PRIME business club

Michelle Dewberry, winner of the hit reality TV show The Apprentice, has left Sir Alan Sugar’s firm and launched her own business. This is only four months after receivng her £100,000 job with Sir Alan’s Amstrad and Viglen operation.

Lose your job after the age of 50 - or even 40 in some industries - and you may have a fight on your hands to find a new one.According to official figures, some 2.8 million people over the age of 45 are without paid work in the UK.

PRIME, the charity behind this web site, has warned about misconceptions over the UK’s new anti-age discrimination law. Ridiculous as it sounds, some people have got the impression it outlaws efforts to help the victims.

In reality the objective of the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006 is to assist people facing age discrimination - and regulation 29 specifically allows positive action to “prevent or compensate for disadvantages linked to age”.

This regulation gives organisations like PRIME (the Prince’s Initiative for Mature Enterprise) and its partners in the business support, education and voluntary sectors all the authority they need to provide age-related programmes.

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Test yourself in this BBC quiz about the new regulations outlawing age discrimination in the workplace in the UK.

The Scotsman takes a positive view of the measures outlawing age discrimination in the workplace, stressing the benefits to incumbent employees who don’t wish to retire.

Is there a downside to the UK’s new laws against ageism in the workplace? Yes - more red tape and legal bills for the country’s small businesses, says Alan Tyrrell of the Federation of Small Businesses.

PRIME has published “Financing an active retirement”, a free guide to pensions for self-employed people over 50. The 32-page printed guide is being distributed free via libraries and Citizen’s Advice Bureaux. You can also download the PDF version immediately from here.

PRIME is concerned that of the 12.5 million self-employed people in the UK, less than half are putting enough money aside to give them an adequate income for their retirement.

As people nowadays are living longer, they need more money to provide for those extra years. Men who make it to 65 are now living on for an average of 20 years, while women can expect to go on for another 22 if they reach 65.

Woman are particularly likely to experience a pensions shortfall, as many have gaps in their contribution record which reduce their state pension. And lower female salary levels typically translate into lower pensions from any company pensions schemes they may have belonged to.

“The self-employed need to bite the bullet and make proper pension arrangements”, says Laurie South, Chief Executive of PRIME. “People think that they can retire comfortably by selling their business, but they may be disappointed.

“In our expereience the owners of many small businesses find that their businesses are not as saleable as they thought. The problem is that they - the owner-operator, are often also the chief asset. Without them the business is worth little.”

PRIME believes the wisest approach is to treat providing for your retirement as a business expense from the outset. For many individuals this will mean making contributions to a personal pension scheme while they are running their business. So it will be competing with other priorities - but it may still be worth doing.

You can download our pension booklet here. For a printed paper copy email us at prime@ace.org.uk

The US now ranks only sixth in the World Economic Forum’s league table of global competitiveness, behind Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Singapore. The UK comes in at number 10 - ahead of Hong King (11th), Taiwan (13th) and France (18th). Angola comes last in 125th place, just behind Burundi. The list is based on polling 11,000 business leaders from all 125 countries.

Only a third of the self-employed in Ireland are contributing to a pension - a very similar figure to in the UK. A study by Bank of Ireland Life suggests the reason may be lack of awareness of the tax incentives available rather than an inability to pay. Over 70% of those polled confessed ignorance of the considerable tax incentives.

Brian Sullivan of the Bank of Ireland said: “The biggest worries facing the self-employed include managing their time and finances, the day-to-day running of their business, developing their product or service, and most importantly, getting a steady stream of sales. When you factor in all these concerns, quite often pension provision can fall to the bottom of the pile.

“Furthermore, many business owners see their business as their pension and so don’t take out separate cover. However, few stop to think of the dangers inherent in relying on your business as your pension.”

SCORE (originally Service Corps of Retired Executives) is a long-established US voluntary group that provides mentoring and other free help to American small businesses. There is some excellent stuff on its web site, including this workshop which talks you through drafting a business plan. If you don’t like the gimmicky interactive approach there are Word and PDF equivalents in SCORE’s free business template gallery.

A dozen small-business owners tell Business Week about their favourite mistake and what they learned from them Click on the arrows at top right to go through the slide show.

Don’t be afraid to communicate something of your personality in your business plan - after all you are a vital ingredient in your startup. Just be sure to include the hard financial data too.

If you really want to understand what makes the economy tick these days, says Business Week, don’t go to Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or Washington. Just take a short trip to your local hospital. Park where you don’t block the ambulances, and watch the unending flow of doctors, nurses, technicians, and support personnel. You’ll have a front-row seat at the health-care economy.

Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the US health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago.

In the US “60-year-old kids” are having to care for parents, children and sometimes also grandchildren simultaneously. Today 49 per cent of Americans in their sixties have at least one parent who is still alive. At the beginning of the 20th century the proportion was between 4 and 7 percent.

People in their 50s and 60s were dubbed the ’sandwich generation’ yesterday due to their long list of caring responsibilities. They are ’sandwiched’ between their elderly parents, who need regular visits and financial assistance, and their own children, who often need the same. Many also have another layer in their sandwich as their grandchildren need a ‘granny nanny’ while their parents go out to work.