transocean's record paints a more equivocal picture.
Nearly three of every four incidents that triggered federal investigations into safety and other problems on deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico since 2008 have been on rigs operated by Transocean, according to an analysis of federal data. Transocean defended its safety record but didn't dispute the Journal's analysis."
The work was being done at the limits of our abilities and knowledge. The US has been hell bent for decades to have "secure" cheap oil. Much to be revealed, if it will be!
Much akin my thoughts.
Despite the fiddling about with taxation on pension funds in the private sector that the Tories were doing just prior to Labour coming in, this was nothing compared to what Gordon the Gorme did to private sector DB funds, which as a result, companies have all but phased out.
I fear civil strife and impecunity for many as a direct result, though when is a piece of elastic.
Is there any evidence that one of them said "what does this button do?"
I'm pondering what you mean by this. If we are thinking the same way, I used to always give newly introduced systems a time to bed down and then visit sites to find out whether folk truly appreciated what they were doing and appreciate the implications, (with much less potential impacts).
If that's the way you are thinking, then I think we shall have to wait awhile to find out!
The tax changes reduced the projected growth, so the appropriate response should have been to increase the amount contributed. Funnily enough when growth was greater than expected, the same companies had no problem taking a contribution holiday.
The real bind on pension funds is not tax but fees - so called 'experts' taking 2% to, in many cases, deliver a return no better than random stock picking or index tracking would have delivered. Over 30 years, a 6% return delivers roughly half as much as an 8% return. When I transferred my personal pension across to Australia (not at the best of times admittedly, but it could have been worse), I got back roughly what I had paid in over 20 years, no more. Some have done a lot worse of course.
I was thinking on the lines of whenever "execs" visit a site they are usually ignorant and arrogant in equal measure and no matter how much one tells them to touch nothing, they usually can't resist poking and fiddling.
Would you please direct us to your meaningful contributions to this or any other debate on uk.d-i-y, Yvonne?
By ME. I just did. already quite a nice return.
but how many share holders will be
exacterly.
BP is well worth a little flutter at anything below 400, I bought at 372.
Can someone explain why any company not three sandwiches short of a picnic would ever set such a scheme up? Why is a company making widgets setting up a pension fund?
Downsides:
1) They are then prey to employee (read: union) pressure to up the eventual benefits.2) If these are "defined" benefits then presumably it means that what the person gets is fixed ahead of time and never mind the economic situation at the time
3) For the employee, if they move around and work for other companies they end up with several pension schemes to worry about4) For the company, they are in the pensions business, which is almost certainly *not* their core business, either (read: General Motors).
Can someone tell me what the upsides are?
I have several pension schemes but at least in each case I moved continents (well, I moved myself, not the continent) so that's not surprising. But my outfit in the States enrolled everyone in a scheme run by a pensions company, where you paid in (and could choose the amount) and the company paid some in too.
Results:
1) Problem (1) above no longer applies2) Eventual pensions then much more likely to reflect actual reality
3) Problem (3) above much less likely to apply.4) Problem (4) above no longer applies
5) Admin costs much lower as the company paid one lump sum each month for all employees instead of thousands of individual payments as would be the case if each employee wanted to have a private pension scheme and the company has none.Vet Tech wrote: ...
Simple answer - don't buy a pension annuity. They are far from the best way of funding your pension and I am very pleased to hear that this government is going to scrap compulsory annuities at age 75.
Colin Bignell
So what do you do instead then? I mean, if you've got a pension pot where in the ordinary course of events you'd expect to buy one?
Annuities are an easy way to get a pension but you can do a lot more by managing the investments yourself. With the help of my financial advisor, I have been running a self-managed pension scheme for myself for more than 30 years. Now I have decided to take a pension, the proceeds from that are in a draw down pension scheme. As I have chosen income over growth, that brings in about £12k pa more than I would have got had I bought an annuity with the same amount of money.
I also had another pension fund, started before I went for the self-managed scheme. The proceeds from that are in high risk investments. I have chosen not to take an income from those as the investments are volatile and it makes more sense to reinvest any gains, rather than risk taking money out at a time when their value is low. Despite the name, they are not especially high risk if you have a good spread of investments. A few might lose money, but they are usually outweighed by the large gains made on others. On the basis of previous performance, which, of course, is not guaranteed, the capital invested could triple in value over 10 years. Also, because of my circumstances, there are certain advantages to me in having capital gains, rather than extra income.
I have also taken my maximum tax-free lump sums from both pension schemes and put those into more traditional and safer investments - a big block of Premium Bonds and fixed-term loans to banks.
Colin Bignell
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