RPI published today?

CLAPTON

grizzly1911 wrote: »

As you say you have surplus and choice.

I could name two widows who one of f whom is in a similar situation to yourself and one who is on basic pension who sits just outside of any additional benefits due to modest savings.

The one on basic pension has already ratcheted down energy use, with the best deal and is in a fully insulated home and eats frugaly. Her energy, food costs and until recently council tax outstrip any index linking of pension. Fixing of energy costs can remove an increase one year or two but the pain just hits you later.

The first widow is now becoming aware of increasing costs and is starting to take sensible measures to "control"extravagant spending and look around for better deals.

They both get up in the morning and live but the issues are very different.

it would seem to me you are making a case for higher pensions for some people rather than any significant comment on the merits of particular ways of creating inflation indexes.

you may well be right but the current set of three guarentees is about a good as it's ever been

Loughton_Monkey

grizzly1911 wrote: »

As you say you have surplus and choice.

I could name two widows

.....The first widow is now becoming aware of increasing costs and is starting to take sensible measures to "control"extravagant spending and look around for better deals.

They both get up in the morning and live but the issues are very different.

My own 'interest' would tend to focus on "how did you get there?"

If you imagine a graph showing, say, lifetime earnings on one axis, and retirement income on the other, then you would predict and expect a fairly high correlation. In other words, whether you were low paid, medium paid, or high paid over your working life, then you would expect to appear on the graph in the corresponding 'low/medium/high' position.

Rather perversely, given the 'flat' nature of the State pension, I would expect to see the lower paid tending to have a not too dissimilar income. Low earnings = meagre lifestyle/little saving = state pension = continue same meagre lifestyle.

The groups that I have absolutely no sympathy with [specific misfortunes apart] are those in the medium/high lifetime earnings category, who are now retiring on little more than state pension. I know of several such people and, in a sense, what they are, are those who scoff all their sweets straight off, and then scream blue murder because they are hungry, and expect others to give them more sweets.

Our benefits system, it seems to me, takes not enough account of 'how you got there' but simply gives money based upon your current situation.