How to Get Through The Tough Times The Old Style Way.

dreaming

jackieglasgow wrote: »

TBH I have buried my head in the sand about retiring. I have thirty years to worry about it, my present employer has a great final salary pension scheme and other than that, I am not dwelling on it for now

#Until very recently my employer had a great final salary scheme. That is now closed (although fortunately "protected" (for now)) and we are now on an average salary scheme. In a strange way this benefits me as I was thinking I had to keep my salary high until I retire but can now afford to maybe take a lower grade job in a few years and "wind down". The other thing my employer has recently done is abolish a regulatory retirement age. Although you could work on past state retirement age they made people retire at 70. Now they don't. I didn't know until my manager was looking at my work records and showed me that my expected retirement year is now - "unspecified".:eek:
Still I am plodding on - overpaying as much on my mortgage as I can (at present rates if I can overpay by £200 a month I can pay it off by the time I am 60 in 4 and a half years time)/growing more stuff in the garden/and just generally cutting back where I can. I do like to try to help my kids out where I can though as they are finding it tough too. I appreciate we are all very lucky to be in work for the moment, and to have the "luxury" of worrying about retirement ages.

HariboJunkie

Wow mardartha, your toms are 10 times the size of mine. :eek::T

Not even thinking about pensions here. What will be will be.

Spent alot of time in the garden this weekend. Mentioned to OH that I would never have room for all my seedlings this year so I popped out with the girls and came back to find he was almost finished building me another raised bed. :T:A:j:love:
It's in a shadier part of the garden so it will be an entirely lettuce bed as I've had trouble with little gems and lollo rosso bolting in the sunnier beds.

My girls made me proud by spending within their budget for mother's day, including a couple of lovely charity shop finds and fairtrade cotton shopping bags which they embellished themselves.

We spent yesterday afternoon round the kitchen table making felt brooches which I have now mastered and wll add to my list of things I can make for presents.

ChocClare

mardatha wrote: »

...Nevermind pet. Here, have a juicy freshly-grown-just-off-the-vine tomato. Take yur mind off things :D

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Now you're just being naughty...

charlies-aunt

ceridwen wrote: »

I think its very much a case of "horses for courses" and what suits some won't suit others and that for every person who goes straight off into "little old lady/man mode" there will be others who think "YAY - at long long last I can operate at MY level - rather than having to put up with a low-level bore the blimmin' pants off me job level" and are positively delighted not to be judged by the (low-level) job they do anymore - but get judged by THEMSELVES at last....:beer::D:beer::D - as the reply to "what job do you do?" can just be "Retired - and loving it:rotfl:".

:rotfl: :rotfl: I understand where you are coming from - but I'm not prepared to wait for retirement to operate at 'my level' . . . working is a means to an end - I give it 100% while I'm there but I'm too busy getting on with all the other stuff that interests me to give it a moments thought when I'm not actually sat at my desk!

mrswive

While it's obvious that the retirement age needs to rise as we're all living longer, it's the double whammy handed out to those of us who are 56/57 that's difficult to deal with. I expected to retire at 60 but being born in 1953 my retirement age was raised to 63 and 6 months. 'Fair enough', I thought, 'needs must'. However if these latest proposals go through I now won't be able to retire until I'm 64 and 9 months, an extra year and a half!! If I'd been born in April rather than October, I'd be able to get my pension nearly 2 years earlier. How is that fair?
I only work 2 days a week, so that I can care for me old mother - if I had to work more hours there's no way she'd be able to spend her last years in her own home - but if I was working full time I'd be blimmin' exhausted now, let alone when I'm nearly 65. Oh well, there's always Plan B, win the lottery; better start buying tickets!!

kezlou

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

mar those plants are whoppa! I haven't even started mine yet, no actually i tell a lie, mine all carked it, with the ice filled rooms.

Well gailey your ot the only who had a carp mothers day, the boys tried they hardest, which made me very happy. Coddy was furious because his basil seeds didn't grow he was planning to make a me a bsil and garlic sauce for lunch. all was oging well till i saw my twerp of an uncle at my nieces birthday party. He basically humiliated us in fornt of complete strangers, so i've been down in the dumps since then. My mum was chuffed with her card, so thats all good.

On Saturday we all helped OH's mum in her garden. We completely stripped the place clean ready for her fruit cage, green house etc. Apparently were expected to pick fruit as soon as it comes :D.

