Personal essays, notes, and ideas worth sharing.
This is my corner of the internet. I write about whatever I’m thinking about at the moment. Books that stuck with me. Projects I’m working on. Random ideas that won’t leave me alone. Sometimes I share bits of my actual life too. There’s no grand theme here, no carefully planned content strategy. Just honest writing about things that matter to me.
Topics we cover: Essays · Projects · Reading Notes · Ideas · Personal
The artwork is blunt. Across the chest, in the block lettering of an industrial hazard notice, it reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH. Above or beside the words sits a yellow caution triangle, and inside it a hand with a diagonal line through it — the standard visual grammar of do not handle. There is no wink in the typography. The design borrows the authority of a safety sign and points it at the wearer’s personal space.
That is the argument I want to make about this shirt: it is not a personality quiz result. It is a boundary expressed in the one visual language most people already obey without thinking. The caution triangle and the crossed-out hand do the work that a sentence like please give me some room often fails to do in open-plan offices, at family gatherings, and in the queue at the till.
You can find the shirt here: Not Friendly Do Not Touch Funny Warning Sign Introvert.
Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner, so treat this as a disclosed recommendation rather than an independent review.
Most social friction around introversion is not about the desire for solitude. It is about the negotiation. Someone approaches, you are expected to perform welcome, and the cost of declining that performance is read as rudeness. A verbal boundary — I’m not up for chatting just now — asks the other person to accept a social claim. A hazard sign does not ask. It informs.
The yellow triangle is the key. In the visual vocabulary of warnings, yellow means caution, not prohibition. A red circle with a slash says you may not. A yellow triangle says be aware. The design uses the softer of the two, which is a more interesting choice than it first appears. It is not ordering people away. It is flagging a condition. The crossed-out hand inside it is the specific instruction: no touching, no tapping on the shoulder, no hand on the arm to make a point.
That distinction matters because it changes who the shirt is arguing with. It is not arguing with the extrovert who wants to talk. It is arguing with the assumption that physical and conversational access are default settings that only a rude person would revoke.
The retail title includes the word introvert, and the search behaviour around this design clusters there. But the printed artwork does not say introvert. It says not friendly and do not touch. Those are not the same claim, and the gap between them is where the shirt gets interesting.
Not friendly is a provocation. It accepts the worst reading of the wearer and wears it as armour. Do not touch is a boundary. Put together, the design says something more precise than I am shy: it says I know how this will be read, and I am choosing the warning label over the performance. That is a more adult position than the introvert-extrovert binary usually allows. It treats friendliness as a behaviour that can be switched off without the person being defective.
I would not read the shirt as a clinical statement about anyone’s temperament. It is a piece of comic signage. But as a piece of rhetoric, it is unusually honest about the trade: the wearer is opting out of being approached, and accepting that some people will conclude they are unfriendly. The design does not pretend otherwise.
Readers of this column tend to spend their working lives in environments where availability is treated as a virtue. Open-plan desks, shared calendars, the expectation that a closed door means come back later rather than do not disturb. The hazard sign is a small, wearable version of the same problem: how do you signal a limit without having to justify it every time?
The shirt’s answer is to borrow a sign that already carries institutional authority. Nobody argues with a wet-floor sign. Nobody taps the person wearing it on the shoulder to ask whether the floor is really wet. The design’s joke is that the same deference could be extended to a person, if only the person came with the right graphics.
That is also its limitation. A warning sign works because it is impersonal. Worn on a body, it becomes a statement about the body, and some people will read it as an invitation to tease. The shirt cannot control that. It can only make the boundary visible before the conversation starts, which is more than most of us manage.
The lettering is the dominant element: all caps, heavy, spaced like a road sign. The caution triangle is the secondary cue, and the crossed-out hand is the specific instruction inside it. The palette is limited — yellow, black, and the negative space of the garment — which is what gives it the flat, official look. It is not a decorative design. It is a notice.
I would resist the temptation to treat it as a statement about loneliness, social anxiety, or the state of modern manners. It is funnier and smaller than that. It is a shirt for someone who has decided that the cost of being misread as unfriendly is lower than the cost of being touched without consent, and who would rather say so in the language of a fire exit than in the language of a feelings conversation.
If you are the sort of reader who audits a suitability report line by line, you will recognise the move. The shirt is a disclosure document. It states the position plainly, in advance, in a format the reader already knows how to interpret. Whether the other party respects it is, as ever, outside the wearer’s control.
Where in your week are you performing welcome when you would rather be issuing a notice — and what would it cost you to put up the yellow triangle instead?
You have probably heard some version of it: retirees die with more money than they retired with. It is said at kitchen tables and in golf clubs, usually with a rueful laugh. It appeals because it names something real. But as a factual claim about estates it is folklore, and I am not going to dress it up as research. No source I can point you to measures it.
The defensible version is narrower and more useful. Many retirees keep spending roughly flat in real terms while their income rises. That is a pattern you can plan around. It is not a promise about your estate, and it is not a reason to feel either smug or guilty.
What follows separates what the evidence shows from what it cannot show, then turns the gap into a practical question: if your plan can absorb more spending, what is stopping you?
The most useful UK work here is the Institute for Fiscal Studies report How does spending change through retirement? (Crawford, Karjalainen and Sturrock, May 2022), based on the Living Costs and Food Survey from 2006 to 2018. Three findings matter for this argument.
Spending stays broadly flat. On average, retirees’ total household spending per person remains relatively constant in real terms through retirement, increasing slightly at ages up to around age 80 and remaining flat or falling thereafter. For the 1939–43 birth cohort, spending at age 67 averaged £245 per person per week, rising to £263 at age 75 — a real increase of about 7%, or just under 1% a year.
