Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

I think the trouble with the ever-receding pension age as a concept is that it pre-supposes a number of things which ain't necessarily so.

F'rinstance, the people making these decisions are white-collar professionals who have no experience, in most cases, of the world of manual work. I've worked factory production lines and I can tell you that by about 40-45 max, people weren't fast enough or strong enough to take it. What if you're a carer or a nurse, is a person who is a septugenarian him/ herself supposed to be able to lift someone? Work a 12 hour shift? Be safe to drive an HGV? Haul your wheelie bins around? Pass the grocery-weight equivalent of a car across the supermarket scanner every checkout shift?

Most people I encounter, by their 40s-50s, have at least one chronic disease. Often it's one of the many forms of arthritis, or diabetes, or one of the auto-immune disorders. On the surface, things look OK, underneath things are getting very difficult.

And how are you going to persuade employers that someone of their granny's generation is the must-have employee whilst young adults in their prime are on the dole? The probable outcome is that you'll spend the last years of your extended working life unemployed, rather than retired.

As you age, vigour declines, hearing becomes less acute, vision weakens. These are biological facts, not something which can be changed by government diktat. Nor are they invalidated by the exceptional agers, those who run marathons or write novels and run multinational companies in their ninth decades; the outliers prove nothing to the average, other than that they are average.

And half of all people are below average, by definition.

It's come as a surprise to me that I've suddenly started to do that older-person thing where you struggle to thread a needle, where the print is too small (and I already have the varifocal lenses, had them two years come July). My knees aren't so bendy, I don't sleep so well, and I have less tolerance for BS than ever I did.

I suspect the latter would be a big handicap in the workforce.

Frugalsod

daz378 wrote: »

they say Blair is the son Thatcher would have wanted ......if the people feel too abandoned.....they may either lurch left or right to the marginal parties ukip/snp though i couldnt see how anyone under 50k a year could vote for a far right party like ukip..... but each to their own........worried whether il get a pension being just a year shy of 50....fingers crossed

Though the same applies to who would vote Conservative if they earned less than £50 000 a year.

I have no idea who to vote for. I will not want another Tory lead government so if I vote Labour that might not happen. If I vote UKIP they will almost certainly align themselves with the Tories so that is out.

I am not so concerned about not getting the pension my pension age has already risen and will probably rise again, though if you have a private pension they will probably rise significantly as well as the income of pension funds is insufficient to pay pensions anyway. Hence my concerns about their solvency.

daz378

Mardartha yes i know the snp are what labour should be if all the main parties weren"t fighting over the middle ground and they could hold the balance of power after the election if labour take as bigger hit as predicted in Scotland...... immigration is tricky , primarily because of lies.... dam lies and statistics....... some stats say immigrants are 8% more likely to find work than locals and the tax may help the pensions we are worried about...... on the otherhand to bigger influx can put pressure on infastructure and services and in micro economic terms lower the average rate of wages.......anyway back to prepping tidied front room ....going to clear ore shelves for more tins.......have a good weekend all

GreyQueen

There is a downside to private pension provision, as well as that of schemes like the local govt scheme; the stock market. If that goes t*ts-up, what are the returns for the funds and what are the outcomes for present and future pensions?

There's an awful lot of paper wealth sloshing around, trying to glom onto tangible assets to secure a revenue stream, and all the signs are that the tangibles aren't there in the quantity needed to absorb the paper-wealth tsunami.

moneyistooshorttomention

..and meanwhile everyone still intends to Have A Retirement and the preferred route (it would appear) for those who can manage to find the money to do so is to get a "buy to let" or two or three. I can understand why people who fear as to how to have A Retirement otherwise would do so on the one hand. On the other hand though is the knock-on effect of these people are competing with home-owners to buy these starter places.

Now that doesn't seem (as far as I can see) to be having a push effect on the prices of starter places (I'm inclined to wonder if its doing the reverse in fact). I may be wrong. But...it makes starter home-owners much more conscious than they would otherwise be of a wish/need to "move up the housing ladder" and those houses (ie the 2nd and 3rd homes on the "ladder") do seem to be experiencing that push effect. 2nd homes (ie the 3 bed houses with gardens) and Final Homes (ie the 3/4 bed detached in reasonable-nice area) are screaming up the price ladder in some parts of the country at least (ask me again why I had to move across country...:().

All round....and our Economy is skewing visibly - whether it be by those who are just crossing their fingers and hoping they will be able to Have A Retirement or those who have found a way to Have A Retirement (but it has a knock-on effect against other people). Never mind win-win. This is a no-win situation it would appear.

.....and the bad news is that a survey was done as to likely date of death fairly recently. Basically it stated that the older someone was when they retired, then the younger the age they would die at. I would hazard a guess that there is an age somewhere around about 70 years old that, if people were forced to work onto it, would mean a high proportion of people dying at or shortly after that age. The correlation between retirement ages and death ages was THAT strong. I guess its down to the fact that the later the age you die at, then the more worn-out/worn-down you get by having to work that long.

