Womens State Pension

EdInvestor

jamesd wrote: »

So, lots of things happening but the one you're unhappy about is one that is reducing the greatest single discrimination in the pension system: women being retired and getting the pension for many more years than men.

Of course under the old discriminatory system only about 35% of women qualified for the full basic state pension, compared with 87% of men. Why do you think that might be?

And what a pale shadow of a pension the current female one @ age 60, is by comparison with the one paid to a man @65.

#No 60% spouse's pension uprated to 100% on death
#No right to claim a 60% "dependant" pension for a spouse under state pension age
#No right to pass on any part of SERPS entitlement
#No right for ex husbands to claim state pensions on the wife's contributions,unlike the male pension
#No retired person's tax allowance

Meanwhile, on the basis that it's wrong to discrimate against MEN(!) , pension credit is available to both sexes at age 60, along with all the other pensioner perks such as fuel allowances, free prescriptions, bus passes etc..

The state pension discrimates against men?Don't make me laugh. The system has been deliberately stacked against women for decades. From the con that was the "married women's stamp" to the NICs rule which meant that part time and low paid women workers could never gain qualifying years, to the second rate pension paid at 60 today.

As of 2010 however the new rules will sweep away much of this discrimination and the "flattening out " of the S2P earnings related second pension will generally benefit women who remain significantly underpaid compared with men.

It's about time.

[PS: Because of the discrimination inherent in private pensions due to the age factor, women are often best advised to avoid pensions as a savings wrapper and instead use ISAs or other investment appraoches which offer equal treatment.]

pandora205

I'm in the 'change over' age group too and have to work until 64.. They've staggered the change to 65 for all women, which is why it is happening.

I think it's fair. After all women live longer on average.

bryanb

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

You will only have to pay/be credited with NI for 30 years..

If you are working you will not be able to stop paying after 30yrs contributions have been paid/credited

seven-day-weekend

bryanb wrote: »

If you are working you will not be able to stop paying after 30yrs contributions have been paid/credited

Yes, I understand that.

I just meant that after 30 years of paying NI, a person will have, under the new rules, a full State Pension, whereas under the old rules it had to be 39 or 44 years depending upon your gender.

jamesd

Ann-Marie, if you want to read much more about the reasons for the changes and why these specific changes are being made, you can find a great deal of detail in the reports of the Pensions Commission. If you're interested in this you'll find a lot of really interesting information in them.


EdInvestor, gender has no effect on how a particular contribution value accumulates either in a pension or in an ISA but women do live longer, so when using income drawdown they will end up being able to take out more of the pension money. No discrimination in annuities, it just depends on how long you're expected to live and since women have the advantage there they will be older than a man when they have the same expected lifetime and get the same annuity value.

I agree with you about the discriminatory items you list, and about the past, which still affects those retiring before 2010 and is only gradually being changed for those retiring after then. We're in a world of changing expectations and the old world of man at work, women at home and not expected to provide for themselves no longer applies. At least, in theory. In reality... still often does the moment children start to arrive.

Still, it's hard to place a value on living longer. Want to sell me a couple of years of your life? How much would it cost me to buy that equality? Would you take 10% of my pension to buy those two years off you and make us have the same life expectancy? How about 25%?

Fortunately Ann-Marie will be retiring after some of these things have been dealt with, though not as many as I'd like to see.

EdInvestor

jamesd wrote: »

EdInvestor, gender has no effect on how a particular contribution value accumulates either in a pension or in an ISA but women do live longer, so when using income drawdown they will end up being able to take out more of the pension money.

Maximum income limits on drawdown are based on annuity rates and include the usual discrimination against women on life expectancy grounds.

Still, it's hard to place a value on living longer. Want to sell me a couple of years of your life? How much would it cost me to buy that equality? Would you take 10% of my pension to buy those two years off you and make us have the same life expectancy? How about 25%?

It's all actuarial therory though.Look at the stats on pensioner poverty - the poorest people are elderly female pensioners.They make up by far the majority of care home inmates, of which by far the majority suffer from dementia .They are far more likely than men to have their homes and incomes confiscated to pay for long term care.

There are downsides to living a long time.

margaretclare

It's interesting.

There were some of us who never bought into the whole 'man at work, woman at home' scenario, which was Beveridge's outlook (Beveridge, the founder of the modern welfare state, who refused to admit the possibility of women earning a pension provision in their own right. As he put it in his 1942 report 'She has other duties'.