Income rises with age. Average household income per person for retirees aged 62 and older is more clearly increasing in real, CPI-adjusted terms as people age. The IFS attributes this to private pension incomes rising faster than CPI and to more people receiving the State Pension and disability benefits as they get older.
The gap gets saved. For the 1939–43 cohort, 59% saved at age 67, rising to 69% by age 75. Over the same ages, the share of income saved rose from 2% to 15%.
Read those three together and you have the mechanism behind the saying. It is not that people are hoarding out of meanness. It is that income arrives faster than spending plans absorb it, and the surplus accumulates by default.
The IFS is careful about what its data can support, and so should we be. The report states plainly that it cannot say with certainty whether retirees’ observed spending patterns reflect their desired pattern of spending — or whether they would spend more earlier if they had more certainty about later-life costs.
That distinction is the whole article. Observed underspending may be a choice, a constraint, or a fog. The IFS also names the converse risk directly: some individuals may draw down too slowly and unnecessarily forgo desirable spending.
So the question is not “are retirees underspending?” in the abstract. It is: is your spending pattern the one you would choose if you had thought it through?
The IFS report sets out the documented explanations for why people do not spend down wealth the way a simple life-cycle model predicts. They include the desire to leave a bequest, saving for medical or care expenditures in later life, and changes in how much satisfaction people derive from consumption as they age. The “retirement consumption puzzle” — spending falling at the point of retirement — has its own explanations: work-related costs disappear, people have more time to cook and shop carefully, and some retirements are forced by ill health rather than chosen.
None of that is irrational. If you are 60 and you do not know what care will cost at 85, holding a reserve is sensible. The problem starts when the reserve is never sized, never reviewed, and quietly becomes the whole plan.
That is the uncomfortable truth: uncertainty is real, but an unsized reserve is not caution. It is an unexamined default.
Before you can decide whether you are underspending, you need a number to compare against. The Retirement Living Standards, published by the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, give three levels of annual spending for one- and two-person households. As at the figures currently published on the site:
Two warnings, both stated on the source page. These are estimated costs, not income — you need enough after-tax income to cover them, and because retirement income may be taxed you may need more gross income than the figure shown. And the figures assume you own your home outright. If you have a mortgage or rent, your costs will be higher.
Used properly, the Standards are a sanity check, not a target. If your household spends £45,000 a year and you are a couple, you are at the Moderate level. The useful question is not “am I normal?” but “what would the next £3,000 buy, and is it worth more to me than the reserve it displaces?”
Permission is easier to give when spending is categorised. I suggest three buckets, sized deliberately rather than by habit.
1. Essentials. Housing, food, utilities, transport, insurance, health costs. These are non-negotiable and should be stress-tested against a bad-market year. If a 20% fall in your invested assets would force you to cut essentials, your plan is too tight — and the answer is not to spend more.
2. Planned discretionary. Holidays, gifts, hobbies, eating out, the things that make retirement worth having. This is the bucket where underspending usually hides. Set a deliberate annual figure — not a ceiling you never approach, but a budget you intend to use.
3. Contingency reserve. Sized to the risks you actually face: later-life care, a survivor’s reduced income, house repairs, helping family. The IFS notes that the death of one partner affects per-person spending because shared costs do not fall — so a couple’s reserve needs to account for the survivor’s position, not just the joint one.
The test before increasing discretionary spending is simple: can the plan absorb this increase in a bad-market year without touching essentials? If yes, the constraint is psychological, not financial. If no, you have found a real limit, and that is useful information too.
A permission-to-spend plan is not a one-off decision. Set a date each year — the same month, so it does not drift — and ask four questions:
If the answer to the first question is consistently “we didn’t spend it,” that is not discipline. It is a signal that either the budget is wrong or the permission has not been given.
If someone else holds the pen on your plan, giving yourself permission to spend runs through them. That makes the adviser check part of the exercise, not a separate compliance chore.
The FCA’s Financial Services Register is a public record of firms and individuals currently or previously approved for regulated activities. The FCA’s own guidance is direct: you should check the details of any individual carrying out regulated activities on your behalf, especially current roles and any disciplinary or regulatory action on their record.
One detail worth understanding: some firms on the Register are appointed representatives (ARs), carrying out activities on behalf of a principal firm. The principal agrees what the AR can do and is responsible for that business. The FCA warns that if an AR has gone beyond the activities the principal allowed, you may not be protected by the Financial Ombudsman Service or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme if something goes wrong. You can ask the principal to confirm what activities the AR is permitted to carry out and how you would be protected.
Checking the Register does not guarantee suitability, and it does not prevent loss. What it does is clarify who is accountable for the plan — and that clarity is what makes it easier to have the conversation about spending more.
If you are still some years from the stop-work date, the framing in The Question You Should Be Asking Years Before You Retire is a useful companion to this piece: the spending question is easier to answer when the funding question has already been faced.
Suppose a couple with no mortgage targets £45,000 a year of after-tax spending. That sits almost exactly at the published two-person Moderate figure of £45,400. Their essentials are £30,000. Their contingency reserve is sized at £150,000 for care and survivor risk. The remaining £15,000 is discretionary.
Now suppose their adviser’s cash-flow model shows the plan can absorb £48,000 a year in a bad-market year without touching essentials. The £3,000 gap is the permission question. What would it buy? A second holiday, more help for grandchildren, a hobby that has been deferred for a decade. Is it worth more than the reserve it displaces? That is a values question, not a maths question — but it can only be asked once the maths has cleared the way.
This is an illustration, not a recommendation. Your own essentials, reserve and risk tolerance will differ, and the point is the structure of the question, not the numbers.
The honest close is not “spend more.” It is: know what evidence would move you. If a care needs assessment, a health diagnosis, or a change in the survivor’s income would change your reserve requirement, then the reserve should be reviewed against those triggers — not against a vague sense of caution.
