What if you could stop working in your 50s or 60s and still receive money every month? Doesn't that sound like a great idea?
I start a lot of my talks to school children like this.
I present the idea of a regular sum of money coming to them each month even though they are no longer in full-time employment.
They can use this not just to pay the bills but also to do their own thing - holidays, visiting family, investing in their hobbies, setting up their own businesses, helping others, doing more voluntary work.
It's only when they get excited about the possibilities of having an income when they retire that I eventually call it what it is: a pension.
By this time, the youngsters are engaged and want to know how to get as much money as possible to enable them to enjoy their later life.
Therefore, when I explain how they can save into a pension, and eventually come onto more technical things such as the tax advantages, compounding, drawdown or annuities, I'm talking to an audience that wants to listen.
It is Pensions Awareness week, and commentators have been filling my inbox with surveys and statistics about how terrible it is that people do not know what a pension is, or how they work.
For example, Royal London's latest research found a quarter of 18-24 year olds wrongly assumed that their pension contributions just sat in a bank account and didn’t know that they were being invested.
It's great to focus on getting young people and encouraging them to take charge of their financial futures now, but old people think the same thing, too.
There's a lack of education everywhere - and I think a lot of the problem is how we talk about pensions.
Basic knowledge of a complicated message
I recall how, 15 years ago, we had a church meeting about how our funds were invested. It became clear as the treasurer was desperately trying to explain ethical investment that only a few people realised the money didn't just sit in a bank.
They genuinely believed that bank managers stuck all the money into a vault, and would simply give it back to you by jumping into this vast money-pit, like Scrooge McDuck with his dive-in cash pool.
(Perhaps that's how they thought ATMs worked - a duck spitting out bills with their ... bills. Sorry/not sorry.)
"I don't want my money gambled on the stock market", said one older person.
So muggins here piped up: "Actually, banks put every bit of money deposited with them to work in the stock market or in loans. One way or another, the same £10 that you put in today could well be going into a loan or a bond or the market tomorrow. It's how money works.
