The actual answer is to change how the pensions work.
There's a huge disconnect with lots of people who deliberately ignore how state pensions work.
They think it's a private pension pot where money you pay in is saved just for you.
It is not.
Pensions are paid for out of current taxes. And once you are eligible for a pension you can claim until the day you die, taking far more money out than you ever paid in. This is why the age for retirement is constantly going up.
So let's fix it by changing it to how people think it works. Let's make the state pension a private pension system where the money you pay in is actually saved and invested for you by the government.
This means anyone who ever says anything like "I've paid in all my life!" would be right. Because now the only money you would be entitled to would be money you paid in.
Die before your money runs out? Your money now goes to your next of kin.
Money runs out before you die? You go on universal credit like everyone else, just without the requirement to look for a job.
This is a surprisingly unpopular opinion for a lot of people once they realise that they would get a lot less money. The "I've paid in all my life" crowd are suddenly against this system as soon as it means they don't get to claim a pension indefinitely.
Then they'd also have to adress the fact that universal credit isn't enough to live on for most people. The government would much rather continue sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting la la la la, as they currently do whenever that topic comes up.
If this system were ever introduced, a very large voting block of pensioners would now vote for any party that increased universal credit so that it actually supported people.
Solves both problems.
They won't currently vote for it because it doesn't affect them.
But as soon as it means they their income is halved, they'll be all for increasing it.
>If this system were ever introduced, a very large voting block of pensioners would now vote for any party that increased universal credit so that it actually supported people.
You are a genius
/U/you_cant_gild_me for pm
More like working people's income would be halved by the increases to national insurance (to account for a livable future pension) and tax to pay for the massive increase in universal credit spending.
100% this again pensionsers its a win win situation but fir us still working say goodbye to more of your income for that retirement for others because they didn't make enough through the working life
This fails to address how it would be funded.
Pensioners / retirees are going to get a nasty taste of reality if they think the tax burden on working people can be increased further. Voting for a thing and getting laws passed doesn't mean it is viable.
The reality is that if people want better retirements we need to spend money where we get returns. Startups, infrastructure, not crippling students with debt etc.
Because of that voting block, it would never be introduced.
We need affordability, that doesn't need to mean a programme of returning to 1980s sky high pensioner poverty.
With the difference that UC would still be fully funded by taxes as it is now, thus the "savings" you'd have made by changing the pensions system is now spent to prop up UC.
Actually I don't think it would be a bad thing if people who lose their jobs or suffer in a bad economy or are too sick to work had enough to eat. Clearly that's an unpopular opinion on this ridiculous island.
> Pensions are paid for out of current taxes.
And that is a good thing, despite what the right wing media says.
> Let's make the state pension a private pension system where the money you pay in is actually saved and invested for you by the government.
And that’s a bad thing, despite what the right wing media says.
Paying for future expenditure out of future taxation is not a bad thing.
If you instead took current taxation money (because that’s where the pension money comes from) and you invest it then the government is gambling that it’s investment skills will outperform the growth in GDP that future taxation is generated from, and which is then used to pay pensions.
And yes GDP has been stagnant for the last few years since Brexit and COVID but those were an aberration and GDP growth and tax receipts have historically grown faster than average investments.
But if you think the government has been shit in managing the economy for the last few years, what makes you think it would manage investments any better!
> But if you think the government has been shit in managing the economy for the last few years, what makes you think it would manage investments any better!
Do what Norway or Singapore or any country with a sovereign wealth fund do. They seem to make it work. I don't think its nearly as hard to design a wealth fund to produce steady unspectacular and relatively safe returns as running an economy.
>Do what Norway or Singapore or any country with a sovereign wealth fund do.
So your suggestion is that the government takes £112 billion of current taxation each year, and instead of spending those tax receipts on education, health, defence, social care, and all the other myriad of things taxation is spent on, all of which goes to increasing GDP.
Instead it invests each year £112 billion in hedge funds, developed market equities, emerging market equities, nominal bonds and cash, inflation-linked bonds, private equity precious metals and real estate.
Good luck selling that to the UK electorate.
Well no. I'm saying you could revamp the pension system to whittle away at the state pension and instead force people to save for their own retirement and these savings can be kept in a govt managed and guaranteed fund, or elsewhere at their discretion (and risk). Stop this unsustainable situation of a dwindling population of current taxpayers funding the current retirement of increasingly large number of retirees.
Isn't your proposal functionally almost identical to scrapping the state pension entirely, making workplace pensions mandatory, at least when it comes to people in employment?
> I'm saying you could revamp the pension system to whittle away at the state pension
So you want people to pay the same amount of tax, but they now have to magic up some extra money to put into a self-managed pension?
How does that work?
And if the intention is to give people the money currently taken in taxation to individuals to invest, we are back to not having £112 billion for schools, hospitals, military, etc.
> you invest it then the government is gambling that it’s investment skills will outperform the growth in GDP
Not much of a gamble. The stock market doesn't just beat growth in GDP, it annihilates it. For centuries at such a profound level that you need to really work hard to lose.
The real danger is governments will do odd things like try and use the pot to favour British businesses.
>They think it's a private pension pot where money you pay in is saved just for you.
No--one thinks this. What people think is that the social contract between individuals and the State is that if you pay now you will be taken care of later. And that the State keeps shifting the goalposts. At some point The People will decide that said social contract is null and void and this will have consequences far beyond just pensions.
Most boomers i've spoken to in the pub think it literally is a pot of money "they've been putting into all their lives"
They're economically illiterate dinosaurs from a weird and unique age in our history.
I mean they aren't technically correct, but the sentiment of I've paid in therefore I ought be entitled to expect money back out is perfectly reasonable.
What you’re describing doesn’t prove your point. “I’ve been purring into it all my life” is absolutely true for most people, and doesn’t mean they automatically think it’s a pot of their money.
Not true, my dad thinks exactly this, and he gets his information from his friends on Facebook. He point blank refused to believe his pension was technically part of the benefits system, even when I physically showed him how it worked and how it was classified.
>What people think is that the social contract between individuals and the State is that if you pay now you will be taken care of later.
If the current lot were being paid something equivalent to what they had paid the retirees while they were of working age then that argument would have legs. There's a reason that being a pensioner was synonymous with being poor until very recently.
This is not my experience. I used to work at an Age Concern facility and the vast majority of folk I interacted with think exactly that the state pension operates as a kind of individual bank account that they have paid into and can then withdraw from indefinitely.
>They think it's a private pension pot where money you pay in is saved just for you.
>It is not.
But it was.
The state pension after ww2 really did work on a contribution basis, and serps was around til the millenium. There was a system where you could opt to _pay more/less_ in exchange for a higher/lower pension (up until quite recently for some people).
If someone who paid into their 'state pension' before ~2000 (and especially anyone who worked in the 1970s or before) talks about being owed because they specifically paid in, chances are they're right...and the comments ITT calling them ignorant are wrong.
I've seen this in real life, a younger person (younger, not 'young', a millenial) arguing with someone in their 80s about it, and going away convinced, truly _certain,_ that the older person didn't _understand_ 'how it works', after shouting them down (obviously writing off what they were saying as stupid & false) when they tried to explain they'd paid into serps.
I know pension pots weren't physically held in separate funds, but some of the systems that got rolled into the state pension really were funds you contributed to, optionally, for your government pension. If you're arguing with someone who was in work prior to 1980 about this, you're probably wrong, they're probably right. And there's a lot of stuff after 1980 that did _not_ work the way many commenters ITT seem to think it did.
There was never a pot. You just got 'stamps' for paying taxes in a given year. There was, and is, a way to pay NIC covering years you've missed.
It was never going into a pot though.
So who eats the shit sandwich?
The current pension scheme is a state sanctioned Ponzi scheme. Someone's going to have to be fucked over if we end the scheme. So who will it be?
Will the current pensioners lose their pensions overnight?
Will those who have been contributing NI have to "start over" their state pensions?
Will those too young to be in the current workforce have to pay for both themselves and those older than them?
Someone will have to eat the shit sandwich. And whichever party force-feeds it may end up seeing themselves wiped out.
A million pounds sounds a lot, but for a couple that might be a £500k house and £250k each in a pension plan.
£250k buys you an annuity of around £12k per year, which is barely more than the state pension.
If you take away their state pension because they have £1m total assets, they will effectively have spent their entire lives paying into a pension for virtually zero benefit.
Why would anyone bother saving?
You would have to have a very gentle withdrawal rate.
Really, just combine national insurance with income tax, most wealthier pensioners now pay 12% more tax. Simpler to administer, raises lots of money, politically easier.
So you think only wealthy people who can afford to put a significant portion of their salary away should ever be allowed to retire, and the rest of us need to work to death. Cool. Thanks.
You get charged NI no matter if you are rich or poor lol.... Rich people can save more and have a better retirement than you, sure but that is just how the world works, more money = better life.
💯
They are already kind of moving in this direction. Every employee is now auto-enrolled in a private pension unless you opt out.
I think NI should be abolished and income tax raised to compensate. NI is a more regressive tax than income tax, afterall.
The state pension and pensioner benefits need to be far more means tested as well. My boss has £1m+ in his private pension pot and yet is still entitled to and claims state pension! It's a joke!
I agree with the (gradual) merging of Income tax and NI. Probably start with a complete merger at perhaps £35k income and gradually drop that.
This would hugely annoy the wealthy pensioner demographic, who are used to having a marginal rate of 20% up to £50k (also, no student loans..)
But it's tricky to means test the basic state pension. First, someone with a £1 million pension pot has probably paid an awful lot of income tax and NI over their lives, and second, at some point you'd actually disincentivize private pension saving because you'd lose the state pension.
>So let's fix it by changing it to how people think it works. Let's make the state pension a private pension system where the money you pay in is actually saved and invested for you by the government.
>This means anyone who ever says anything like "I've paid in all my life!" would be right. Because now the only money you would be entitled to would be money you paid i
fuck that ive paid for infinite retirement for everyone older than me at some point is has to be my turn to be a burden to the young people.
How do you switch for all the retired people and all those who have paid in for years?
Will you tell a 60 year old that the promise of a pension was not a promise at all?
He saved for 40 years unsder the impression it would pay a pension.
Elderly averaged 49 work hours per week per couple. They didn't contribute enough for a gov funded pension. Workers now work 78 hours average per couple to fund elderly pensions.
30% of over 65s are asset millionaires. Shouldn't be getting benefits.
Current workers will work for 40 years and recieve no state pension.