And if nothing would change your mind, that is worth noticing too. A plan that cannot be updated by evidence is not a plan. It is a habit.
No. No source I can cite measures estate values in that way. What the IFS evidence shows is that, on average, spending stays roughly flat in real terms while income rises, and the share of income saved increases with age. That is a pattern, not a proof about any individual estate.
No. The IFS lists bequest motives, later-life medical costs and changing consumption preferences as documented explanations. Holding a reserve against genuine uncertainty is rational. The problem is an unsized, unreviewed reserve that becomes the whole plan.
No. The source page states clearly that they are estimated costs, not income, and that you need enough after-tax income to cover them. They also assume outright home ownership.
Use the FCA’s Financial Services Register to check the firm and the individual, including current roles and any disciplinary or regulatory action. If the firm is an appointed representative, ask the principal to confirm what activities it is permitted to carry out and how you would be protected.
Annually, on a fixed date, with the four questions above. The point is to notice whether the discretionary budget is being used and whether the reserve still matches the risks you face.
The artwork reads LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW, set around four smiling root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet and an onion — each drawn with its roots visible in the soil. The lettering wraps the group rather than sitting above it, so the sentence and the vegetables occupy the same space. The pun is doing two jobs at once: root as encouragement, and root as the thing the plants are doing underground.
That double meaning is the whole design, and it is worth taking seriously for a moment. The shirt is a humorous object, not a thesis. But the sentence it carries has a quiet tension inside it that anyone who has sat through a growth strategy meeting will recognise.
To root for someone is to want them to succeed. It is generous, low-cost and mostly invisible. To root, for a plant, is to establish itself in the ground — to put down the part that is not seen and does not photograph well. The design puts both meanings in the same line of text and lets the reader supply the join.
My reading is that the shirt is more interesting than a straightforward cheer. The vegetables are smiling, but their roots are drawn explicitly, in soil, below the visible surface. The growth being celebrated is the kind that happens out of sight. That is a different proposition from the growth we usually mean when we use the word at work.
In a business context, growth has largely been colonised. It means revenue, headcount, market share, compound annual rates. It is a number that must go up, and the language around it is compulsory. When a company says it is rooting for your growth, it usually means it expects your output to increase, and it would like you to describe that expectation as mutual.
The shirt’s sentence is not that. Watch each other grow implies observation, patience and a timescale longer than a quarter. You do not watch a beet grow by checking it on Friday and asking for a status update. The design’s roots are visible because the artist chose to show them, not because they were pulled up for inspection.
That distinction matters more as you approach the end of a working life. The vocabulary of potential and collective growth is hardest to resist when you are senior enough to be flattered by it and close enough to the exit to feel you should keep proving something. A shirt cannot resolve that. But it can name the difference between support and demand, which is the useful part.
I want to be careful here. The shirt does not argue that growth is bad, that ambition is suspect, or that you should stop trying. It is a pun about vegetables. The four faces are cheerful. There is no critique in the drawing itself — the critique, if there is one, is in the gap between the two meanings of root, and that gap is something the reader brings.
Nor is there any claim that wearing it improves anything. It is a printed cotton t-shirt. The design is the argument; the garment is the medium. If you want the object, it is listed as the Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective.
The smiling vegetables are doing something subtler than they first appear to. They are cheerful without being manic. Four faces, all content, none of them performing enthusiasm. That is a narrow register, and it is hard to sustain in an office where every all-hands meeting ends with a call to lean in and level up.
The shirt’s version of mutual support is quieter. It does not ask you to celebrate anyone’s promotion, or to pretend that a restructure is an opportunity. It asks you to root for the person next to you and to notice when they have grown. That is a reasonable thing to do, and it does not require you to be relentlessly positive about everything else.
For readers in the final decade of a career, that distinction is worth holding onto. The rhetoric of potential is most seductive when you are deciding whether to stay another two years or go. A shirt will not answer that question. But the sentence on it — support without demand, growth without a target — is a useful thing to have in your head when someone asks you what your plans are.
When someone says they are rooting for your growth, ask yourself which meaning they are using. Are they offering encouragement, or are they describing an expectation? The shirt does not settle it. But it makes the ambiguity visible, and that is more than most slogans manage.
Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
You are somewhere between fifty and sixty-eight. The stop-work date is no longer theoretical. A recommendation lands on the table, and it rests on a risk label: medium, balanced, growth, cautious. The label is doing a lot of work. It is standing in for at least three different questions, and your job before you sign anything is to make sure the file answers each of them separately.
This is not an argument that advisers hide things. It is an argument that a single word is a summary, and summaries lose information. The information they lose is usually the part that matters most at the point you stop earning.
Strip away the vocabulary and there are three distinct questions.
What are you willing to risk? This is your tolerance. It is a preference, and it is partly emotional. It shows up in how you answer questions about volatility, and in how you actually behave when markets fall. It is not a measure of what you can afford.
What can your finances absorb? This is your ability to bear losses, sometimes called capacity. It is arithmetic, not feeling. It depends on your income, your assets, your commitments, and how much of your spending depends on the money that is invested.
What return does the plan actually need? This is the risk required. It is the least discussed of the three and often the most decisive. If your bridge to State Pension age is short and your essential spending is covered by a defined benefit pension, the plan may need very little investment risk to work. Taking more than that is not prudence. It is unnecessary exposure.
The FCA’s suitability rules treat the first two as separate inputs. A firm providing investment advice must obtain information on the client’s financial situation, including their ability to bear losses, and on their investment objectives, including their risk tolerance, and must recommend only what is suitable in accordance with both. The rule does not merge them. It names them side by side. You can read the text in COBS 9A.2.1R.
The same section defines what ‘financial situation’ means. It must include, where relevant, the source and extent of regular income, assets including liquid assets, investments and real property, and regular financial commitments (COBS 9A.2.7). That is a factual inventory, not a mood. If your file records a tolerance score but no clear statement of income, assets and commitments, the ability-to-bear-losses side of the assessment is thin.
