Pension Awareness Week: pension guru Steve Bee’s cartoon anthology

Mouthy Money contributor, pensions guru and cartoonist Steve Bee takes a walk down pensions memory lane with some select drawings from his cartoon anthology for Pension Awareness Week.

I think I drew this back in 2003 as part of my Pensions Conversations series of cartoons. It features two of my regular characters from back then, Emma Leaven and Neville Rebel. 

It concerns something I didn’t think many people appreciated at the time. I don’t think many people really understand it these days either if I’m being honest…

Here’s another one from way back in 2007. The ‘crises’ outlined here were ‘solved’ a decade later with the introduction of Automatic Enrolment, but at the cost of scrapping the State Second Pension (aka S2P – the state pension previously known as Serps…).

Here’s another one of my Pensions Conversations comic strips from, I think, 2006. It features my then new characters, PensionsGuru and Mrs Guru.

This one’s from 2006. I drew it after having a coffee with a personal finance journalist at the M-Bar in Leadenhall Market (I did a lot of my cartooning there in those days).

It more or less sums up the conversation we’d had about the so-called special agreement that the politicians of the time had come up with.

Quite important these days I think to remind ourselves just why the pensions triple-lock was eventually introduced.

This one’s interesting in that I drew it in 2007 and some people have since pointed out to me that it in some way predicted the rise of the Waspi movement.

I don’t think that’s the case, nor anything like it, but I do think a state pension system with such poor outcomes for half the population should never have been acceptable to us.

When I drew this in 2008 I thought it was quite funny. These days I’m not so sure…

Another one from 2008 that would probably still be relevant in 2058.

Here’s another one that’ll be just as true in 20 years time as it was 20 years ago when I drew it…