EXTENDED: You've got another week to add your travel & holiday deals questions for expert MSE Oli as part of the latest Ask An Expert event.
'Are you an financial optimist for 2012?' poll
This discussion has been closed.
Latest MSE News and Guides
MoneySavingExpert
Chair, Martin Lewis · Editor, Marcus Herbert
Replies
So can we (you!) stop all the bleating about helping people in debt and get this government to do something about (real) inflation that is slowly, but ever so surely, strangling savers!
I agree. Time is money. It usually takes many decades to save or invest enough to support yourself through retirement.
I'm a baby boomer. Apart from taking time out to bring up my children I have worked all my life, as has my husband. The only assets we have managed to accrue is a semi detached house worth about £110,000 a car each and £3,000 savings (decreasing monthly). I have a small civil service pension of £4,500 per annum and am waiting to claim my State Retirement Pension (if they stop raising the age to claim). My husband will have a small local authority pension of about £6,000 per annum and his State Retirement Pension when he is old enough. I would hardly say that we will be basking in riches in our retirement.
I would say to those people who accuse baby boomers of having it all, that we have all worked all our lives to get these things. We did not have a large house with two new cars on the drive and annual foreign holidays from the word go. We bought small terraced houses and worked our way up to the houses we have now. We bought cheap second hand cars, repairing them ourselves, and worked our way up to new cars. We went camping in the UK when the children were small and worked our way up to foreign holidays when we were older.
Many younger people these days want all of this from the outset and get themselves into massive debt trying to get it all. If you are envious of baby boomers then why not try the methods we used to get where we are now, which as I said earlier is not exactly the lap of luxury.
Problem is getting the message to those who do not know how to play the system.
How much do you need in your pension pot to get half median income until average life expectancy? What monthly proportion of median income would need to be saved over a 50-year working life in order to accumulate this amount? What proportion of the population would be able to accumulate this amount? What proportion would be able to accumulate enough for a one-third median income pot, so that, with the State pension, they might still have a half median income pension? (That's my case - no mortgage - and I don't feel under pressure: can still fly off on holidays.)
I think this is the only way I'll get my head round all the dread over pensioner poverty, and find I can relax over the fate of my children. I can't find anything like this anywhere.