I feel that I've landed the poor
@Duke of Marmalade with this, so I'll stop munching lettuce for a while to try to help him out.
As I recall, this started with
@JimmyB99 making two complaints about
my interview with Pat Kenny on 30 April.
One stemmed from Pat saying that the fund I was recommending would invest in a combination of low-risk and high-risk assets.
@JimmyB99 said that I should have corrected Pat, to say that I was recommending 100% in equities. I said that I decided not to, because it could bring us down a rabbit hole that was irrelevant for our discussion.
@Brendan Burgess agreed my "irrelevant rabbit hole" point and
@ronaldo later made the excellent point that "equities" is a broad church, encompassing low-risk, medium-risk and high-risk shares.
I hope that this particular complaint has been adequately dealt with.
@JimmyB99 's other complaint was that I told Pat that no-one would be forced into my scheme, that they could always choose not to join it.
I still don't fully understand why he took issue with that comment. It should be self-evident that no-one can be forced to join, but I'm happy for him to clarify what the issue was.
I think it was that, if the employer opts into AE, then the employee has to join if they want to get the benefit of the employer's matching contribution.
My answer to that was that, if I were an employer, I would be happy to match the employee's contribution to their preferred scheme if they didn't want to join the AE scheme. I still stick with that belief. It's an important issue no matter which AE scheme is adopted by government, assuming the current tax proposals go through because, in that case, it will be better for higher paid workers to join a conventional scheme rather than the AE scheme.