Tolerance and capacity are both inputs about you. Risk required is an output about the plan. It asks: given your spending, your guaranteed income, your time horizon and the bridge to State Pension age, what return does this actually need to produce?
That question is harder to put on a questionnaire. It requires a cash-flow model, or at least a clear statement of the funding gap and the years it spans. It is also the question most likely to change the answer. A couple with a large pension pot and a short bridge may need almost no growth. A couple with the same pot and a longer bridge, or a larger gap, may need more. The label can be identical in both cases.
This is where the quiet failure tends to sit. Not a wrong label, but an unexamined one. The file may contain a tolerance score and a capacity assessment, and still contain no explicit statement of the risk required to fund the plan to State Pension age. That gap is worth naming before any product is chosen.
There is a further distinction that is often flattened. Greg Davies of Oxford Risk has argued that ‘risk capacity’ and ‘capacity for loss’ are frequently used interchangeably, which he describes as a major problem leading to confusion and unsuitable advice. His argument, published in PA Adviser, is that capacity for loss is fully contained within the broader notion of risk capacity: measure risk capacity and you have measured capacity for loss as a side effect, but not the reverse.
His reasoning is that risk capacity has to account for wider financial circumstances — investible and non-investible assets, current and future cashflows, and even emotional attachments to assets like the family home. The more you rely on your investible assets to fund your lifestyle, the less risk you can take with them. Capacity for loss, by contrast, is a narrower test of whether a fall in value would materially damage your standard of living.
This is an attributed argument, not an FCA rule. But it is a useful one for a pre-retiree, because it explains why a single ‘capacity’ number can feel right and still be incomplete. The question to ask is not only ‘could I absorb a fall?’ but ‘what does the whole of my financial life — guaranteed income, property, future spending — say about how much risk these invested assets should carry?’
The FCA also expects the tools used in this process to be fit for purpose. Firms must take reasonable steps to ensure client information is reliable, including ensuring that risk assessment profiling tools are appropriately designed for the firm’s clients, with any limitations identified and actively mitigated (COBS 9A.2.9(2)(b)). That gives you a legitimate question about how the tool was used and what its limitations were. It does not give you a conclusion that it was misused.
Consider a couple, both 58, mortgage-free. One has a defined benefit pension that begins at 60 and covers their essential spending. Between them they hold £400,000 across ISAs and a SIPP. They plan to stop work at 60 and bridge two years to the DB pension, with the State Pension following later.
Their tolerance might reasonably be called medium. Their ability to bear losses is high, because the DB pension covers essentials from 60 and the home is owned outright. But the risk required to fund a two-year bridge is low. The plan does not need much growth to work. A single ‘medium’ label would overstate the risk the plan actually needs, and the useful conversation is about the bridge — its length, its funding, and what happens if the stop-work date moves — not about the label.
This is an illustration, not a case history. The point is structural: three numbers can point in different directions, and a single word cannot show you which direction each one points.
A joint label is a particular risk. One partner may have low tolerance and high capacity; the other high tolerance and low capacity. A joint ‘medium’ can hide both. The audit question is whether the file records each partner’s inputs separately, and whether the recommendation reflects the household position rather than an average of two questionnaires.
The FCA’s rules on identifying the subject of a suitability assessment recognise that a client can be a group of two or more natural persons, and require the firm to establish and record a policy on who is assessed and how (COBS 9A.2.15). For a couple, that policy should be visible in the file.
These are suggested questions, not regulatory requirements. They are designed to surface whether the three inputs have been captured separately and reconciled.
The suitability report is the artefact to audit. You are not looking for a particular label. You are looking for evidence that the label was derived rather than assumed.
If the report does not show tolerance and ability to bear losses as separate inputs, ask for them in writing before acting. If it does not show the risk required to fund the plan, that is the gap to resolve first — not a reason to change product.
The pre-retirement years are when the three numbers are most likely to diverge, and when a single label is least able to hold them. Tolerance may fall as you approach the point where you stop earning. Capacity may rise if a DB pension or the State Pension is about to start. Risk required may fall sharply once the bridge is short. None of these movements is captured by a label that was set three years ago and reviewed annually.
This is why the question of when to stop work and how to fund the bridge deserves its own conversation, separate from the risk label. The article on the question you should be asking years before you retire sets out why that timing decision is the one that shapes everything downstream.
The Consumer Duty raises the standard firms must meet: it requires them to act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers and to put customers’ needs first (FCA). A risk label that cannot be unpacked into its component parts is hard to reconcile with that standard. Your job is not to police the firm’s compliance. It is to make sure you understand what you are agreeing to before you agree to it.
No. The FCA’s suitability rules require information on risk tolerance and ability to bear losses, and a recommendation suitable in accordance with both. ‘Risk required’ is a planning concept — the return the plan needs to work — not a defined regulatory input. It is still the question most likely to change the answer.
That is common, and it is not a problem to be hidden. The question is how the adviser resolved it and whether the resolution is recorded. A recommendation that takes more risk than your tolerance allows, or less than your capacity could support, needs an explanation you can follow.
Not necessarily. A label is a summary, and summaries are useful. The issue is whether the file shows the inputs behind it. If it does, the label is a convenience. If it does not, the label is doing work it cannot support.
The FCA requires firms with an ongoing relationship to have policies and procedures to maintain adequate and up-to-date information about the client (COBS 9A.2.10). In practice, the pre-retirement years are when circumstances move fastest. A review that only restates the label is not a review of the three numbers.
Changes to the tax treatment of pensions and to the minimum age at which most pension savers can access their pensions are legislated and will affect the timing and wrapper decisions around the bridge. They do not change the three-number question, but they change the answer. Any plan that assumes a stop-work date or a pension access date should be checked against the current legislated position for the relevant tax year.