It's true that the poorest people we have today, and the ones least visible and least vocal, are older single women. 1 in 4 of all retired women is living below the poverty line according to Age Concern figures. These are the women who were never encouraged to make pension provision for themselves and are living on, and on...

Me, I always worked, always paid full NI contributions, but I couldn't have considered 'retiring' at 60. I still had a mortgage and I was widowed and redundant. Stopping work was not an option, whatever work I could find. In fact I worked until I was 67, admittedly not in the career I'd followed for most of my working life, but still, work.

Thinking about it, today I've reached the age of 73. My mother died at 63, my MIL at my present age was suffering from Alzheimer's. I'm happily-remarried and not alone. I'm not rich but not poor either. So many older women are alone, and if you see them out, some of them look as if they're dead already, the blank faces and empty eyes. Thin polyester skirts, bare legs and padded shower-jackets seem to be the uniform. God help and preserve us!

jamesd

margetclare, do you know if the Age Concern figures are for absolute poverty or relative poverty? Relative is often set at 60% of median income, which was 108 a week for a single adult, 186 for a couple, both in 2005/6 and after housing costs have been deducted (rent, mortgage interest, water, council tax, insurance). Absolute at what's needed to live, and even that may include things like mobile phones these days, using some definitions.

You seem to be a fine example of women who have been badly treated by the past system, which still isn't going away quickly.

margaretclare

Hello jamesd

Here are the references quoted in this AgeConcern downloadable pdf booklet: http://www.ageconcern.org.uk/AgeConcern/Documents/Key_facts.pdf

You seem to be a fine example of women who have been badly treated by the past system, which still isn't going away quickly.

No, it is not, and it will not, because the changes which some in this thread are complaining about (having to work longer etc) will not affect anyone born before 1950.

I wasn't badly-treated by the past system, but only by the merest chance - I made the decision to pay full NI contributions, and how that came about was, as I said, by the merest chance. Paying for your pension is not the first thought in any young bride's head!

jamesd

Thanks.

You gave the wrong number there, should have been 19% instead of 25% because the 25% number is before housing cost subsidies like housing benefit are allowed for. "21% of single male pensioners and 25% of single female pensioners, before housing costs, are in poverty; 16% of single male pensioners and 19% of single female pensioners, after housing costs, are in poverty, compared to 21% of all pensioners before housing costs, and 17% of all pensioners after housing costs."

They did use the relative poverty definition instead of real absolute poverty: "Poverty is defined as living in a household where the income is less than 60 per cent of the median income of the population as a whole."

So all they actually said was that 19% of single female pensioners are on less than 60% of the median income.

That's very different from what many people think of as poverty. Not really a surprise that they used the 60% of median income definition when they have been campaigning for pensions to be linked to earnings: it serves their political purpose better to make it sound as though there are more desperately poor pensioners than there are. Still too many of them, though.

It's actually more dismaying in one way because they give the reason why many are in relative poverty a little later: "The standard guaranteed level of Pension Credit is £119.05 for single people and £181.70 for couples" and as you can see from my earlier post, that's more than the 108 needed to be out of relative poverty. But... "The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that, in 2005-06, between 31% and 40% of pensioners in private households who were entitled to Pension Credit, did not claim. ... in 2004-05, between 13% and 19% of people in private households who were entitled to Housing Benefit, and between 42% and 47% entitled to Council Tax Benefit, did not claim."

That's far from the whole story but it's still frustrating that people don't claim things that society thinks they are entitled to, to help them live decently.

If you noticed their life expectancy number, don't use it in planning retirement. They ignored their source, the Government Actuaries Department, saying that they were using the wrong number and telling them what to use. The real expected lifetimes are 6-8 years longer than those given once you use the proper cohort life expectancy tables. "The expectation of life figures shown in the Interim life tables are period life expectancies. These give ... the average number of years a person would live, if he or she experienced the ... age-specific mortality rates for that time period throughout his or her life. It makes no allowance for any later actual or projected changes in mortality. In practice, death rates ... are likely to change in the future so period life expectancy does not therefore give the number of years someone could actually expect to live. ... Cohort life expectancies are calculated using age-specific mortality rates which allow for known or projected changes in mortality in later years and are thus regarded as a more appropriate measure of how long a person of a given age would be expected to live".