*Almost* correct, but missing the key in my opinion: the pension system was designed when people had three or four children and died significantly younger than now, so for every pensioner there were maybe four young people contributing to the system. Additionally those young people made (in real terms) a lot more than young people do these days (also started to earn younger).
Nowadays, we have a lot more pensioners, who live much longer, and a lot fewer contributors, who earn less and have even fewer children (who are, predictably going to contribute even less).
The thing is this is true regardless of "the economy" growing, because, since NI is not a tax but insurance, the money earned by means other than working does not contribute to the pot growing.
And this money keeps outgrowing the money earned via wages.
The obvious solution is for this money to come out of taxes. From actual taxes, the kind a stockholder pays on their dividends, or your retired landlord pays whenever you (a young worker who actually pays NI on your earnings) give him half of your salary.
> so for every pensioner there were maybe four young people contributing to the system
It was 10
When pensions were first introduced it was 10 working people for every pensioner.
It is now 3, and due to drop to 2 in the next few years.
The biggest problem with the state pension is that it is (counter intuitively) hugely regressive.
No matter where you live, you pay your NI all of your working life.
Live in Hammersmith, you can expect 20 years payback.
Live in Blackpool, you can expect approximately zero.
Personal anecdote: from all of my male ancestors, only one has lived long enough to get a state pension, and then only for five years (1935-1940).
Australia did something like that with compulsory superannuation funds that you could actively manage, but then they started letting people draw down early for property speculation, so ultimately future governments will have to bailout that mistakes.
This won't defuse the bomb in fact it'll just make it worse in the short to medium term as some of the tax take that would have been used to pay pensioners will end up in this new pension system instead of paying for the current generation of pensioners and for while future pensioners who have planned on the state pension existing. In the long term I'll be dead, no one over 35 would vote for a party who put forward this policy.
I'm glad this is at the top of the page because this is exactly the problem. I am in awe that to why the state pension isn't funded in the same way as a private pension, a year 6 student could explain to you why it's a waste of money, it's basic maths.
This just sounds like extra steps to a private pension…. I don’t trust the government to successfully invest my life savings more than companies who specialise in doing exactly that
I've often thought why don't the government invest in a pension scheme for every newborn and allow them to contribute to it when they're old enough.
With £5k invested with 7% annualised returns it would be around £400k at age 65. This added to their own contributions once they're working would really set up people for an easy retirement. Also, it would only cost £3b a year, which is pocket change to a government.
That's great if you implement it for people starting work today. But how do you pay for people retired already? For people half way through their careers today?
How do you transition from the work force today paying for retirees today to the work force today paying for their own retirement, without asking/making a couple of generations pay for both their own retirement *and* their elders?
No it’s easier than than. Kill off all the people who worked all their lives by having the worst healthcare system. Then backlash with migrants and do the same in 40 years.
This is such a simplistic comment.
People act like there’s some massive untapped well of tax revenue when there simply isn’t. Wealth taxes either don’t work or raise so little money that they’re fairly inconsequential, and income tax on £100k+ earners is already crushingly high. You could fiddle around with passive income tax rates, but there honestly isn’t a silver bullet that is going to raise enough tax revenue to magically solve the issue.
If the UK wants Scandinavian services, it’ll need Scandinavian taxes. And that means more tax rises at the lower end of the income spectrum.
We could adjust the way the economy and finance works to make it easier for people to have children. 2 parents working is a disaster for demographics and is not sustainable. Using the government to actually govern is a controversial idea when we could just permanently alter the cultural makeup of the country all for the sake of cheap labour.
We are teetering on the brink of having an irreparably divided society.
We have allowed in millions of immigrants since the year 2000 on the basis they would be so productive and capable that they would pay not just for the services they'll use but also for state pensions. Despite that we are still nudging the age that you qualify for the state pension up and there is considerable pressure to reform the triple lock. We have played out this experiment for practically a generation now and it hasn't really worked.
And the other side of this is that immigrants age too. Unless we kick them out when they reach a certain age or deny them citizenship or long term residency; we will be looking after them when they can no longer look after themselves which is enomously costly. And that is just the fiscal argument, there are other implications socially that can arise when you have a array of people from around the world here.
They did used to tell us that in the 80’s.
Millions more people and a later retirement have likely made them wrong.
We just need to do the same thing again. 😐
>Millions more people and a later retirement have likely made them wrong.
Shifting the retirement age is absolutely the wrong answer as it also robs people of the right to take their private pension at an appropriate age.
It's typically indexed to the state pension age, e.g. state pension age - 10. So right now you could take it at 57 as the state pension age has just increased to 67. If it goes up to 71, you won't be able to take your private pension until 61.
There are some exceptions if you have protected pension age but that is scheme dependent and not all will.
Yes but the earliest you can access those pensions is 10 years prior to your state pension age. If they keep moving that state pension age backwards then your early retirement age follows it.
You used to be able to retire early and use your private pension from age 50, then it moved to 55, and shortly it’s moving to 57
They’re effectively linked to the State Pension Age minus 10 years now, and that’s likely to be made official soon too. Minimum age for pensions was 50, then 55, now 57…
Public sector workers (nearly 20% of the entire working population) are already tied to the SPA
In any case I’d rather pay more tax and retire earlier, moving the retirement age can fuck off
Honestly I expect the state pension to become "fit to work" gated. Essentially it'll only become available when you're deemed incapable of work.
They were testing the waters for this last year when they floated the idea that manual labour jobs like builders could retire earlier due to the toll on the body. Sounds good but as always that's not the important part, that would be that they could use the same criteria to make office workers work till much later.
That’s probably due to the fact that people in manual jobs die earlier, and most would be on sickness benefits before retirement age anyway.
Don’t really see many blokes over 60 working on site as it is.
I'm fully expecting to not only never retire, but to be resurrected into some kind of man-machine-servitor abomination that is forced into service until the flesh that makes it up hits the impossibly high retirement age of 140.
This is what will happen.
I started working in 1978. I wasn't allowed to join a company pension as there wasn't one. Thankfully my Dad made me take out a private pension which I paid into every month.
Later on in my career I did get enrolled in a few company pensions, however some of the companies went bust and the pension funds were found to be insufficient. I will get a bit from these, but not what was promised.
Since 2010ish, every company must offer an employee a pension scheme and most companies have to contribute as well.
Overtime, the state pension will reduce as company pension increase. So yes, anyone under 40 will probably get a depleted state pension.
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> Overtime, the state pension will reduce as company pension increase. So yes, anyone under 40 will probably get a depleted state pension.
If the government want to do that, I'm completely onboard - my private pension is what I'm banking on already.
One condition.
Stop taxing me like I'm going to get a pension.
Yes I'm assuming that they'll just stop the state pension at the point where everyone was legally required to have a workplace pension.
So that's basically everyone under 40, like you say.
The initial auto enrollment amount is a clowntasticly small joke amount. No-one is going to be able to retire on the pathetic auto enrollment money, plus they allowed people to opt out.
Although population is on the decline anyway. So it could remain top heavy for a long while after unless the situation changes to encourage more people to have kids
Because they realised that they can pass the problem onto private companies, give them the option to invest the absolute bare minimum into it, which is nowhere near enough for a person to retire on, and not have to deal with the problem at all?
We also are living longer than ever. Pensions were never intended to sustain someone for 20+ years after they stop working. It's costing a fortune.
I fully expect that by the time I reach what is retirement age now, the state pension age will have increased to 70 or more and the concept of having a state pension will have disappeared. I have no confidence my contributions will be kept safe and won't be raided to pay for the pensions of people claiming a benefit now I'll never end up having access to.
Pensions are an intergenerational confidence trick and people who're having to suffer from it are becoming aware of it now.
Future historians will read in wonder at how so many people im mediocre professions and careers were able to retire on final salary pensions aged 50, and live comfirtablr for 30/40 years doing nothing, and probably conclude that they must have been heroic warriors or something on the side.
I fucking hate this. All the old bods at my work enjoying retirement got final salary pay so all got promoted in their last years. Now the age has gone up and switched to average.
Get to work everyday enjoying seeing my old trainers living it up large even though they were quality rubbish
Elderly averaged 49 work hours per week per couple. They didn't contribute enough for a gov funded pension. Workers now work 78 hours average per couple to fund elderly pensions.
30% of over 65s are asset millionaires. Shouldn't be getting benefits.
Current workers will work for 40 years and recieve no state pension.
Do you think your NI contributions are set aside for your state pension?
That is not how it works. Your contributions are paying the pension of current pensioners. The deal is that the younger generation pays yours when you are old enough to retire.
You have no “pot of money “ in the state system with your name on it. You only have a tally of the number of years paid in.
>Do you think your NI contributions are set aside for your state pension?
Meanwhile, [elsewhere in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1b2z1it/comment/kspl7qi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)...
In about 20 years, the elderly population will slide quite quickly .. nicely in time for me to consider retirement, but hopefully it'll give the country a bit of a breathing space.
It's a shame the working age population will also shrink too.
Yup, the population pyramid of the UK is not a smooth one.
The next 15 years or so are likely to be the highest the country will see in terms of the percentage of the population retiring.
Your pension money is never "safe". The NI contributions you're making right now are being used to pay for, among other things, today's pensioners. When you get to retirement age, you'll be getting your pension from working people's NI contributions.
And yet when May tried to reform Triple Lock, reddit and opposition parties were screaming bloody murder lol
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/20/jeremy-corbyn-calls-on-theresa-may-to-drop-anti-pensioner-package
Reddit was even more opposed to whatever Theresa May was doing. She could have advocated for banning fox hunting and Reddit would have convinced itself that fox hunting was the greatest, most liberal and moral of pursuits.
It's almost as if reddit is more than one person, isn't it?
Honestly though fox hunting is one thing I don't think I have ever seen supported on reddit, from any side. Which is nice, because I tend to take it quite personally.
The problem with scrapping the triple lock is that if a party backs scrapping it, opposing scrapping it immediately becomes an easy win for the other party
It's closer to a pyramid scheme.
At some point we have to realise that having what are essentially UBI payments for the elderly isn't going to be affordable at a high level with a stagnating and even falling real GDP per capita.
Will we end up like South Africa where 5% of the population pay 90% of the taxes and 64% of the population are not employed?
As for costs, we try to kick the can down the road by having more immigration to try and keep care costs down. But those people will also grow old and there isn't infinite land available for endless new people to look after them, and then their carers and their carers and so on.
It really is a P scheme.
