Makes my blood boil

worried_jim

westv wrote: »

My previous employer paid 20% and I paid 5%.
My current employer pays 19% and I pay 10%
Both private sector.

I pay 5% and they pay 13%. I can pay just 3% (most do) and they pay 8%, but I'll take that extra free money thank you very much!

Muscle750

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/may/31/senior-civil-servants-salaries-data

Click on the A Z listing and see where the government get their £200k a year of only 56 from .......................total garbage
I fully appreciate that these are at the top and not everyone in the public sector are earning this but it shows what a load of rubbish the figures by the government portray

agarnett

We don't know, but if you are a career civil servant GunJack with one of these pensions we are astounded by, then you may not realise quite how insulated you have become from the changes in the private sector particularly with regard to pension provision.

If you are a civil servant with an established decent grade and salary, it really doesn't matter that you have had no salary-rise to speak of. It will likely be totally irrelevant compared to last year's increase in the notional cost of maintaining your pension promise.

Your pension promise is the biggest part of your reward package as you get older. Do you know how much this last year a private pension pot might have had to increase in order to continue to buy your forecast pension in the private sector? Possibly by as much as 50% of your salary! Maybe more! That's already some reward package rise if you haven't gained a promotion, methinks!

Pensions in the private sector, even at the banks, can't hold a candle now to civil service pensions.

Muscle750

mollycat wrote: »

I'm a public sector worker, (NHS).

Previous to this worked in private sector, (factory work).

I find your ill informed rant offensive.

I pay contribute to my own pension and pay taxes, just like you do.

After 30 years of carrying out tasks many persons would choose not to do, my pension will be extremely modest. Despite that I count my blessings and do not denigrate those who have been more fortunate in their professional life than I have been.

Like others have said, come and do what I do. I could list my duties, but some of them are of a nature I would choose not to on this forum.

People like yourself use the NHS, hope your kids are educated properly, and want safe streets. You also seem to resent the people who carry these tasks benefiting from their agreed terms and conditions.

Why not focus on aspects of your life you can control?

We have all made choices in life, I take full responsibility for mine.

What about trying to do the same and stop blaming people like ourselves?

You have hit the nail on the head you do a worthwhile job and should be applauded yet you say your pension will not be very good , however you fail to realise if you had more years in doing nursing things would be alot better when you get your pension, My wife was recently in hospital and all i ever heard was them on the phone trying to get staff to work at a weekend it was mainly foreigners phillipinos etc nursing. they were very very short staffed. Those years you spent in the private sector have had a adverse effect on your pension throu no fault of your own to a point you should have the same level of comfort to look forward to

chucknorris

Muscle750 wrote: »

Im never going to win this argument i know.

What argument? You can't argue it is unfair, unless you were somehow excluded from working in the public sector! In the public sector I earn £55k (pro rata) plus the pension, in the private sector I would earn about £70-75k with an inferior pension, there isn't much in it either way. Although I must admit that the hours are also better working as a QS lecturer rather than as a quantity surveyor (QS) in industry.

mollycat

Muscle750 wrote: »

You have hit the nail on the head you do a worthwhile job and should be applauded yet you say your pension will not be very good , however you fail to realise if you had more years in doing nursing things would be alot better when you get your pension, My wife was recently in hospital and all i ever heard was them on the phone trying to get staff to work at a weekend it was mainly foreigners phillipinos etc nursing. they were very very short staffed. Those years you spent in the private sector have had a adverse effect on your pension throu no fault of your own to a point you should have the same level of comfort to look forward to

My pension will be with maximum service.

You need to realise that the average public sector pension, (even with full service), is not "gold plated".

People on £100K per annum pensions are extremely rare; people on even £20K pensions are also rare.

You need to get your facts straight; you're misinformed.

If your "blood is boiling", it shouldn't be.

agarnett

GunJack wrote: »

some of the assumptions in that article are farcial... 4%pa payrises in the public sector? where have you been, 1% pa if they've been lucky over the last several years with no rise on the horizon either, so that just makes a nonsense of the whole thing...

We don't know, but if you are a career civil servant GunJack with one of these pensions we are astounded by, then you may not realise quite how insulated you have become from the changes in the private sector particularly with regard to pension provision.

If you are a civil servant with an established decent grade and salary, it really doesn't matter that you have had no salary-rise to speak of. It will likely be totally irrelevant compared to last year's increase in the notional cost of maintaining your pension promise.

