WOULD you like a job that pays £1.3 million a year? That is just the average expected salary among children aged eight to 15, when they get their first job, according to a new survey by Halifax.

It’s equal to nearly 38 times the average wage in the UK this year, proving that, unfortunately, our children are away with the fairies. They also believe that schoolteachers, firefighters and postmen are earning well over £100,000 a year. Wouldn’t we all be out delivering letters tomorrow? However, you shouldn’t be smiling. It’s not just schoolchildren who have an exaggerated notion of what their future income will be.

When it comes to adults, research has repeatedly shown that, as far as our pension expectations are concerned, we are overly optimistic.

Former pensions minister Steve Webb has just addressed this very topic, looking in particular at what we are expecting from our state pension when we retire. Even if you look up your personal estimate on the ‘check state pension’ section of the gov.uk website, you cannot be totally certain of what you are going to get. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) admitted a few years ago that one in ten of their online pension forecasts were wrong. They’ve been working on it since, and claim it’s now down to 3 per cent, but still. Your forecast is particularly likely to be wrong if you contracted out defined benefit pension membership and transferred from one scheme to another. It’s also crucial to make sure the records of your National Insurance contributions are complete.

There are many cases where national insurance (NI) contributions, paid in good faith, have ‘gone missing’ from people’s records. Mothers seem to be particularly likely to have missing contributions. If you took time off work to bring up your children, and were due NI credits for that time, well, often it just doesn’t happen.

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