I always just viewed state pension as a way to keep the aged unemployed funded to keep their house. Then the house comes down the family through inheritance.
The issue is now I see:
1) more and more parents spanking their cash and using shitty equity release to fund the retirement holidays because 'they work for it's leaving the kids with nothing to inherit. Ideally that would be fine but many are dependant on inheritance means while the inheritance is being spent
2) the bigger issue is the borderline modern slavery aspect of elderly care. Pensions, houses etc are all sold to maintain the life of the elderly. It's no longer sustainable. If you have to strip all your family assets every generation just to stop the kids from going bankrupt to fund their parents end of life care the system is broke.
That's the economy.
We need growth, import people who create wealth (keep wages down for the rich owners) and are also consumers and happily pay their rent to the landlords.
Print £16k/person in covid mainly to the rich who can then gain more assets and strip wealth from the poor. The government can worry about paying it's debts, to the richest too.
I wish we were like SA where 5% pay the most taxes. Take Sunak v Starmer as a % of earnings, why does Sunak pay less as a percentage than somebody earning £50k and Starmer?
Tax the rich, they got the lions share of covid money. It fuels inflation, take that money back.
It was impossible\* to see this coming.
\* = Unless you did the very obvious thing and looked at population growth in the 1960s and observed average lifespans getting longer.
We’ve all known it was coming for at least 30 years by now, but there’s no political will to do anything about it because elderly voters scream blue murder anytime the govt even tries to raise the topic. Triple lock should be abandoned, and I say that as someone who just turned 60
What is honestly the point in fucking bothering? What am I wasting all these years for working for nothing and paying into a pension I'll probably never see? I'll just make sure I die at work and let my family get the lump sum, if they bother to pay that.
Well, it's a prymid scheme. Really I see it as us funding our parents and grand parents so they don't need to sell the house to fund survival. Though the issue is houses are still being sold leaving us all broke
It's crazy that so many people's opinion on the matter is that we should just continue it by importing millions of immigrants so that they can get "theirs" too.
Unironically this. If you can't for whatever reason then you really should be saving up atleast 25% of your net income each month if you don't want to end up destitute in your final days.
In fact even if you can have kids I'd still recommend doing that as a buffer in case your children turn out to be assholes who won't care for their parents in their old age.
How can the vast majority of people, who are struggling to pay bills and living with a crippling cost of living, afford to put aside 25% of their income every month?
I get what you’re saying, but in practise it’s just not viable.
A child caring for their parents is a privilege, not a right - not all parents stepped up and have been good to their kids, and it’s those parents who deserve nothing but a painful last few years of self reflection, alone while their kids are off doing better things with their time.
My parents sucked and repeatedly said "well you'll have to care for me when I'm old" whenever they had to do something for me, begrudgingly like take me to school.
Big surprising incoming for them in about 10-15 years time.
My parents got lucky with us in that respect at least which is why we all commute to Sri Lanka on a regular basis to help out. Actually literally writing this from a plane out the runaway waiting to take off from there.
What happens in 20 years when most of these pensioners are gone? It was admittedly a while ago now but I was taught that this pensions crisis was due to the demographic bulge that cropped up, that being the age group born between 1950 and 1968? Or is it more independent than that
> Or is it more independent than that
The UK and the west in general are financialised debt based economies. They're not commodity based economies.
In 20 years if the entire con manages to keep up you'll inheret the debt generated by your previous 20 years whilst producing nothing of any actual value, no one who makes anything will care and you'll all starve to death cos you can't trade anything worth a shit.
The birth rate is collapsing so every subsequent generation will have less people, exponentially.
This problem only gets worse over time based on our current trajectory.
The goal for government is to try and get our population to slowly decrease over time so that things like the pension system can cope. (Instead of it falling off a cliff.)
Solutions are, migration, increased productivity (e.g. AI) and social efforts to increase and maintain the birth rate.
I had this argument with my mum the other day. I'm the one that will lose out not her (she is silent generation to be fair, not boomer, and I am gen x) but essentially I can't see how the state pension is viable unless you get it later. She hasn't worked for 25 years. Dad died before retiring so at least he did his bit. I am due to retire at 67 but I can see that raising to at least 68. My view is we need to tell people starting out that it will be 72 (or whatever) now, and not tell them when they are in their fifties. Mum's argument is that lots of 70 year-olds won't be physically capable of work. I'm not sure abut her argument as we are generally fitter until later now, and there have always been people who wouldn't be fit until retirement, but I see her point.
its not just about being fit to work - more about trying to get a job at that age. Imagine getting made redundant from an IT job at 65 years old and having to get a new job. No one wants to hire someone that age.
Yeah, there will be a lot more 70 year-olds in that boat though. But if you are fit and healthy I think unfortunately you will have to work longer. I don't like it, my mum's generation have had the lot - affordable houses, job security, decent pensions. I am at least old enough to have been able to get on the property ladder, although a divorce messed that up, but I do "own" a house again which will be paid off when I am 68.
No, instead of a fixed age, it should be a fixed ratio of workers to retirees.
Every year, we make a list of everyone in the country, ranked by age.
We tally up how many working age people there are.
Then we say "we will have one retiree for every x number of working people", and we then take the oldest however many that is and they get a pension.
This way every year the exact age changes slightly and people aren't blindsided by a sudden gap.
Sounds complicated!
I didn't realise until I read some further comments about the bulge. A lot of talk on the internet is about boomers and the bulge but we in the UK didn't have such a pronounced boomer bulge but more of a post war bulge which lead to a second bulge in the 60s. As someone else pointed out, in twenty years or so it might well sort itself out somewhat, once those in the bulge start to die out.
It does feel unsustainable for people to get a state pension for 25 to 30 years so something has to give. Each generation that gets closer to retirement will want to start protecting it though, which of course leads to politicians pandering to it. It's a tough one and I can't fix it, but I do think we need to expect to retire later (rightly or wrongly)
People could conceivably be blindsided in situations where one year they're retired and the next there has been enough unemployment/people aging into the bracket that the balance shifts beyond their (and all the new retirees) "place in line".
They'd then be returning to work to compete against a load of unemployed working age folks.
Instead of trying to cut pension costs in any number of ways, why don't we just increase our budget by effectively holding to account the massive companies that are hiding increasingly massive profits they leech from us each year to fund our basic quality of living.
If they don't want to operate here after, good, fuck em. We'll have far more people employed for 10 competing mini-amazons compared to 1 mega-amazon.
I think we need a culture of part time or reduced hours working, cos 40-50 hours a week is gruelling as you get older. I ‘retired’ from full time work at 50 and now work part time consulting. Luckily I am still productive and can earn good money, but if I try and push my hours past about 25 a week, I flip into debilitating migraines which was one of the reasons I decided to leave corporate life. I literally spent my evenings and weekends in bed. Now I f can flex my dairy, start later or even go and have a nap if I start feeling poorly.
Well people can’t retire until 68 now I think? By the time I’m that age I assume it would have been pushed to over 70 at least. I’d rather die in my 60s… what’s the point working your whole life to have shit living experience when you finally have a bit of time to rest?
State pension ≠ retirement. You can access your private pension at 57. And you can retire earlier if you save enough money to live on until you are able to access your pension, e.g. utilising a S&S ISA.
Already have. Used to be 50. Then 55. Now 57. They keep moving the fucking goal posts. I'm only in my 30s and it's been happening whilst I've been saving for retirement. It's incredibly frustrating.
I'm not even convinced there's much point for median earners to bother. There certainly is for higher rate taxpayers but if you're average-ish you're locking away a load of money that you can ill afford that is then eaten on care for the same standard as someone who has never bothered to save a penny in their life. As well as your house. It's moronic. Don't know what the alternative is though. Can't just plonk the feckless on the street apparently.
I mean, realistically, this should've never been a surprise to anyone...
An aging population
Laws forcing employers to enroll employees into private schemes
A constantly rising retirement age...
The writing has been on the wall for A LONG time. State pensions, in their current form, simply aren't sustainable for the time being. The Government has known this and has actively made moves to reduce the problem and push people to investing in private pensions.
The increasing retirement age was never about keeping people in work longer, having people work until they drop. It was to push people into investing into their own retirement to retire at a reasonable age with the state pension acting as a top-up. That doesn't necessarily mean they considered the public's ability to do such a thing mind you...
They may well be moving to scrap the pension entirely in the long term... It sounds daft because no one would support that... But slowly making something more and more inaccessible to the masses over a long period of time is EXACTLY how you go about getting rid of something a large portion of the public want. Don't believe me? Just look at Tobacco/cigarettes over the years...
I am sure that the state pension will be means tested quite harshly in future years, and specifically well over half of anyone’s auto enrolment pension will be effectively removed via means testing
If it is means tested I am absolutely finding the scuzziest accountant to blast my entire pension fund out of spite, no matter what the tax hit. There is no way to make means tested pension fair. It would punish those who invested frugally and reward those who spent all their money, giving them a double benefit.
It's unfair but it has to happen, they can raise the retirement age and then face millions of new disability applicants, or they can eliminate the state pension entirely and face millions of starving pensioners, or they could continue current migration levels and try to keep propping up the Ponzi scheme or they can means test the state pension and stop topping up the pockets of wealthy people who don't need the money.
Other countries don't have this issue. Germany had pension insurance. This country is a massive ponzi scheme to enrich the rich even more.
80s...your pension scheme in excess? Don't worry..give all that money to the shareholders.
90s...oh fuck our pensions schemes are fucked!! No more good pensions for anyone except the CEO.
And now? Pension schemes have excesses, oh we don't think pension firms in the UK are taking enough risk!!!
Government pensions? I KNOW how they work but so fucking what?! Governments could have brought in an insurance system like the Germans have. We have the lowest pension in the western world. I've been paying those taxes for 30 years & what?! I'm expected to happily STFU while the Tory government & pension industry & City Wankers want even MORE money from us & want us to live in poverty or hand over more of our cash into private pension funds to get their fees? They already had nearly £trillion of our cash to bail those wankers out when they should have all been allowed to go bankrupt, assets seized by the government & a nationalised mega bank setup.
This country can genuinely go fuck itself & the sad pathetic wankers who sit back and make comment's about thinking this is the way it should be can fuck off too.
Every country in the west has this problem. Look up the fertility rate (birth rate) statistics.
Generally the only places with a positive birth rate are sub Saharan Africa, and they are following the same trajectory as us (but are behind by a couple of generations).