The shirt reads I HAD POTENTIAL in white capitals. Beneath the words, a white curved ramp descends from an upper-left ledge to a lower-right flat. A dashed empty circle sits on the upper ledge. A solid white ball rests on the lower ledge. That is the whole design. No arrows, no equations, no caption. Just a diagram and a sentence in the past tense.
What makes it worth more than a glance is that the drawing and the words are not saying the same thing. The sentence is a lament. The diagram is a demonstration. And the demonstration quietly undercuts the lament.
In the visual language of physics diagrams, a dashed outline usually marks a position that is possible but not occupied — a starting point, a predicted location, a place where something could be. Here the dashed circle sits at the top of the ramp, on the high ledge. The solid ball sits at the bottom, on the flat.
Read literally, the diagram shows a ball that has already descended. The dashed circle is where it began. The solid ball is where it ended up. The ramp is curved, not a straight diagonal, which matters: a straight line would suggest a simple slide, a single gradient. A curve suggests acceleration, a path that changes as it goes. The ball did not fall off the ledge. It rolled.
That is a different story from the one the words tell. I had potential implies loss, waste, a failure to launch. The diagram implies motion, a trajectory, a completed journey from high to low. The ball is not stuck. It arrived.
Potential is one of those words that only exists pointing forward. To say someone has potential is to say they have not yet done the thing. It is a compliment that doubles as a deferral. It is also, in work culture, a currency: potential is what gets you put on the succession plan, the stretch project, the list of people to watch.
The shirt takes that forward-facing word and puts it in the past tense. I had potential. The grammar alone is the punchline. It is the sentence you are not supposed to say in a performance review, the one that admits the forward-pointing currency has been spent or has expired.
But the diagram refuses to let the sentence have the last word. If the ball rolled down the ramp, then the potential was not wasted. It was converted. Potential energy became kinetic energy, and then the ball came to rest. The flat ledge is not a failure state. It is the end of a process.
I think the design is funnier — and more useful — than a simple self-deprecating joke. It is a small argument about how we talk about our own working lives.
The lament in the words is the voice of the annual review, the career conversation, the internal monologue that measures the present against an imagined high-water mark. The diagram is the voice of the physics teacher: here is what actually happened, drawn to scale. A ball on a ramp does not have potential in the abstract. It has a position, a path, and a resting place. The dashed circle is not a reproach. It is just the starting coordinate.
That is why the shirt works as an object rather than a slogan. A shirt that said only I had potential would be a sigh. The ramp and the ball turn the sigh into a diagram, and a diagram invites you to read it rather than just agree with it. The double meaning of potential — the everyday word for promise, the physics word for stored energy — is the hinge. The design uses both. The words use one. The gap between them is the joke.
The palette is white on the garment, with no second colour, no border, no decorative frame. The type is plain capitals. The drawing is a line and two circles. That restraint is doing work. A busier design would tell you what to feel. This one leaves the reading to you: is the ball at rest, or is it about to roll further? Is the dashed circle a memory or a missed turn? The shirt does not say. It just shows the setup.
For a certain kind of reader — the one who has sat through enough strategy presentations to be suspicious of the word potential — that restraint is the point. The design does not argue with you. It puts a diagram on your chest and lets you argue with yourself.
The shirt is sold as the I Had Potential Funny Physics Pun Sarcastic Minimalist Quote by Quirky Cotton Collective. The retail title calls it a physics pun and a sarcastic minimalist quote, which is fair as far as it goes, but the drawing is doing more than the title lets on. The curved ramp, the dashed circle, the solid ball: those are the parts worth looking at.
It is a humorous object, not a performance statistic and not evidence of any economic mechanism. It does not claim to improve anything, and it should not be read as investment guidance. It is a shirt with a diagram on it, and the diagram is the interesting part.
If the ball is at rest on the lower ledge, the sentence I had potential is not a confession of failure. It is a description of a completed transfer. The potential was real, and it went somewhere. The flat ledge is where the ball ended up, not where it was wasted.
That is a more interesting thought than the shirt first appears to offer. The next time you hear the word potential in a meeting — yours or someone else’s — it is worth asking which tense it is in, and whether the diagram would show a ball still on the high ledge or one that has already rolled. The shirt does not answer that. It just gives you the drawing.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
You bank with a UK bank. You fill up at a UK forecourt. You may hold a workplace pension that was set up years ago and never revisited, and an ISA that has drifted into whatever the platform’s default happened to be. It is easy to assume that your money is therefore “invested in Britain” — and that this is either a virtue or a problem, depending on which headline you last read.
The uncomfortable truth is narrower and more useful: the question is not whether the UK is under-owned or over-owned in aggregate. It is whether the UK slice of your portfolio is a deliberate decision or an accident of familiarity. Those are different things, and only one of them is worth defending.
Before auditing your own accounts, it helps to correct a common premise. The story that UK investors are rampantly overweight the domestic market does not hold for workplace pensions. The Department for Work and Pensions estimated that around 20% of workplace defined contribution (DC) assets were invested in the UK by 2023, down from around 50% in 2012, driven primarily by a movement away from UK listed equities (DWP, Pension Fund Investment and the UK Economy). In 2023, an estimated 70% of private-sector workplace DC assets sat in overseas equities and 6% in UK equities. The domestic share of DC listed equity fell from 40% in 2012 to 8% in 2023.
The FCA’s 2026 asset allocation survey of contract-based workplace default arrangements points the same way: 15.3% of disclosed default assets were UK investment and 84.7% non-UK (FCA, Asset allocation survey). And the Investment Association’s 2025 ISA Barometer, citing IA data, reports UK equities at 11.5% of total UK investor funds under management against 42% in overseas equities (IA/Opinium, July 2025).