DawnW

ivyleaf wrote: »

I was born in Oct 1953 and am one of a fairly small group of women who actually had their State Pension age changed three times - from 60, to (in my case) 62-and-a-bit, to 65-and-a-bit. There was such a furore about this last one being implemented too late for us to do anything to make extra provision for retirement that it was changed again, on a sliding scale, and in theory I should get mine when I'm 64 and 7 months-ish.

There is confusion about whether women who won't be entitled to the full "flat rate" (How can it be a "flat rate" if not everyone's going to get the same amount?) will still be able to get a bit more pension based on their spouse's NI contributions, or whether that idea's being swept away...

Ivyleaf - we are the same age. I was born in Oct 1953 as well. I must confess I got very confused by the third change, and wouldn't put it past the beggars not to change it again Still, I am very fortunate, I was able to take my (modest) work pension at 60, though it was actuarily (sp?) reduced by 25% (5% per year) as I was under 65 when I decided to retire. OH and I are mortgage and debt free, have reasonable savings and are fairly frugal, so manage ok (OH is also retired). I certainly have no regrets. I didn't have a manual job by any means, but it was a stressful senior post which involved long hours, a lot of travelling, dealing with often very difficult external people, and managing constant change of the type that impacted negatively by and large on the workforce. I really could not have continued with that for another 5 years :eek:

moneyistooshorttomention

Of course, another knock-on effect of forcing people to work on after they have reached reasonable Retirement Age (ie between 60-65) is that, if they've managed to reach that age in reasonable health, then many of these are the people who wouldn't have the spare time that retirement brings to do the things that many healthier pensioners do.

These being = free childcare for younger relatives and voluntary work. Basically pretty much the only people available these days to do voluntary work, for instance, are the unemployed or the healthy retired. Cut out the healthy retired and:cool::(:cool:. This in an era when a lot of work that someone should be paid to do is now falling onto the voluntary sector, as well as things that are normally "voluntary work".

I'm beginning to see just how topsy-turvy this whole thing is going to cause Society as a whole to go.

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

I think the trouble with the ever-receding pension age as a concept is that it pre-supposes a number of things which ain't necessarily so.

F'rinstance, the people making these decisions are white-collar professionals who have no experience, in most cases, of the world of manual work. I've worked factory production lines and I can tell you that by about 40-45 max, people weren't fast enough or strong enough to take it. What if you're a carer or a nurse, is a person who is a septugenarian him/ herself supposed to be able to lift someone? Work a 12 hour shift? Be safe to drive an HGV? Haul your wheelie bins around? Pass the grocery-weight equivalent of a car across the supermarket scanner every checkout shift?

Most people I encounter, by their 40s-50s, have at least one chronic disease. Often it's one of the many forms of arthritis, or diabetes, or one of the auto-immune disorders. On the surface, things look OK, underneath things are getting very difficult.

And how are you going to persuade employers that someone of their granny's generation is the must-have employee whilst young adults in their prime are on the dole? The probable outcome is that you'll spend the last years of your extended working life unemployed, rather than retired.

As you age, vigour declines, hearing becomes less acute, vision weakens. These are biological facts, not something which can be changed by government diktat. Nor are they invalidated by the exceptional agers, those who run marathons or write novels and run multinational companies in their ninth decades; the outliers prove nothing to the average, other than that they are average.

And half of all people are below average, by definition.

It's come as a surprise to me that I've suddenly started to do that older-person thing where you struggle to thread a needle, where the print is too small (and I already have the varifocal lenses, had them two years come July). My knees aren't so bendy, I don't sleep so well, and I have less tolerance for BS than ever I did.

I suspect the latter would be a big handicap in the workforce.

I totally agree, but what they might do is push such people on to means tested disability benefits until they get to pension age. Though that would mean that many would have to under go ATOS style medicals which are designed to fail people.

That said there are many jobs that people who might not be up to in their old careers like firemen who could still do something else. Maybe what would be good is make it so that when you get to that position in life that you become eligible for standing for parliament. That would end these juniors who have to think about their post parliament career and so become even less accountable.

Perplexed_Pineapple

GreyQueen wrote: »

There is a downside to private pension provision, as well as that of schemes like the local govt scheme; the stock market. If that goes t*ts-up, what are the returns for the funds and what are the outcomes for present and future pensions?

It might be even worst than that GQ, at least the stock market is based on tangible assets, even if over-valued. A lot of pension funds are heavily invested in government bonds - I've heard that you can get a very good rate of return on Greek government bonds at the moment :rotfl:

daz378

on a lighter note....starting right now on bbc3 .... i survived the zombie apocalypse