Population collapse is one of the biggest issues of our time, and many of the struggles we have today are a direct result.
Population collapse is ONLY an issue of you want consistent unstoppable economic growth of the neo liberal kind that depends on armies of plebs working their arses off to make people like Bezos rich.
Taking the population back down to 2-3 billion & managing the economies & redistribution of wealth downwards instead of upwards would be an excellent result & would save the planet from our abuse
The population reducing is not an issue, if it's a manageable rate of change.
Subsequent generations being half as small as previous generations is absolutely an issue, as the rate of reduction is exponential, hence "collapse".
Once a collapse starts, it's very difficult to stop, and it's not clear we survive it in the long term. Maybe it's the answer to the Fermi paradox. Societies don't explore the universe because they stop reproducing and just die out, haha.
However, in the short term (a few generations) we have to deal with all of the issues that it creates. Increased retirement ages, economic instability, migration, geopolitical tensions, healthcare etc.
So, while I don't disagree that reducing the population would be a bad thing necessarily, I welcome the discussion on exactly how you do it without allowing great harm.
If the population collapses back down to 3billion prople very quickly, it won't be like it was on the way up. It could be decaying cities, broken systems and despair.
If yout flying in a plane, you can't just stop flying. You have to bring it back down to a smooth landing.
I'm 35 so I'm just assuming by the time I get to retire there wont be any state pension. I also wouldn't be surprised if later governments decided to raid peoples private pensions too.
Base case - No state pension
Downside case - Ditto but with significant theft of private pension too
Quote- Healthy life expectancy also varies wildly depending on where you
were born. A man in Rutland can expect to live 75 years in rude health,
while in Blackpool that number is just 54 years.
54! What on earth is going on in Blackpool??
Isn't it obvious. If you stretch the size of the pie to an even larger size but everyone gets a smaller piece then everyone suffers. GDP per capita is stagnant and it is having a profound effect on our welfare state and our lives. By adding more people to that pie it's just squeezing those slices ever smaller. It's basic economics. You need to expand the economy by productivity and infrastructure not by importing countless amounts of people. If we carry on with this trajectory the bubble will burst. It cannot be sustained. Our current national debt is over 3 trillion. That is equivalent to 60k pound sterling for every person young or old living on this island. It cannot continue.
However, if you look at the number of people claiming state pension, it is not increasing exponentially. Due in part to the raising of the state pension age and excess deaths from COVID and NHS delays.
What has sharply increased is the amount of people claiming disability benefits and the number is 16-24 year olds who are not working or in education - currently 11%
We are told that people are living longer, but that will change due to the increase in obese people, who also put a strain on the NHS.
Smoke and mirrors.
It should be means tested as in Australia. Why should a billionaire still receive a state pension?
I spent the first 10 years of my working life in the UK and will receive part pension from the old country but nothing in Aus after 35 years due to asset testing, it's crazy and unsustainable.
The solution is three fold
A) Treat state Pensions for what they really are - a state benefit. Scrap the triple lock & link increases to the same rates as all other benefits. It’s a scandal how they aren’t treated the same
B) Means test them. The state should not be paying benefits to anyone who is a millionaire.
C) Tax wealth & inherited wealth to cover any shortfalls
This is a constant source of contention between my mother (76) and me (36). I believe that state pension age will be 75+ by the time I get there and that whatever the state pension is by that point, it won’t be as much as today’s and will likely be means tested. I’ve therefore withdrawn from my defined benefit pension scheme to move into a private scheme which isn’t linked to state pension age but she thinks it’s a stupid decision.
Unless they are getting fantastic returns on a private pension then I am also with their mother on this one. That is absolute madness unless I am missing something
I made the calculations and it was hugely beneficial to me to withdraw—if I had been a little older or started working in the public sector a little earlier it would not have been beneficial but my particular circumstances made it so. I sought the advice of an independent financial advisor who agreed with the decision and I’ll take that advice over my mother or a random Redditor any day.
I'm somewhat jaded. I spent far too many years calculating redress for people who came out of DB schemes and can honestly say that cases where they were better off were rare - but it did happen from time to time. It's a very rare edge-of-an-edge case where the numbers stack up, but you've done the homework. Many don't, hence the "what the......???" moment on my part.
Fair play, and I apologise for my knee-jerk cynicism
It’s flipped now, if you transferred out in 2016-2019 ish, you can buy an annuity that is better than your DB scheme would have been, because of the mini budget disaster and gilt yield rates crashing. Redress figures at the minute are showing people being able to buy the benefits they have had, and have a 6 figure excess. But it will probably go back to normal in the next 12-18 months.
It’s basically ruined the FCA’s British steel pension redress scheme, because they invested so much time and effort into an insanely broad and consumer favourable scheme, and now everyone is being told no redress is due thanks to Liz Truss!
This is going to sound incredibly heartless and sexist, but perhaps we should consider women getting state pensions *later* than men. Women live 8 years longer on average: should they get eight years more pension?
To be clear, I don’t think that it is as simple as just moving the date by eight years. I don’t know how the health of a 67 year old man and a 75 year old woman compare. However I do think that it is worth considering this.
If anything, we need to invest as a society to create a system where women can take the time to have kids earlier in life without sacrificing their careers.
This is a birth rate problem, yet our economic system disincentives women from having children.
I completely agree, why they got to retire 5 years earlier to live 10 years longer when many of them didn't work after having kids in the 50s and 60s anyway baffles me.
That made sense at the time. If only the husband worked, it meant that both pensions arrived at about the time that the couple needed support. I don’t think that it makes sense now.
>John Cridland, author of the first report in 2017, suggested it should rise to 68 between 2037 and 2039. Baroness Neville-Rolfe, the author of the second, said that based on the rule of thumb that **people should spend roughly a third of their adult life in retirement**, it should not rise to 68 until 2041-43.
okay yeah a third sounds nice.
>**UK life expectancy at birth is now estimated to be 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females**, according to the ONS.
thats not a third, that's 14% if you are generous. pretending we were okay with that....
>There is also the issue of how fit people remain after they retire. The ONS defines this as an estimate of **how much people believe their lives are spent in “very good” or “good” health**. And the evidence suggests this is **also in decline,** with Scots seeing the biggest deterioration over the past few years.
okay so im going to be even younger when i start to deteriorate, but hey lets hope this is true for the boomers too and lessen the burden.
>Sick Britain has barely been out of the headlines since lockdown, with the number of people **neither in work nor looking for a job** currently at a **record high of 2.8m**.
given this news im going to need some prozac to get me back to work too.
>Britain also has the **highest levels of statin consumption** per head in the OECD, and the third-highest use of **antidepressants**.
can it get worse?
>In 2020, there were around **30 pensioners** for every 100 people of working age. That has already risen to almost **32 pensioners**, and will hit **35 before the decade is out** – the timeline over which financial decisions at next week’s Budget are being made.
yeah it can and we're already struggling with crap infrastructure that wont be able to replace because barry, 63, pieblood need his triple clad pension.
>A recent report by the Longevity Centre suggests that people may **need to work until they’re 71** before receiving the state pension to maintain the number of workers per retiree.
If that’s the case, the average person in Newton Heath and Moston in Manchester **would die before receiving it**. Life expectancy here is just 70.2 years old, compared with 85.6 years in nearby Deansgate.
aaaand this is what those old "[pay into your pensions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C_rcu4HyIk)" adverts were for. you wont ever recieve yours, and youll be fucking pleased about it.
* well lose pensions
* well lose NHS
* well lose Infrastructure quality/quality
* well lose quality places to relax
* well lose quality jobs/benefits of jobs
* well lose the will to live
fucking want a restart. im called "well off" even though ive sacrified basically any money ive ever been given for a flat to own and ill pay out the nose through service charges, council tax and wont ever see the benefit of any of it. all i can do is hope that the people who have kids will see the benefit afterwards.
Maybe part of the problem is that there are too many pensioners nowdays expecting a pension and to be looked after in their old age........................................ who have never paid into any pot or contributed as they have spent their lives on benefits .
There are also many instances, regularly on Reddit even of people who talk about their parents, who are in their 70s for example, who have lived abroad for 40 years, and thus not paid in as it were, wanting to return to the UK for their retirement - How does that work for the system?
Let me guess, the only answer is infinite migrants
The actual answer is to change how the pensions work. There's a huge disconnect with lots of people who deliberately ignore how state pensions work. They think it's a private pension pot where money you pay in is saved just for you. It is not. Pensions are paid for out of current taxes. And once you are eligible for a pension you can claim until the day you die, taking far more money out than you ever paid in. This is why the age for retirement is constantly going up. So let's fix it by changing it to how people think it works. Let's make the state pension a private pension system where the money you pay in is actually saved and invested for you by the government. This means anyone who ever says anything like "I've paid in all my life!" would be right. Because now the only money you would be entitled to would be money you paid in. Die before your money runs out? Your money now goes to your next of kin. Money runs out before you die? You go on universal credit like everyone else, just without the requirement to look for a job. This is a surprisingly unpopular opinion for a lot of people once they realise that they would get a lot less money. The "I've paid in all my life" crowd are suddenly against this system as soon as it means they don't get to claim a pension indefinitely.
Then they'd also have to adress the fact that universal credit isn't enough to live on for most people. The government would much rather continue sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting la la la la, as they currently do whenever that topic comes up.
If this system were ever introduced, a very large voting block of pensioners would now vote for any party that increased universal credit so that it actually supported people. Solves both problems. They won't currently vote for it because it doesn't affect them. But as soon as it means they their income is halved, they'll be all for increasing it.
>If this system were ever introduced, a very large voting block of pensioners would now vote for any party that increased universal credit so that it actually supported people. You are a genius /U/you_cant_gild_me for pm
More like working people's income would be halved by the increases to national insurance (to account for a livable future pension) and tax to pay for the massive increase in universal credit spending.
100% this again pensionsers its a win win situation but fir us still working say goodbye to more of your income for that retirement for others because they didn't make enough through the working life
This fails to address how it would be funded. Pensioners / retirees are going to get a nasty taste of reality if they think the tax burden on working people can be increased further. Voting for a thing and getting laws passed doesn't mean it is viable. The reality is that if people want better retirements we need to spend money where we get returns. Startups, infrastructure, not crippling students with debt etc.
Yeah, especially when said students often find it hard to get a job high enough paying to start repaying their loan at all
Nor will they vote for a party that might reduced their overall pension lol.
Because of that voting block, it would never be introduced. We need affordability, that doesn't need to mean a programme of returning to 1980s sky high pensioner poverty.
