Cancel Employer Pension?

jamesd

BernardM wrote: »

The National Insurance Fund currently has a surplus of £46bn, which is forecast to grow to £114bn by 2012. This money is primarily intended to pay for state pensions, but today’s pensioners are being denied a higher pension because the government is using the money to fund other expenditure

The government is borrowing it and using that to pay for higher expenditure.

It's good that there is a surplus. It'll help to reduce the extra taxes needed to pay for the pensions of the baby boomers as more of that generation retires. I'd like to see a considerably larger surplus paid into the fund by baby boomers to reduce the impact of those taxes on the post-baby boomer generation.

BernardM

EdInvestor wrote: »

The figures quoted are for the basic state pension, but people retiring now also get S2P (formerly SERPS) and the average state pension payable is over £6k a year.Many people will get more than that, up around the £10k mark and this will increase as more people retire with a full S2P record..

The position is not as bad as you claim.

Really?
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/78552

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8169859.stm

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/78533

jamesd

BernardM, the first link is fun. It's comparing pensioner incomes in each country to average earnings in each country, not how well off pensioners actually are in each country. So a pensioner in a poorer country can be worse off on 100% of average income than one on 60% of average income in a rich country. It's natural that in a poorer country the percentage of average income required to deliver a decent living will be higher than in a country with higher average income.

Also worth noting from the second one that "One of the big contributors has been low take-up of means-tested benefits". If you want to help, do all you can to encourage people to ask for the benefits that they are entitled to.

BernardM

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/79010