So if you hold a modern default fund, the odds are that your UK exposure is modest — perhaps lower than you assume. The risk you need to check is not necessarily too much UK; it may be that you do not know what you hold at all.
There is a structural question about what UK-listed indices contain. The FTSE 100 is a concentrated index by construction: a relatively small number of large companies account for a large share of its weight, and the index has historically leaned toward financials, energy and mining rather than the technology-heavy composition of some overseas indices. That is a real feature of the index, but it is a feature of the index, not proof about your portfolio. I have not asserted specific sector weights here because the current official factsheet and constituent-weight downloads did not retrieve cleanly for this piece; if you want the exact figures, go to FTSE Russell’s own factsheet for the index and read the sector breakdown directly rather than trusting a second-hand number.
The second question is the one you can actually act on: what do your wrappers hold? A workplace pension, a SIPP, a stocks and shares ISA and a general investment account can each hold a different fund with a different geographic mandate. Two funds with different names can hold the same handful of large UK names. Overlap — not the headline allocation on a factsheet — is where accidental concentration hides.
This is a method, not a recommendation. It is designed to tell you what you own before you decide whether to change it.
If you hold a workplace default fund, start there. The FCA survey suggests the UK share of default assets is around 15%, but your scheme’s default may differ. The point is to replace assumption with a number you can date-stamp.
Familiarity feels like knowledge. Holding the bank you use and the oil major you buy fuel from can feel like understanding a business, when it is really understanding a brand. The IA/Opinium survey found that 71% of investors believe it is important to support the UK economy by investing in British businesses, and three fifths prefer investing in the UK because they know the market better (IA/Opinium, July 2025). Those are legitimate preferences. They are not expected-return forecasts, and they should be priced as preferences rather than mistaken for analysis.
For a pre-retiree, the sequencing question matters more than the geography question. Money you will spend in the next few years should not depend on any single market’s mood, UK or otherwise. A UK tilt that happens to be concentrated in banks and oil majors is a bet on those sectors, not a bet on “Britain” in any diversified sense.
A deliberate home tilt is defensible if you can write down three things: the reason, the size, and the review date. “I want some exposure to UK-listed companies because I expect to spend in sterling and I accept the concentration that comes with it” is a reason. “I have always held it” is not a decision just because it has been held for years.
If you work with an adviser, ask them to show you the UK exposure across all your accounts, not just the one fund they recommended. The FCA Register is a public record of firms and individuals authorised or registered by the FCA or PRA, and it includes warnings about unauthorised and clone firms (FCA, Financial Services Register). Checking the firm and the individual is a reasonable first step before a conversation about concentration. The question you should be asking years before you retire is not “which market will win” but “what have I actually agreed to own, and why”.
Probably not by default. The DWP estimated around 20% of workplace DC assets were UK-invested by 2023, and the FCA’s survey of contract-based default arrangements found 15.3% UK investment. But your scheme’s default may differ, so check the fund factsheet rather than assuming.
It can be a form of concentration, but the retrieved sources for this piece do not establish current FTSE 100 sector weights or typical retail portfolio composition. The useful step is to look at your own top holdings across all accounts and see whether the same names recur.
That is a decision for you and, if you use one, your adviser. This article sets out an audit method, not a recommendation. The point is to know what you own and to be able to state why you own it.
There is no single correct interval. A practical approach is to review whenever you change accounts, when a fund factsheet’s date is more than a year old, and at the same time as your broader pre-retirement planning review.
The artwork is almost nothing. On a dark shirt, centred, in lowercase, sits the word meh. — small enough that you have to be close to read it, plain enough that it could be a printing error at a glance. There is no animal, no slogan, no pride variant, no decorative frame. Just four letters and a full stop, scaled down until the shirt is doing most of the talking and the type is barely whispering.
That scale is the argument. A shirt that shouted MEH across the chest would be a different object entirely — a joke delivered at volume, a costume of indifference. The small lowercase version is closer to a private note worn in public. It doesn’t perform boredom; it declines to perform anything. For readers whose working lives are saturated with the rhetoric of potential, collective growth and compulsory cheer, that refusal is the interesting part.
Look at the mechanics rather than the mood. The word is lowercase, which removes the emphasis a capital M would supply. It ends in a full stop, which closes the sentence rather than leaving it open — a small piece of punctuation doing the work of a shrug. And it is centred and tiny, so the composition is symmetrical but not assertive. Nothing in the layout asks for attention. The shirt asks you to lean in.
That is a deliberate inversion of how slogan garments usually work. Most printed tees use type as a broadcast: large, high-contrast, readable across a room. This one uses type as a signal — legible only at conversational distance, which is roughly the distance at which you’d actually want to explain yourself. The design is not antisocial. It is selectively social.
Anyone who has sat through a strategy day knows the vocabulary. Stretch. Grow. Lean in. Bring your whole self. The language of work has spent two decades borrowing from therapy and sport at the same time, and the result is a kind of compulsory optimism that treats a flat answer as a character flaw. Meh is the flat answer. It is not hostile, not depressed, not even particularly rude. It is the sound of a person declining to inflate their enthusiasm to match the room.
That is why the small version works better than a loud one. Compulsory cheer is defeated by understatement, not by counter-cheer. A big MEH would just be another performance — the cynic’s equivalent of the motivational poster. The tiny lowercase version simply opts out of the volume war. It says: I am here, I am dressed, I am not going to pretend this is exciting.
The retail description is clear that this is a minimal typographic design with no animal illustration and no pride variant. That distinction is worth stating plainly, because the meh shirt has cousins. There are versions of this joke that attach the word to an animal, usually a cat or a capybara, and versions that fold it into identity messaging. Those are different objects with different arguments. The animal version says: this creature is me. The pride version says: this is who I am, and I am at peace with it. The plain typographic version says something quieter and, to my eye, more interesting: no further information.