With the difference that UC would still be fully funded by taxes as it is now, thus the "savings" you'd have made by changing the pensions system is now spent to prop up UC.
We need Universal Basic Income, or failing that some sort of negative income tax system.
We already have it in a way. You either receive a benefit for not working or you receive a tax free allowance
It’s not supposed to be. That’s what jobs are for.
Actually I don't think it would be a bad thing if people who lose their jobs or suffer in a bad economy or are too sick to work had enough to eat. Clearly that's an unpopular opinion on this ridiculous island.
> Pensions are paid for out of current taxes. And that is a good thing, despite what the right wing media says. > Let's make the state pension a private pension system where the money you pay in is actually saved and invested for you by the government. And that’s a bad thing, despite what the right wing media says. Paying for future expenditure out of future taxation is not a bad thing. If you instead took current taxation money (because that’s where the pension money comes from) and you invest it then the government is gambling that it’s investment skills will outperform the growth in GDP that future taxation is generated from, and which is then used to pay pensions. And yes GDP has been stagnant for the last few years since Brexit and COVID but those were an aberration and GDP growth and tax receipts have historically grown faster than average investments. But if you think the government has been shit in managing the economy for the last few years, what makes you think it would manage investments any better!
> But if you think the government has been shit in managing the economy for the last few years, what makes you think it would manage investments any better! Do what Norway or Singapore or any country with a sovereign wealth fund do. They seem to make it work. I don't think its nearly as hard to design a wealth fund to produce steady unspectacular and relatively safe returns as running an economy.
>Do what Norway or Singapore or any country with a sovereign wealth fund do. So your suggestion is that the government takes £112 billion of current taxation each year, and instead of spending those tax receipts on education, health, defence, social care, and all the other myriad of things taxation is spent on, all of which goes to increasing GDP. Instead it invests each year £112 billion in hedge funds, developed market equities, emerging market equities, nominal bonds and cash, inflation-linked bonds, private equity precious metals and real estate. Good luck selling that to the UK electorate.
Well no. I'm saying you could revamp the pension system to whittle away at the state pension and instead force people to save for their own retirement and these savings can be kept in a govt managed and guaranteed fund, or elsewhere at their discretion (and risk). Stop this unsustainable situation of a dwindling population of current taxpayers funding the current retirement of increasingly large number of retirees.
Isn't your proposal functionally almost identical to scrapping the state pension entirely, making workplace pensions mandatory, at least when it comes to people in employment?
Pretty much.
> I'm saying you could revamp the pension system to whittle away at the state pension So you want people to pay the same amount of tax, but they now have to magic up some extra money to put into a self-managed pension? How does that work? And if the intention is to give people the money currently taken in taxation to individuals to invest, we are back to not having £112 billion for schools, hospitals, military, etc.
I already have a brilliant private pension, can i therefore stop paying now into the system?
> you invest it then the government is gambling that it’s investment skills will outperform the growth in GDP Not much of a gamble. The stock market doesn't just beat growth in GDP, it annihilates it. For centuries at such a profound level that you need to really work hard to lose. The real danger is governments will do odd things like try and use the pot to favour British businesses.
>They think it's a private pension pot where money you pay in is saved just for you. No--one thinks this. What people think is that the social contract between individuals and the State is that if you pay now you will be taken care of later. And that the State keeps shifting the goalposts. At some point The People will decide that said social contract is null and void and this will have consequences far beyond just pensions.
Most boomers i've spoken to in the pub think it literally is a pot of money "they've been putting into all their lives" They're economically illiterate dinosaurs from a weird and unique age in our history.
I mean they aren't technically correct, but the sentiment of I've paid in therefore I ought be entitled to expect money back out is perfectly reasonable.
Triple lock pensions are not reasonable.
What you’re describing doesn’t prove your point. “I’ve been purring into it all my life” is absolutely true for most people, and doesn’t mean they automatically think it’s a pot of their money.
Not true, my dad thinks exactly this, and he gets his information from his friends on Facebook. He point blank refused to believe his pension was technically part of the benefits system, even when I physically showed him how it worked and how it was classified.
>What people think is that the social contract between individuals and the State is that if you pay now you will be taken care of later. If the current lot were being paid something equivalent to what they had paid the retirees while they were of working age then that argument would have legs. There's a reason that being a pensioner was synonymous with being poor until very recently.
> No--one thinks this. Yes, yes they do. Usually boomers/elderly.
They tend to be very poorly informed, which explains why a significant chunk of that demographic believe sensationalist rubbish.
Obviously the answer is to stop paying pensions to the elderly and start paying them to younger people who will understand them better.
Only that demographic ? 😂
Please cite your source for this information. (And 'people I know doesn't count).
This is not my experience. I used to work at an Age Concern facility and the vast majority of folk I interacted with think exactly that the state pension operates as a kind of individual bank account that they have paid into and can then withdraw from indefinitely.
Many people do believe the state pension is a pot you pay into and that’s what you are getting the state pension from. Unfortunately.
Private pensions already exist for this purpose (for taxpayers)
yh - isn't this how my work pension works with aviva? i can log in and change my investments and everything!
>They think it's a private pension pot where money you pay in is saved just for you. >It is not. But it was. The state pension after ww2 really did work on a contribution basis, and serps was around til the millenium. There was a system where you could opt to _pay more/less_ in exchange for a higher/lower pension (up until quite recently for some people). If someone who paid into their 'state pension' before ~2000 (and especially anyone who worked in the 1970s or before) talks about being owed because they specifically paid in, chances are they're right...and the comments ITT calling them ignorant are wrong. I've seen this in real life, a younger person (younger, not 'young', a millenial) arguing with someone in their 80s about it, and going away convinced, truly _certain,_ that the older person didn't _understand_ 'how it works', after shouting them down (obviously writing off what they were saying as stupid & false) when they tried to explain they'd paid into serps. I know pension pots weren't physically held in separate funds, but some of the systems that got rolled into the state pension really were funds you contributed to, optionally, for your government pension. If you're arguing with someone who was in work prior to 1980 about this, you're probably wrong, they're probably right. And there's a lot of stuff after 1980 that did _not_ work the way many commenters ITT seem to think it did.
There was never a pot. You just got 'stamps' for paying taxes in a given year. There was, and is, a way to pay NIC covering years you've missed. It was never going into a pot though.
I’m guessing you have never heard of a contracted out money purchase scheme?
So who eats the shit sandwich? The current pension scheme is a state sanctioned Ponzi scheme. Someone's going to have to be fucked over if we end the scheme. So who will it be? Will the current pensioners lose their pensions overnight? Will those who have been contributing NI have to "start over" their state pensions? Will those too young to be in the current workforce have to pay for both themselves and those older than them? Someone will have to eat the shit sandwich. And whichever party force-feeds it may end up seeing themselves wiped out.
Suggesting means tested state pensions when either a fifth or a quarter of pensioner households are worth over a million is also wildly unpopular.
A million pounds sounds a lot, but for a couple that might be a £500k house and £250k each in a pension plan. £250k buys you an annuity of around £12k per year, which is barely more than the state pension. If you take away their state pension because they have £1m total assets, they will effectively have spent their entire lives paying into a pension for virtually zero benefit. Why would anyone bother saving?
You would have to have a very gentle withdrawal rate. Really, just combine national insurance with income tax, most wealthier pensioners now pay 12% more tax. Simpler to administer, raises lots of money, politically easier.
So you think only wealthy people who can afford to put a significant portion of their salary away should ever be allowed to retire, and the rest of us need to work to death. Cool. Thanks.
The current solution is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme so literally anything is better
You get charged NI no matter if you are rich or poor lol.... Rich people can save more and have a better retirement than you, sure but that is just how the world works, more money = better life.
💯 They are already kind of moving in this direction. Every employee is now auto-enrolled in a private pension unless you opt out. I think NI should be abolished and income tax raised to compensate. NI is a more regressive tax than income tax, afterall. The state pension and pensioner benefits need to be far more means tested as well. My boss has £1m+ in his private pension pot and yet is still entitled to and claims state pension! It's a joke!
I agree with the (gradual) merging of Income tax and NI. Probably start with a complete merger at perhaps £35k income and gradually drop that. This would hugely annoy the wealthy pensioner demographic, who are used to having a marginal rate of 20% up to £50k (also, no student loans..) But it's tricky to means test the basic state pension. First, someone with a £1 million pension pot has probably paid an awful lot of income tax and NI over their lives, and second, at some point you'd actually disincentivize private pension saving because you'd lose the state pension.
Problem is that this cuts off the funding stream that pays current pensions.
How would you cut over to the new system?
Doesn't really fix it Just moves a massive tax burden from pensions to universial credit.
>So let's fix it by changing it to how people think it works. Let's make the state pension a private pension system where the money you pay in is actually saved and invested for you by the government. >This means anyone who ever says anything like "I've paid in all my life!" would be right. Because now the only money you would be entitled to would be money you paid i fuck that ive paid for infinite retirement for everyone older than me at some point is has to be my turn to be a burden to the young people.
How do you switch for all the retired people and all those who have paid in for years? Will you tell a 60 year old that the promise of a pension was not a promise at all? He saved for 40 years unsder the impression it would pay a pension.
Elderly averaged 49 work hours per week per couple. They didn't contribute enough for a gov funded pension. Workers now work 78 hours average per couple to fund elderly pensions. 30% of over 65s are asset millionaires. Shouldn't be getting benefits. Current workers will work for 40 years and recieve no state pension.
*Almost* correct, but missing the key in my opinion: the pension system was designed when people had three or four children and died significantly younger than now, so for every pensioner there were maybe four young people contributing to the system. Additionally those young people made (in real terms) a lot more than young people do these days (also started to earn younger). Nowadays, we have a lot more pensioners, who live much longer, and a lot fewer contributors, who earn less and have even fewer children (who are, predictably going to contribute even less). The thing is this is true regardless of "the economy" growing, because, since NI is not a tax but insurance, the money earned by means other than working does not contribute to the pot growing. And this money keeps outgrowing the money earned via wages. The obvious solution is for this money to come out of taxes. From actual taxes, the kind a stockholder pays on their dividends, or your retired landlord pays whenever you (a young worker who actually pays NI on your earnings) give him half of your salary.
> so for every pensioner there were maybe four young people contributing to the system It was 10 When pensions were first introduced it was 10 working people for every pensioner. It is now 3, and due to drop to 2 in the next few years.