Also came home with about 24 strawberry plants, loads of home grown rhubarb and lemons all from MIL's garden yay! So yeah it was good, even had a lovely dinner in the garden. Made her day too as she found out lost her job on the 31/03/2011. So seeing the boys cheered her up. But i'm aching now, too much gardening in one day for me.

Today though has been manic, picking up parts for MIL's boiler, parcels, opening up trade accounts etc Haven't stopped, so tomorrow will be another clearing out day, i've decided.

Hmmm wondering whether to put the hanging baskets on the the floor. Its blowing a gale outside and i've got images of strawberry plants scattered all over the yard.

annie123

ChocClare wrote: »

However, I shall be 58 in 2020. Which means my chances of getting any sort of pension (at age 66 or 67 or whatever it is) are looking Pretty Slim.

You and me both as we seem to be the same age.

It's heading back to where it started. You had to be 70 before you could get your pension when it started in 1908,below taken from:
http://www.pension100.co.uk/historyofpensions/timeline.htm

The Act provided for a non-contributory old age pension for persons over the age of 70.



It paid a weekly pension of between 1s and 5s (= to 10p to 25p) a week (7s 6d = to 37.5p) for married couples).

• In order to be eligible, they had to be earning less than £31.50 per year
• had to pass a 'character test'; only those with a 'good character' could receive the pensions.
• Those who had habitually failed to work or had been imprisoned received nothing from the scheme.
• Not be in receipt of charitable donations nor detained in a workhouse or mental health asylum
• Not served a prison term or been convicted under the Inebriates Act
• Not to have refused work when able

A pensioner in 1909 paid about 2 shillings rent for one room.
This left 3s for food, fuel etc which would buy: coal (6d), 4 loaves of bread (6d) ¼ lb tea (6d), ½ lb sugar (1d), quart of milk (3d), 7lbs potatoes (3d), ¼ lb cheese (2d), ½ lb cheap cuts meat (3d), leaving 6d over for beer, vegetables or other expenses.

At least we have moved on from the above list ......how does one prove good charater? what happened if one was not of good charter!
By time I get my pension with the cost of living rising so quickly on day to day purchases, lentils will have become a luxury!

mardatha

Good post annie - very interesting . I have to point out that the tomatoes are a very early artic variety called Latah. I was just trying them to see if they would suit up here. Planted seeds on 1st March, got flowers on them today. Superb!

ChocClare

Annie, that is so interesting (and very sobering). For all our moaning, we are still pretty lucky in this country not just to be completely abandoned with no help from anyone. Anybody who has visited slum areas in the Third World will know what I'm talking about here.:eek:

They were very hot on character where "charity" was concerned - the deserving poor and all that. The census from my mother's family's village showed quite astonishing numbers of former maids presenting their illegitimate children for baptism (local lord of the manor and his sons/guests must have been constantly at it!) and, unless they moved back in with their families, they seemed to end up in the workhouse. The CBA obviously worked even less well then than it does now...

I remember reading early 19th century literature - lovely, funny stuff, like Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell, early Dickens etc. It all sounds flippant, the ladies' absolute obsession with finding a marriageable man, but not when you realise that a "lady" could not work and that therefore her only chance of not ending her days in miserable penury was to get herself married. I seem to remember that one of Jane Austen's brothers was pretty well-off, but that did not mean that SHE would get any money, as all his money had to pay for his own family.

Slightly closer to our own times, I have the signal honour of being descended from two ladies (my maternal grandparents' respective grandmothers) who were each disinherited from their wealthy families. In each case, they lived in "the big house" in fairly isolated countryside, which meant that they were expected to marry someone of their own class - and there weren't many eligible bachelors around, particularly when you remember that most people still needed a licence to leave their village at the time. Expected to marry Sir Somebody or Other, forty years her senior and perhaps a drunken lech, is it any wonder that Grandma eloped with her father's ostler, a good-looking boy her own age whom she'd known since she was a little girl? In the circumstances, a fairly brave thing to do, as they would have had to leave the area to find work - and both she and my other disinherited grandmother became very hard-working women - which they would not have been brought up to be.

On that note, I shall count my blessings and go to bed, I think! Night night all.

ceridwen

mardatha wrote: »

Good post annie - very interesting . I have to point out that the tomatoes are a very early artic variety called Latah. I was just trying them to see if they would suit up here. Planted seeds on 1st March, got flowers on them today. Superb!

Cor....where did you get the Latah seeds from Mardatha? (I've never seen that type anywheres.) If yours are coming out now so far oop north...then it makes me wonder if many of the rest of us could have tomatoes in springtime:D.