Your bank account is not the only choice when it comes to saving for retirement - nor is it the best one. A pension offers many advantages to help you meet your goals.
The most immediate benefit of saving into a pension is that it gives you access to tax relief, letting you grow your retirement savings faster.
Consider what happens normally when you save a bit of money. First you get paid and then you put the money into a savings account. However, before you even received your salary, it likely was taxed; for instance, at the basic rate (20%) or the higher rate (40%) (NB, tax rates in Scotland will differ). This lowers how much you were able to set aside for the future.
With a pension, however, the money you put into it can come straight out of your salary - before it is taxed. This tax relief, therefore, means that the money you otherwise would have paid to the government goes into your pension. For a basic rate taxpayer, therefore, this effectively equals a 25% “boost” to your retirement savings. For someone on the higher rate, it would be 66.66% (although note that the Lifetime Allowance, or LTA, will apply to all contributions).
To put this into perspective, a 25-67% boost to your pension savings (or contributions) stacks very well against the <1% interest typically offered by most bank accounts. It even surpasses most of the returns you can reasonably expect on the stock market - and carries no risk (although once received it will carry the same risk as the rest of the underlying fund/portfolio in which your pension fund is invested).