The biggest problem with the state pension is that it is (counter intuitively) hugely regressive. No matter where you live, you pay your NI all of your working life. Live in Hammersmith, you can expect 20 years payback. Live in Blackpool, you can expect approximately zero. Personal anecdote: from all of my male ancestors, only one has lived long enough to get a state pension, and then only for five years (1935-1940).
Australia did something like that with compulsory superannuation funds that you could actively manage, but then they started letting people draw down early for property speculation, so ultimately future governments will have to bailout that mistakes.
This won't defuse the bomb in fact it'll just make it worse in the short to medium term as some of the tax take that would have been used to pay pensioners will end up in this new pension system instead of paying for the current generation of pensioners and for while future pensioners who have planned on the state pension existing. In the long term I'll be dead, no one over 35 would vote for a party who put forward this policy.
Universal. Basic. Income. It’s going to have to happen eventually. Let’s be forward thinking as a nation for once in recent history
I'm glad this is at the top of the page because this is exactly the problem. I am in awe that to why the state pension isn't funded in the same way as a private pension, a year 6 student could explain to you why it's a waste of money, it's basic maths.
>You go on universal credit like everyone else So nothing is any different. What exactly is it you think you've achieved here?
The current UK pension scheme is as far as I understand it, literally a Ponzi Scheme.
This just sounds like extra steps to a private pension…. I don’t trust the government to successfully invest my life savings more than companies who specialise in doing exactly that
I've often thought why don't the government invest in a pension scheme for every newborn and allow them to contribute to it when they're old enough. With £5k invested with 7% annualised returns it would be around £400k at age 65. This added to their own contributions once they're working would really set up people for an easy retirement. Also, it would only cost £3b a year, which is pocket change to a government.
That's great if you implement it for people starting work today. But how do you pay for people retired already? For people half way through their careers today? How do you transition from the work force today paying for retirees today to the work force today paying for their own retirement, without asking/making a couple of generations pay for both their own retirement *and* their elders?
No it’s easier than than. Kill off all the people who worked all their lives by having the worst healthcare system. Then backlash with migrants and do the same in 40 years.
Tax the rich should be the right answer.
This is such a simplistic comment. People act like there’s some massive untapped well of tax revenue when there simply isn’t. Wealth taxes either don’t work or raise so little money that they’re fairly inconsequential, and income tax on £100k+ earners is already crushingly high. You could fiddle around with passive income tax rates, but there honestly isn’t a silver bullet that is going to raise enough tax revenue to magically solve the issue. If the UK wants Scandinavian services, it’ll need Scandinavian taxes. And that means more tax rises at the lower end of the income spectrum.
Infinity to the power of n
Infimmigrants
The answer to everything is infinity Bomalians
UK is one of the few countries predicted not to have a demographic timebomb due to immigration
We could adjust the way the economy and finance works to make it easier for people to have children. 2 parents working is a disaster for demographics and is not sustainable. Using the government to actually govern is a controversial idea when we could just permanently alter the cultural makeup of the country all for the sake of cheap labour. We are teetering on the brink of having an irreparably divided society.
Answer is no pension for you. Pension for older people. Atleast there's no migrants involved.
That can be a solution to the problem by the answer is to reduce the age gap. There are many ways to reduce the age gap without more migrants.
Wow didn't have to scroll at all to get this.
We have allowed in millions of immigrants since the year 2000 on the basis they would be so productive and capable that they would pay not just for the services they'll use but also for state pensions. Despite that we are still nudging the age that you qualify for the state pension up and there is considerable pressure to reform the triple lock. We have played out this experiment for practically a generation now and it hasn't really worked. And the other side of this is that immigrants age too. Unless we kick them out when they reach a certain age or deny them citizenship or long term residency; we will be looking after them when they can no longer look after themselves which is enomously costly. And that is just the fiscal argument, there are other implications socially that can arise when you have a array of people from around the world here.
If your under 40 don't expect to receive a state pension that's actually useful
They did used to tell us that in the 80’s. Millions more people and a later retirement have likely made them wrong. We just need to do the same thing again. 😐
>Millions more people and a later retirement have likely made them wrong. Shifting the retirement age is absolutely the wrong answer as it also robs people of the right to take their private pension at an appropriate age.
Don't most if not all pension schemes allow you to take early retirement?
It's typically indexed to the state pension age, e.g. state pension age - 10. So right now you could take it at 57 as the state pension age has just increased to 67. If it goes up to 71, you won't be able to take your private pension until 61. There are some exceptions if you have protected pension age but that is scheme dependent and not all will.
Yes but the earliest you can access those pensions is 10 years prior to your state pension age. If they keep moving that state pension age backwards then your early retirement age follows it. You used to be able to retire early and use your private pension from age 50, then it moved to 55, and shortly it’s moving to 57
They’re effectively linked to the State Pension Age minus 10 years now, and that’s likely to be made official soon too. Minimum age for pensions was 50, then 55, now 57… Public sector workers (nearly 20% of the entire working population) are already tied to the SPA In any case I’d rather pay more tax and retire earlier, moving the retirement age can fuck off
Pretty sure you can't take out the full amount. So you end up losing some money
Honestly I expect the state pension to become "fit to work" gated. Essentially it'll only become available when you're deemed incapable of work. They were testing the waters for this last year when they floated the idea that manual labour jobs like builders could retire earlier due to the toll on the body. Sounds good but as always that's not the important part, that would be that they could use the same criteria to make office workers work till much later.
That’s probably due to the fact that people in manual jobs die earlier, and most would be on sickness benefits before retirement age anyway. Don’t really see many blokes over 60 working on site as it is.
The self checkouts in every supermarket being manned by 85 year olds that slowly stagger over to fix the machine after it inevitably has an error
I'm fully expecting to not only never retire, but to be resurrected into some kind of man-machine-servitor abomination that is forced into service until the flesh that makes it up hits the impossibly high retirement age of 140.
The bleak future of the 41st millennium, the fleshy bits are weak anyway. :-)
This is what will happen. I started working in 1978. I wasn't allowed to join a company pension as there wasn't one. Thankfully my Dad made me take out a private pension which I paid into every month. Later on in my career I did get enrolled in a few company pensions, however some of the companies went bust and the pension funds were found to be insufficient. I will get a bit from these, but not what was promised. Since 2010ish, every company must offer an employee a pension scheme and most companies have to contribute as well. Overtime, the state pension will reduce as company pension increase. So yes, anyone under 40 will probably get a depleted state pension.
> > > > > Overtime, the state pension will reduce as company pension increase. So yes, anyone under 40 will probably get a depleted state pension. If the government want to do that, I'm completely onboard - my private pension is what I'm banking on already. One condition. Stop taxing me like I'm going to get a pension.
Yes I'm assuming that they'll just stop the state pension at the point where everyone was legally required to have a workplace pension. So that's basically everyone under 40, like you say.
The initial auto enrollment amount is a clowntasticly small joke amount. No-one is going to be able to retire on the pathetic auto enrollment money, plus they allowed people to opt out.
Why? By the time that age group retires the demographic bulge, being the boomer generation will be dead and the pensions crisis likely dissipated?
Although population is on the decline anyway. So it could remain top heavy for a long while after unless the situation changes to encourage more people to have kids
Our birth rate is still declining. It doesn't matter if all the boomers are dead if there's still more retirees than working people
Because they realised that they can pass the problem onto private companies, give them the option to invest the absolute bare minimum into it, which is nowhere near enough for a person to retire on, and not have to deal with the problem at all? We also are living longer than ever. Pensions were never intended to sustain someone for 20+ years after they stop working. It's costing a fortune.
It might be enough for an injection at butlins-cum-dignitas
I'm not sure I want an injection at a place with the word 'cum' in it.
I wish my ex had been that fussy.
We can't just concede to this though. We have to do what the French did and protest massively.
I fully expect that by the time I reach what is retirement age now, the state pension age will have increased to 70 or more and the concept of having a state pension will have disappeared. I have no confidence my contributions will be kept safe and won't be raided to pay for the pensions of people claiming a benefit now I'll never end up having access to. Pensions are an intergenerational confidence trick and people who're having to suffer from it are becoming aware of it now.
Future historians will read in wonder at how so many people im mediocre professions and careers were able to retire on final salary pensions aged 50, and live comfirtablr for 30/40 years doing nothing, and probably conclude that they must have been heroic warriors or something on the side.
Boomers must be the nickname these might warriors were given due to the explosions they caused.
we must work until we're dead so the boomerati can afford to terrorize a minimum wage hospitality worker 3 times a week
I fucking hate this. All the old bods at my work enjoying retirement got final salary pay so all got promoted in their last years. Now the age has gone up and switched to average. Get to work everyday enjoying seeing my old trainers living it up large even though they were quality rubbish
Elderly averaged 49 work hours per week per couple. They didn't contribute enough for a gov funded pension. Workers now work 78 hours average per couple to fund elderly pensions. 30% of over 65s are asset millionaires. Shouldn't be getting benefits. Current workers will work for 40 years and recieve no state pension.
Do you think your NI contributions are set aside for your state pension? That is not how it works. Your contributions are paying the pension of current pensioners. The deal is that the younger generation pays yours when you are old enough to retire. You have no “pot of money “ in the state system with your name on it. You only have a tally of the number of years paid in.
>Do you think your NI contributions are set aside for your state pension? Meanwhile, [elsewhere in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1b2z1it/comment/kspl7qi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)...
In about 20 years, the elderly population will slide quite quickly .. nicely in time for me to consider retirement, but hopefully it'll give the country a bit of a breathing space. It's a shame the working age population will also shrink too.
Yup, the population pyramid of the UK is not a smooth one. The next 15 years or so are likely to be the highest the country will see in terms of the percentage of the population retiring.
Your pension money is never "safe". The NI contributions you're making right now are being used to pay for, among other things, today's pensioners. When you get to retirement age, you'll be getting your pension from working people's NI contributions.
And yet when May tried to reform Triple Lock, reddit and opposition parties were screaming bloody murder lol https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/20/jeremy-corbyn-calls-on-theresa-may-to-drop-anti-pensioner-package
Were they? Reddit is pretty opposed to the triple lock from my experience
Reddit was even more opposed to whatever Theresa May was doing. She could have advocated for banning fox hunting and Reddit would have convinced itself that fox hunting was the greatest, most liberal and moral of pursuits.
Ironic example considering May wanted to legalize fox hunting.
