It?s getting close to the end of the year. A time for celebration and reflection, a time to think about progress made toward specific goals. In other words, it?s time to review your finances.

With the day of remembrance, yesterday, November 11, it brings to mind all of those young men and women who sacrificed themselves for our right to freedom and independence. We tend to basically taking it all for granted that we are free today with freedom of speech, spirit, and the right to choose our own path in life.

Putting Remembrance Day in another context: Remember (and say a prayer for) our fallen heroes and heroines who gave their lives so that we could live long enough to collect a pension.

So your family has had a good year, your job is going well. When was the last time you looked at your pension? The Bermuda National Pension Scheme, started on January 1, 2000, is now almost six years old. How has yours performed since inception? That is a loaded question, given that we don?t know what your personal financial profile is.

So, let?s approach that task from a different perspective, and many do consider it a task, having stated that they rarely check the results; they just file it!Doyou know if your total pension assets today are more than the sum total of all your contributions to date? If they are, you?ve made some cumulative gains. But how much and for how long? Since every pension plan has a different reporting format, finding this information is not be the easiest thing to accomplish. Some pension statements will show cumulative contributions separate from overall appreciation (gain) in assets.

However, to really know where you are on a cumulative basis, putting the whole track record on a spreadsheet each quarter when you receive your pension statement is the best method. It becomes your verification of all your contributions. This is your money; it is your ultimate responsibility to provide for your retirement. Regrettably, as we are only too well aware, there are companies out there who do not (and have not) deposit your pension money into your account. With fines for non-compliance ridiculously low, this unscrupulousness may continue. If you find that you are short, notify authorities such as the Pension Commission.

You cannot allow anyone to steal your future quality of life. Implementing a personal spread sheet pension tracking system will also allow you to better track changes in asset allocation as well, so you can compare your personal results to global benchmarks. Reports, at a minimum, should state the name of the investments, the type of security, your allocation in units and percentage, the amount of new cash contributed (this should be a verified percentage of your pay), the benchmark against which they are tracked, the fees charged, and the performance.

While overall, pension reports that I have seen do a decent job of showing you where you are, if you are uncomfortable with investments, they may not feel user friendly to you, nor provide the cumulative since inception data that really counts since pension investing takes the long-term view. Since this seems so much like homework, here is another way to look at your pension by setting up your own personal benchmark. Assume that you have a conservative asset allocation that will generally return five percent over the long-term, make that at least ten years, but be brave and compute the entire number of years left until retirement.

Assume also that you are 40 years old and you earn $50,000 per year. Ten percent of your salary (five percent from your employer and five percent from yourself) will be added each and every year until age 65 ? 25 years from now. If your investments grow at that average appreciation rate of five percent for 25 years, what is the cumulative amount you will have? Start with what your pension is worth now (assume $35,000); add $5,000 per year for 25 years, compounded at five percent annually. This simple calculation does not take into account raises, promotions to new higher salary positions, additional voluntary contributions and the like. This is just a straightforward estimated assessment of where you?ll be and what you will have nearing retirement. Critics will state that we don?t know what capital markets will bring, but historically (and that is all we have to go by), conservative allocations have returned somewhere between five percent and eight percent. We have no reason to think that this won?t happen over the next 25 years. And this was money you never even missed. Is this reason enough for you to take control of this very important part of your financial life?. There is one premise in the above computations that some people just can?t help messing with. We assume that you will your current asset allocation and that you will not succumb to the temptation to become market timers, moving things around in your pension portfolio every time you hear a different buzz on CNBC.

Just because everyone is saying this is not the time to be in bonds, does not mean you should be shifting out of them. The very success of your long-term strategy is dependent upon consistency in asset allocation. Smart portfolio managers do their job by often taking the totally reverse tactic than current media hype; the theory is by the time everyone is talking about it (USD currency plays, for example), it is too late.

There are possibly a couple of exceptions to not touching your allocations: One, is you are worried about your aggressive positions; and two, you are within five years of retirement and need to get into capital preservation mode.

In the next article, we?ll discuss pension fees, complementing your overall asset allocation, should you additional voluntary funds to your pension as forced savings, and what happens to your pension if you leave Bermuda before retirement.

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