That absence is the design. There is no mascot to hide behind and no cause to declare. The shirt offers a mood and withholds a reason, which is exactly what meh means as a word. It is the most efficient way in English to say I have an opinion and it is not strong enough to argue about.
The listing title includes the word introvert, and it is easy to see why. A garment that is only readable up close is a garment that rewards proximity and punishes crowds. But I’d be careful about treating that as a psychological claim. The shirt does not diagnose anyone. It is a piece of printed humour, and the introvert framing is retail language rather than a clinical or scientific statement. What the design does is make a visual choice — small type, low broadcast — that happens to align with a temperament. That alignment is an interpretation, not evidence.
Where the interpretation is useful is in thinking about boundaries. A boundary is often not a declaration; it is a small adjustment of scale. You don’t announce that you’re leaving the party early. You just leave. The shirt is the wardrobe equivalent: it doesn’t say do not approach, it says approach at your own pace. For readers who spend their working days managing other people’s expectations, that is a recognisable move.
It would be easy to over-read this. A shirt is not investment guidance, not a performance statistic, and not evidence of an economic mechanism. It is a humorous object, and the honest way to write about it is to describe what is printed and what that printing does. The word is small. The word is lowercase. The word ends in a full stop. The shirt is dark. There is no animal. Those are the facts, and they are enough to support an argument about understatement without inventing a wearing experience, a customer reaction, or a sales history.
What I can say is that the design rewards a second look, and that the second look is the point. The first glance registers a dark shirt. The second registers the word. The third registers the full stop, which is the smallest and most decisive element on the garment. A full stop is a boundary in typography. It says the sentence is finished. On a shirt, worn into a meeting or a family lunch, it says something similar: this topic is closed.
For the reader who spends their days in rooms where enthusiasm is a currency, the small meh. shirt functions as a kind of off-duty uniform. It is not a protest and not a costume. It is a low-stakes way of signalling that the wearer has a register below thrilled and is willing to use it. That is a modest thing for a garment to do, but modest is the correct scale here. The shirt is not trying to change the culture of work. It is trying to survive it with a little dignity and a very small font.
If you want the object itself, the listing is here: Meh Funny Sarcastic Introvert Minimalist Saying. The design is the small centred lowercase meh. on a dark shirt, with no animal illustration and no pride variant. That is the whole of it, and the whole of it is the argument.
Not every refusal needs to be loud. Some of the most effective boundaries in working life are set at a scale that only the people standing close enough will notice. The small meh. shirt is a reminder that understatement is a strategy, not a failure of nerve — and that a full stop, printed at four millimetres, can close a conversation more politely than a paragraph ever could.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
You are 58. You have stopped full-time work, or you are about to. The bridge between now and State Pension age needs funding, and the largest pot you own is the pension. Taking a taxable income payment from it looks like the obvious move.
It may well be the right move. But it is not a neutral one. One taxable withdrawal from a money purchase arrangement changes the contribution rules that apply to you, and it changes them from the tax year of the withdrawal onwards. That is the part of the decision that gets less attention than it deserves.
Most people saving into a pension operate under the standard annual allowance. GOV.UK describes it plainly: the annual allowance is the most you can save in your pension pots in a tax year before you have to pay tax, and it is £60,000 this tax year (GOV.UK, Tax on your private pension contributions). That figure applies across all your private pensions combined, including employer contributions.
There is a second regime. GOV.UK states that your annual allowance might be lower if you have flexibly accessed your pension pot, and gives two examples of what that can mean: taking cash or a short-term annuity from a flexi-access drawdown fund, or taking cash from a pension pot through an uncrystallised funds pension lump sum. The lower allowance is called the money purchase annual allowance (MPAA).
So the structure is not a penalty bolted onto a withdrawal. It is a switch between two sets of rules. Before the switch, your money purchase contributions are tested against £60,000. After it, they are tested against a much smaller number. The planning question is not whether the withdrawal is affordable. It is whether you have finished making the contributions you want to make.
The trigger events are set out in HMRC’s Pensions Tax Manual. The manual states that the MPAA test applies when an individual first flexibly accesses a money purchase arrangement in certain circumstances on or after 6 April 2015, and that if a trigger event occurs, the test applies for the tax year in which the event occurs and in subsequent tax years (PTM056520).
The list is longer than most people expect. It includes:
Two things follow from that list. First, the size of the withdrawal is not the test. The manual describes trigger events in terms of the first payment, not a minimum amount. Second, several of these events are administrative or structural rather than a deliberate decision to draw income. Converting an old capped drawdown arrangement, or taking a small lump sum from an overseas scheme, can move you into the MPAA regime without it feeling like a retirement decision at all.
For tax year 2023-24 onwards, HMRC states the MPAA is £10,000 (PTM056510). The same manual records the history: £10,000 in 2016-17, £4,000 from 2017-18 to 2022-23, and £10,000 from 2023-24 onwards. The 2015-16 year was split into two mini tax years with different figures again.
The history matters for one reason. The allowance has been changed by legislation before, in both directions. Anyone treating the current £10,000 as a permanent feature of the landscape is making an assumption, not reading a rule. Plan on the figure that applies now, and accept that it can move.
Carry forward is the mechanism that lets you use unused annual allowance from earlier tax years. It is widely understood, and widely relied on by people with lumpy incomes who want to make large one-off contributions.
It does not work against the MPAA. HMRC states that any unused annual allowance carried forward from previous tax years is added to the alternative annual allowance, not to the money purchase annual allowance (PTM056510). The manual also states that any unused money purchase annual allowance cannot be carried forward to later tax years.