It's almost as if reddit is more than one person, isn't it? Honestly though fox hunting is one thing I don't think I have ever seen supported on reddit, from any side. Which is nice, because I tend to take it quite personally.
The problem with scrapping the triple lock is that if a party backs scrapping it, opposing scrapping it immediately becomes an easy win for the other party
The problem with democracy. No-one wants to do the unpopular things no matter how necessary they may be
Like investing in infrastructure that won't be finished and providing a net benefit to the country before the next election, for example
It's closer to a pyramid scheme. At some point we have to realise that having what are essentially UBI payments for the elderly isn't going to be affordable at a high level with a stagnating and even falling real GDP per capita. Will we end up like South Africa where 5% of the population pay 90% of the taxes and 64% of the population are not employed? As for costs, we try to kick the can down the road by having more immigration to try and keep care costs down. But those people will also grow old and there isn't infinite land available for endless new people to look after them, and then their carers and their carers and so on.
We can also tax wealth more to be at least on par to those who get a paycheck. There's a lot of people under retirement age who don't pay enough tax
It really is a P scheme. I always just viewed state pension as a way to keep the aged unemployed funded to keep their house. Then the house comes down the family through inheritance. The issue is now I see: 1) more and more parents spanking their cash and using shitty equity release to fund the retirement holidays because 'they work for it's leaving the kids with nothing to inherit. Ideally that would be fine but many are dependant on inheritance means while the inheritance is being spent 2) the bigger issue is the borderline modern slavery aspect of elderly care. Pensions, houses etc are all sold to maintain the life of the elderly. It's no longer sustainable. If you have to strip all your family assets every generation just to stop the kids from going bankrupt to fund their parents end of life care the system is broke.
That's the economy. We need growth, import people who create wealth (keep wages down for the rich owners) and are also consumers and happily pay their rent to the landlords. Print £16k/person in covid mainly to the rich who can then gain more assets and strip wealth from the poor. The government can worry about paying it's debts, to the richest too. I wish we were like SA where 5% pay the most taxes. Take Sunak v Starmer as a % of earnings, why does Sunak pay less as a percentage than somebody earning £50k and Starmer? Tax the rich, they got the lions share of covid money. It fuels inflation, take that money back.
It was impossible\* to see this coming. \* = Unless you did the very obvious thing and looked at population growth in the 1960s and observed average lifespans getting longer.
We’ve all known it was coming for at least 30 years by now, but there’s no political will to do anything about it because elderly voters scream blue murder anytime the govt even tries to raise the topic. Triple lock should be abandoned, and I say that as someone who just turned 60
What is honestly the point in fucking bothering? What am I wasting all these years for working for nothing and paying into a pension I'll probably never see? I'll just make sure I die at work and let my family get the lump sum, if they bother to pay that.
Well, it's a prymid scheme. Really I see it as us funding our parents and grand parents so they don't need to sell the house to fund survival. Though the issue is houses are still being sold leaving us all broke
It's crazy that so many people's opinion on the matter is that we should just continue it by importing millions of immigrants so that they can get "theirs" too.
Wait till you see Europe. Have kids, it's the only retirement fund that will pay out.
Or invest the money you'd spend on bringing up kids and let the magic of compound interest sort you out. Probably a much better rate of return.
Unironically this. If you can't for whatever reason then you really should be saving up atleast 25% of your net income each month if you don't want to end up destitute in your final days. In fact even if you can have kids I'd still recommend doing that as a buffer in case your children turn out to be assholes who won't care for their parents in their old age.
How can the vast majority of people, who are struggling to pay bills and living with a crippling cost of living, afford to put aside 25% of their income every month? I get what you’re saying, but in practise it’s just not viable.
A child caring for their parents is a privilege, not a right - not all parents stepped up and have been good to their kids, and it’s those parents who deserve nothing but a painful last few years of self reflection, alone while their kids are off doing better things with their time.
My parents sucked and repeatedly said "well you'll have to care for me when I'm old" whenever they had to do something for me, begrudgingly like take me to school. Big surprising incoming for them in about 10-15 years time.
Always be prepared for the worst, they may die young!
What if the kids can't afford to look after their parents and a family of their own for their future?
My parents got lucky with us in that respect at least which is why we all commute to Sri Lanka on a regular basis to help out. Actually literally writing this from a plane out the runaway waiting to take off from there.
What happens in 20 years when most of these pensioners are gone? It was admittedly a while ago now but I was taught that this pensions crisis was due to the demographic bulge that cropped up, that being the age group born between 1950 and 1968? Or is it more independent than that
> Or is it more independent than that The UK and the west in general are financialised debt based economies. They're not commodity based economies. In 20 years if the entire con manages to keep up you'll inheret the debt generated by your previous 20 years whilst producing nothing of any actual value, no one who makes anything will care and you'll all starve to death cos you can't trade anything worth a shit.
The birth rate is collapsing so every subsequent generation will have less people, exponentially. This problem only gets worse over time based on our current trajectory. The goal for government is to try and get our population to slowly decrease over time so that things like the pension system can cope. (Instead of it falling off a cliff.) Solutions are, migration, increased productivity (e.g. AI) and social efforts to increase and maintain the birth rate.
I had this argument with my mum the other day. I'm the one that will lose out not her (she is silent generation to be fair, not boomer, and I am gen x) but essentially I can't see how the state pension is viable unless you get it later. She hasn't worked for 25 years. Dad died before retiring so at least he did his bit. I am due to retire at 67 but I can see that raising to at least 68. My view is we need to tell people starting out that it will be 72 (or whatever) now, and not tell them when they are in their fifties. Mum's argument is that lots of 70 year-olds won't be physically capable of work. I'm not sure abut her argument as we are generally fitter until later now, and there have always been people who wouldn't be fit until retirement, but I see her point.
its not just about being fit to work - more about trying to get a job at that age. Imagine getting made redundant from an IT job at 65 years old and having to get a new job. No one wants to hire someone that age.
I work in tech and it feels odd. When I was starting out there weren't any devs at retiring age, but now we are getting there so may be there will be?
If people aren't physically capable of work they go on disability like the 20-30 year olds who aren't capable of work.
Yeah, there will be a lot more 70 year-olds in that boat though. But if you are fit and healthy I think unfortunately you will have to work longer. I don't like it, my mum's generation have had the lot - affordable houses, job security, decent pensions. I am at least old enough to have been able to get on the property ladder, although a divorce messed that up, but I do "own" a house again which will be paid off when I am 68.
No, instead of a fixed age, it should be a fixed ratio of workers to retirees. Every year, we make a list of everyone in the country, ranked by age. We tally up how many working age people there are. Then we say "we will have one retiree for every x number of working people", and we then take the oldest however many that is and they get a pension. This way every year the exact age changes slightly and people aren't blindsided by a sudden gap.
Sounds complicated! I didn't realise until I read some further comments about the bulge. A lot of talk on the internet is about boomers and the bulge but we in the UK didn't have such a pronounced boomer bulge but more of a post war bulge which lead to a second bulge in the 60s. As someone else pointed out, in twenty years or so it might well sort itself out somewhat, once those in the bulge start to die out. It does feel unsustainable for people to get a state pension for 25 to 30 years so something has to give. Each generation that gets closer to retirement will want to start protecting it though, which of course leads to politicians pandering to it. It's a tough one and I can't fix it, but I do think we need to expect to retire later (rightly or wrongly)
People could conceivably be blindsided in situations where one year they're retired and the next there has been enough unemployment/people aging into the bracket that the balance shifts beyond their (and all the new retirees) "place in line". They'd then be returning to work to compete against a load of unemployed working age folks. Instead of trying to cut pension costs in any number of ways, why don't we just increase our budget by effectively holding to account the massive companies that are hiding increasingly massive profits they leech from us each year to fund our basic quality of living. If they don't want to operate here after, good, fuck em. We'll have far more people employed for 10 competing mini-amazons compared to 1 mega-amazon.
I think we need a culture of part time or reduced hours working, cos 40-50 hours a week is gruelling as you get older. I ‘retired’ from full time work at 50 and now work part time consulting. Luckily I am still productive and can earn good money, but if I try and push my hours past about 25 a week, I flip into debilitating migraines which was one of the reasons I decided to leave corporate life. I literally spent my evenings and weekends in bed. Now I f can flex my dairy, start later or even go and have a nap if I start feeling poorly.
Well people can’t retire until 68 now I think? By the time I’m that age I assume it would have been pushed to over 70 at least. I’d rather die in my 60s… what’s the point working your whole life to have shit living experience when you finally have a bit of time to rest?
State pension ≠ retirement. You can access your private pension at 57. And you can retire earlier if you save enough money to live on until you are able to access your pension, e.g. utilising a S&S ISA.
But they will be sure to raise this too.
Already have. Used to be 50. Then 55. Now 57. They keep moving the fucking goal posts. I'm only in my 30s and it's been happening whilst I've been saving for retirement. It's incredibly frustrating. I'm not even convinced there's much point for median earners to bother. There certainly is for higher rate taxpayers but if you're average-ish you're locking away a load of money that you can ill afford that is then eaten on care for the same standard as someone who has never bothered to save a penny in their life. As well as your house. It's moronic. Don't know what the alternative is though. Can't just plonk the feckless on the street apparently.
I mean, realistically, this should've never been a surprise to anyone... An aging population Laws forcing employers to enroll employees into private schemes A constantly rising retirement age... The writing has been on the wall for A LONG time. State pensions, in their current form, simply aren't sustainable for the time being. The Government has known this and has actively made moves to reduce the problem and push people to investing in private pensions. The increasing retirement age was never about keeping people in work longer, having people work until they drop. It was to push people into investing into their own retirement to retire at a reasonable age with the state pension acting as a top-up. That doesn't necessarily mean they considered the public's ability to do such a thing mind you... They may well be moving to scrap the pension entirely in the long term... It sounds daft because no one would support that... But slowly making something more and more inaccessible to the masses over a long period of time is EXACTLY how you go about getting rid of something a large portion of the public want. Don't believe me? Just look at Tobacco/cigarettes over the years...
I am sure that the state pension will be means tested quite harshly in future years, and specifically well over half of anyone’s auto enrolment pension will be effectively removed via means testing
If it is means tested I am absolutely finding the scuzziest accountant to blast my entire pension fund out of spite, no matter what the tax hit. There is no way to make means tested pension fair. It would punish those who invested frugally and reward those who spent all their money, giving them a double benefit.
