This email was sent to Money Box subscribers on 27 February 2009

Dear listener,

If the Royal Bank of Scotland had been allowed to fail last October, former chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin would have got a pension of less than £28,000 a year at 65 rather than the £693,000 a year from the age of 50 that he negotiated as part of his leaving package. If he had been entitled to the pension at 50 - which is not at all clear - then it would have been scaled back to just under £22,000.

Without the government bailing out RBS in October with £20bn of taxpayers' money it almost certainly would have gone bust. In that circumstance the pension scheme would have been taken over by the Pension Protection Fund. It has an upper ceiling of £27,771 on the pension that can be paid at 65. If your contract says you can retire earlier than that then the maximum is reduced. At 50 it would be £21,953.

Now that is still a good pension. You would need to have saved up about £764,000 in your personal pension pot to buy an index -linked pension of £21,953 a year for yourself at age 50. To get £693,000 index-linked for life you would need a pot of around £24m. Which, as my colleague Evan Davies pointed out, is a bit like winning the Lottery in a rollover week.

Not bad for leading a bank so well it has had to secure a second rescue of £25.5bn of taxpayers' money and a guarantee that taxpayers would bear up to £275bn of the cost if £325bn of duff loans the bank made were to default.

*** ON MONEY BOX THIS SATURDAY ***

The banks have lost their latest attempt to stop the Office of Fair Trading deciding if their overdraft charges are fair or not. The Court of Appeal threw out their claim that the charges are payments for a service and can be set at whatever level the market will bear. The court refused leave of appeal to the House of Lords but the banks say they will now ask the Lords to overturn that decision and hear their appeal. We hear an eye witness account of what the judges said and the banks defend themselves.

We investigate an investment that promised your money was "100% capital secure" but wasn't. Some may have lost everything.

A listener tells us that he cannot stop Barclaycard ringing him about someone else's overdue Barclaycard account.

And will cash mean cash when cash funds are redefined as cash?

There might be more. There might be less. Find out what's in and what's out by listening to Money Box. Saturday at noon. Or if you miss that the repeat is on Sunday at 9pm. To make sure you never miss Money Box why not subscribe to our podcast - we had 150,000 downloads in January. Just go to our website bbc.co.uk/moneybox where you can listen online or look at lots of other exciting stuff, including videos.

Best wishes,

Paul

PS Don't forget the programme taster on BBC Breakfast between quarter to nine and nine o'clock. If you miss it, you can watch it on our website.

 


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