So the asymmetry is this. Carry forward can enlarge the allowance that applies to defined benefit accrual. It cannot enlarge the £10,000 that applies to your money purchase contributions. If you trigger the MPAA while you still have significant money purchase contributions ahead of you, carry forward is not the escape route.
This is where the practical complexity sits, and it is worth being precise.
HMRC describes a split test. Money purchase pension input amounts are tested against the MPAA. Other pension input amounts, essentially defined benefit accrual, are tested against what the manual calls the alternative annual allowance. For 2023-24 onwards, that alternative annual allowance is £30,000 or a lesser amount where the tapered annual allowance also applies (PTM056510).
Carry forward is added to the alternative annual allowance. It is not added to the MPAA. And where the MPAA is exceeded, the manual sets out a comparison between an alternative chargeable amount and a default chargeable amount, with the greater of the two being the amount subject to the annual allowance charge.
The practical consequence: if you have a defined benefit scheme and you trigger the MPAA, you have not capped all your pension saving at £10,000. You have capped your money purchase inputs at £10,000 and moved your defined benefit accrual onto a different, lower allowance. Those are different problems with different answers, and they need to be worked through separately.
Here is the argument I would put to a couple in their late fifties with £300,000 or more spread across pensions, ISAs and property, still contributing, and needing cash before State Pension age.
The MPAA is a sequencing problem, not a saving problem. The decision is not whether to withdraw money. It is whether you have finished making the contributions you want to make. If you have, the MPAA is largely irrelevant to you and you can draw what you need. If you have not, the order in which you take money from your various pots matters more than the withdrawal itself.
Three broad routes, in ascending order of consequence:
Use non-pension pots first. If the cash need is temporary, or if you are still contributing meaningfully, drawing from ISAs or cash reserves preserves your full money purchase allowance. This is a planning judgement, not a rule. It depends on your tax position, your cash flow, and whether the ISA money was earmarked for something else.
Take only the tax-free element. Where the need is a lump sum rather than an income, the tax-free portion of a pension commencement lump sum is the part that does not create a taxable payment. I am deliberately not going further than the retrieved HMRC material supports on what does and does not trigger the MPAA, because the manual’s trigger list is framed around taxable payments and specific events rather than around a general exemption list. If this route matters to your decision, get written confirmation from the scheme and from your adviser before you act.
Accept the trigger. If the contribution phase is genuinely over, or if the cash need is recurring and the pension is the right source, then triggering the MPAA is simply the cost of the decision. It is not a mistake. It is a trade, and it should be made with the number in front of you.
The useful adviser question is not “what is the MPAA?” Most people reading this already know. The useful question is narrower and more uncomfortable:
Which of my pension inputs are tested against which allowance, and is carry forward available for the defined benefit side only?
Ask for it in writing. If you have both money purchase and defined benefit arrangements, the answer should show the two tests separately. If you have already triggered the MPAA, the answer should show the tax year of the trigger event and confirm which subsequent years are affected.
There is a second question worth asking, and it connects to the wider work of auditing an adviser relationship. If a taxable withdrawal is being recommended, what is the stated reason, and has the effect on your remaining contribution headroom been documented? A recommendation that produces a permanent change to your allowance should say so on the page, not leave you to discover it later.
If you are still some years from the decision, the groundwork is worth doing now. The question of what you are actually trying to achieve with the money, and in what order, is the one that makes the MPAA decision straightforward when it arrives. That is the subject of The Question You Should Be Asking Years Before You Retire.
Does the MPAA apply to all my pensions or just the one I withdrew from?
It applies to your money purchase pension inputs across all your arrangements combined. The £10,000 is a single allowance, not a per-scheme allowance. HMRC’s manual describes the test in terms of an individual’s money purchase pension input amounts, not per scheme.
Can I use carry forward to get back above £10,000?
No, not for money purchase contributions. HMRC states that unused annual allowance carried forward is added to the alternative annual allowance, and that unused money purchase annual allowance cannot be carried forward. Carry forward can help with defined benefit accrual, not with the MPAA itself.
I triggered the MPAA years ago. Does it still apply?
HMRC states the test applies for the tax year in which the trigger event occurs and in subsequent tax years. The manual does not describe a mechanism for resetting it. If you are unsure of your position, check your pension statements for drawdown income payments or uncrystallised funds pension lump sums, and ask the scheme directly.
I have a defined benefit pension as well. Am I limited to £10,000 in total?
No. The calculation splits. Money purchase inputs are tested against the MPAA. Other inputs, essentially defined benefit accrual, are tested against the alternative annual allowance, which HMRC states is £30,000 or a lesser amount for 2023-24 onwards where the tapered annual allowance applies. Carry forward is added to the alternative annual allowance.
What happens if I exceed the MPAA?
HMRC’s manual sets out a comparison between the alternative chargeable amount and the default chargeable amount, with the greater amount subject to the annual allowance charge. The detail matters and the arithmetic is not trivial. This is a calculation to have checked rather than estimated.
Does the MPAA figure ever change?
It has changed before. HMRC records £10,000 in 2016-17, £4,000 from 2017-18 to 2022-23, and £10,000 from 2023-24 onwards. Treat the current figure as the rule that applies now, not as a permanent feature.
A taxable withdrawal from a money purchase pension is not reversible in the way most financial decisions are. You can change your mind about an ISA contribution. You can stop a regular saving plan. You cannot un-trigger the MPAA.
That does not make it a trap. It makes it a decision with a long tail, and decisions with long tails deserve to be made deliberately. If you are still contributing, and you expect to keep contributing, the sequencing question is the one to answer first. If you are not, the MPAA is a footnote to a decision you have already made.
Either way, the number is £10,000 for money purchase inputs from 2023-24 onwards, the trigger is the first taxable payment or the relevant event, and the effect runs from that tax year forward. Those are the facts. What you do with them is a planning judgement, and it is better made with the arithmetic on the table than discovered afterwards.