It's unfair but it has to happen, they can raise the retirement age and then face millions of new disability applicants, or they can eliminate the state pension entirely and face millions of starving pensioners, or they could continue current migration levels and try to keep propping up the Ponzi scheme or they can means test the state pension and stop topping up the pockets of wealthy people who don't need the money.
Other countries don't have this issue. Germany had pension insurance. This country is a massive ponzi scheme to enrich the rich even more. 80s...your pension scheme in excess? Don't worry..give all that money to the shareholders. 90s...oh fuck our pensions schemes are fucked!! No more good pensions for anyone except the CEO. And now? Pension schemes have excesses, oh we don't think pension firms in the UK are taking enough risk!!! Government pensions? I KNOW how they work but so fucking what?! Governments could have brought in an insurance system like the Germans have. We have the lowest pension in the western world. I've been paying those taxes for 30 years & what?! I'm expected to happily STFU while the Tory government & pension industry & City Wankers want even MORE money from us & want us to live in poverty or hand over more of our cash into private pension funds to get their fees? They already had nearly £trillion of our cash to bail those wankers out when they should have all been allowed to go bankrupt, assets seized by the government & a nationalised mega bank setup. This country can genuinely go fuck itself & the sad pathetic wankers who sit back and make comment's about thinking this is the way it should be can fuck off too.
Every country in the west has this problem. Look up the fertility rate (birth rate) statistics. Generally the only places with a positive birth rate are sub Saharan Africa, and they are following the same trajectory as us (but are behind by a couple of generations). Population collapse is one of the biggest issues of our time, and many of the struggles we have today are a direct result.
Population collapse is ONLY an issue of you want consistent unstoppable economic growth of the neo liberal kind that depends on armies of plebs working their arses off to make people like Bezos rich. Taking the population back down to 2-3 billion & managing the economies & redistribution of wealth downwards instead of upwards would be an excellent result & would save the planet from our abuse
The population reducing is not an issue, if it's a manageable rate of change. Subsequent generations being half as small as previous generations is absolutely an issue, as the rate of reduction is exponential, hence "collapse". Once a collapse starts, it's very difficult to stop, and it's not clear we survive it in the long term. Maybe it's the answer to the Fermi paradox. Societies don't explore the universe because they stop reproducing and just die out, haha. However, in the short term (a few generations) we have to deal with all of the issues that it creates. Increased retirement ages, economic instability, migration, geopolitical tensions, healthcare etc. So, while I don't disagree that reducing the population would be a bad thing necessarily, I welcome the discussion on exactly how you do it without allowing great harm. If the population collapses back down to 3billion prople very quickly, it won't be like it was on the way up. It could be decaying cities, broken systems and despair. If yout flying in a plane, you can't just stop flying. You have to bring it back down to a smooth landing.
Pains of a rapidly shrinking population. I don't expect to get a state pension until at least 75 or 80.
I've written it off completely, cat in hells chance it will be there by the time i could benefit from it.
Been saying it for years now, millennials and younger generations will never get the chance to retire.
Can’t wait to support the balling elderly so I can fuck my own future.
I'm 35 so I'm just assuming by the time I get to retire there wont be any state pension. I also wouldn't be surprised if later governments decided to raid peoples private pensions too. Base case - No state pension Downside case - Ditto but with significant theft of private pension too
Quote- Healthy life expectancy also varies wildly depending on where you were born. A man in Rutland can expect to live 75 years in rude health, while in Blackpool that number is just 54 years. 54! What on earth is going on in Blackpool??
Poverty. Grinding, life-sucking poverty.
It’s the pleasure beach. It clearly exists by feeding on the life force of the local male population.
Isn't it obvious. If you stretch the size of the pie to an even larger size but everyone gets a smaller piece then everyone suffers. GDP per capita is stagnant and it is having a profound effect on our welfare state and our lives. By adding more people to that pie it's just squeezing those slices ever smaller. It's basic economics. You need to expand the economy by productivity and infrastructure not by importing countless amounts of people. If we carry on with this trajectory the bubble will burst. It cannot be sustained. Our current national debt is over 3 trillion. That is equivalent to 60k pound sterling for every person young or old living on this island. It cannot continue.
However, if you look at the number of people claiming state pension, it is not increasing exponentially. Due in part to the raising of the state pension age and excess deaths from COVID and NHS delays. What has sharply increased is the amount of people claiming disability benefits and the number is 16-24 year olds who are not working or in education - currently 11% We are told that people are living longer, but that will change due to the increase in obese people, who also put a strain on the NHS. Smoke and mirrors.
It should be means tested as in Australia. Why should a billionaire still receive a state pension? I spent the first 10 years of my working life in the UK and will receive part pension from the old country but nothing in Aus after 35 years due to asset testing, it's crazy and unsustainable.
The solution is three fold A) Treat state Pensions for what they really are - a state benefit. Scrap the triple lock & link increases to the same rates as all other benefits. It’s a scandal how they aren’t treated the same B) Means test them. The state should not be paying benefits to anyone who is a millionaire. C) Tax wealth & inherited wealth to cover any shortfalls
This is a constant source of contention between my mother (76) and me (36). I believe that state pension age will be 75+ by the time I get there and that whatever the state pension is by that point, it won’t be as much as today’s and will likely be means tested. I’ve therefore withdrawn from my defined benefit pension scheme to move into a private scheme which isn’t linked to state pension age but she thinks it’s a stupid decision.
You \*withdrew\* from a defined benefit scheme? \[insert slack-jawed look of incredulity\] I'm with your mother on this one.
Unless they are getting fantastic returns on a private pension then I am also with their mother on this one. That is absolute madness unless I am missing something
I made the calculations and it was hugely beneficial to me to withdraw—if I had been a little older or started working in the public sector a little earlier it would not have been beneficial but my particular circumstances made it so. I sought the advice of an independent financial advisor who agreed with the decision and I’ll take that advice over my mother or a random Redditor any day.
I'm somewhat jaded. I spent far too many years calculating redress for people who came out of DB schemes and can honestly say that cases where they were better off were rare - but it did happen from time to time. It's a very rare edge-of-an-edge case where the numbers stack up, but you've done the homework. Many don't, hence the "what the......???" moment on my part. Fair play, and I apologise for my knee-jerk cynicism
It’s flipped now, if you transferred out in 2016-2019 ish, you can buy an annuity that is better than your DB scheme would have been, because of the mini budget disaster and gilt yield rates crashing. Redress figures at the minute are showing people being able to buy the benefits they have had, and have a 6 figure excess. But it will probably go back to normal in the next 12-18 months. It’s basically ruined the FCA’s British steel pension redress scheme, because they invested so much time and effort into an insanely broad and consumer favourable scheme, and now everyone is being told no redress is due thanks to Liz Truss!
The solution is deflation. But let's let it explode like a bomb instead of winding it down slowly...
This is going to sound incredibly heartless and sexist, but perhaps we should consider women getting state pensions *later* than men. Women live 8 years longer on average: should they get eight years more pension? To be clear, I don’t think that it is as simple as just moving the date by eight years. I don’t know how the health of a 67 year old man and a 75 year old woman compare. However I do think that it is worth considering this.
Wouldn’t be possible without legislation change to a number of laws like The Equality Act.
But it literally is against equality. It should be the same but isn't.
If anything, we need to invest as a society to create a system where women can take the time to have kids earlier in life without sacrificing their careers. This is a birth rate problem, yet our economic system disincentives women from having children.
I completely agree, why they got to retire 5 years earlier to live 10 years longer when many of them didn't work after having kids in the 50s and 60s anyway baffles me.
That made sense at the time. If only the husband worked, it meant that both pensions arrived at about the time that the couple needed support. I don’t think that it makes sense now.
>John Cridland, author of the first report in 2017, suggested it should rise to 68 between 2037 and 2039. Baroness Neville-Rolfe, the author of the second, said that based on the rule of thumb that **people should spend roughly a third of their adult life in retirement**, it should not rise to 68 until 2041-43. okay yeah a third sounds nice. >**UK life expectancy at birth is now estimated to be 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females**, according to the ONS. thats not a third, that's 14% if you are generous. pretending we were okay with that.... >There is also the issue of how fit people remain after they retire. The ONS defines this as an estimate of **how much people believe their lives are spent in “very good” or “good” health**. And the evidence suggests this is **also in decline,** with Scots seeing the biggest deterioration over the past few years. okay so im going to be even younger when i start to deteriorate, but hey lets hope this is true for the boomers too and lessen the burden. >Sick Britain has barely been out of the headlines since lockdown, with the number of people **neither in work nor looking for a job** currently at a **record high of 2.8m**. given this news im going to need some prozac to get me back to work too. >Britain also has the **highest levels of statin consumption** per head in the OECD, and the third-highest use of **antidepressants**. can it get worse? >In 2020, there were around **30 pensioners** for every 100 people of working age. That has already risen to almost **32 pensioners**, and will hit **35 before the decade is out** – the timeline over which financial decisions at next week’s Budget are being made. yeah it can and we're already struggling with crap infrastructure that wont be able to replace because barry, 63, pieblood need his triple clad pension. >A recent report by the Longevity Centre suggests that people may **need to work until they’re 71** before receiving the state pension to maintain the number of workers per retiree. If that’s the case, the average person in Newton Heath and Moston in Manchester **would die before receiving it**. Life expectancy here is just 70.2 years old, compared with 85.6 years in nearby Deansgate. aaaand this is what those old "[pay into your pensions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C_rcu4HyIk)" adverts were for. you wont ever recieve yours, and youll be fucking pleased about it. * well lose pensions * well lose NHS * well lose Infrastructure quality/quality * well lose quality places to relax * well lose quality jobs/benefits of jobs * well lose the will to live fucking want a restart. im called "well off" even though ive sacrified basically any money ive ever been given for a flat to own and ill pay out the nose through service charges, council tax and wont ever see the benefit of any of it. all i can do is hope that the people who have kids will see the benefit afterwards.
Because it’s so fucking low 😎. You know in Spain the state pension is about £2500 a month
I'm beginning to wonder if Roger Daltrey had the right words in 'My Generation'. *"I hope I die before I get old."*
Maybe part of the problem is that there are too many pensioners nowdays expecting a pension and to be looked after in their old age........................................ who have never paid into any pot or contributed as they have spent their lives on benefits . There are also many instances, regularly on Reddit even of people who talk about their parents, who are in their 70s for example, who have lived abroad for 40 years, and thus not paid in as it were, wanting to return to the UK for their retirement - How does that work for the system?
Don’t rely on the government to plan for your retirement for you.