Your pension promise is the biggest part of your reward package as you get older. Do you know how much this last year a private pension pot might have had to increase in order to continue to buy your forecast pension in the private sector? Possibly by as much as 50% of your salary! Maybe more! That's already some reward package rise if you haven't gained a promotion, methinks!

Pensions in the private sector, even at the banks, can't hold a candle now to civil service pensions.

And Mollycat, you may be now and may have always beeen a very good and kind person, but you surely realise that the NHS is a disgraceful mess so please don't try to tell us that you are part of a wonderful service. I accept that many like you have given and continue to give their best, but the bests given by you and your colleagues sadly just aren't good enough to right the wrongs of the system. You may be good but you are part of something which is not.

And the mucky tasks are not just something that is conducted in the NHS. Far more of us than used t be the case are now personally involved longer term with caring for elderly relatives at home, primarily because hospitals and local services refuse to do that kind of nursing. "Hospitals are acute units" I was told at Addenbrookes two years ago when they were trying to steal back my father's bed after he'd only been in it three days, his first hospital stay in his entire life aged almost 90!

I spent half one afternoon and evening in an A&E accompanying a young relative during the week just past. She'd already made the same mistake twice of expecting a city walk-in centre to be worth trying had spent half the morning and the first half of the afternoon achieving absolutely nothing. It was her second visit in a couple of weeks - the first was equally inconclusive and she went home again to fend for herself.

What she finally achieved by 8pm in A&E was some slight reassurance after some blood tests and urine tests that despite her exhibiting very worrying symptoms including constant bleeding, that she wasn't in immediate danger. So judged not acute. Go home, Contact GP, we'll put in your notes that you should have an "urgent" investigation - it'll have to be back in the area your GP is based - we'll mark it so when the GP organises it, he should be able to arrange it as an "urgent" "within about 2 weeks". Bye bye.

A 20 year old bleeding internally (which was not a reproductive system symptom) - leave our hospital - go home and you must contact your GP who will within about two weeks arrange for you to be seen by a hospital near the GP. We're the hospital near you, but we don't think you'll die tonight so off you go.

Part of that, Mollycat? Big questions like that asked by the OP have to be asked.

No one said civil servants are bad people, but specifically as regards pension promises, and even though many of you have to contribute now to your own pensions, you are insulated from any semblance of present day pensions expectations reality at taxpayer's expense. Most of you if you are in the final years of your careers, do not realise exactly how much your pensions, largely built as non-contributory in your early careers, would actually cost to fund in the private sector. The numbers are very very big like I intimated in my last post.

Undoubtedly the way the UK economy is set up with low taxation and low wages generally, we cannot afford civil service pension promises, but the promises are nevertheless being kept, even though they were broken long ago in the private sector.

As I have implied above, you cannot continue to claim to be a special case just because you are a good person who has cared for the needy. Because of the enormous increase in life expectancy in the last 20 years, we are all caring for the needy in our extended families, and we are all doing it outside the NHS and for long periods.

I accept that you could probably claim that easily 30 years ago, but not now.

You too will live a lot longer than was expected when you first were made a promise of a good pension. That means the taxpayer will have to pay it for much much longer than was ever imagined.

Our dumbed down economy cannot afford the civil service pension promises.

We could possibly afford them if we had a much higher minimum wage and much higher basic rate tax, and if we taxed the £200,000 a year types at 60% and also heavily taxed their trappings of wealth like their fancy houses and cars and of course their fancy pensions which many might be drawing for 30 or 40 years!

I don't begrudge you your position, but equally you must not deride us for pointing out the obvious.

If you want the UK to continue with a low wage low tax economy, then civil service pensions will have to be adjusted significantly, or civil service retiree's pensions will eventually sink us, unless you are all heavy smokers!

You don't say exactly what tasks you have to endure, but if you are alluding to personal care of the toilet kind and to caring for patients with dementia, there is now 1,000 times more of that type of care work being carried out by the general population for free for their family members and neighbours than there is being carried out as paid work inside the NHS. Things have changed that much, as you must surely realise. That kind of work is seen as not the kind the NHS does anymore except for the briefest periods when those patients arrive as acute patients but are sent home again with what turn out to be permanent catheters and bags and specially raised armchairs to sit out God knows how many years as they get lost to dementia with NHS visiting once in a blue moon.

Modern day medicine really is that good, isn't it? You can live longer than your personality yet your pension keeps coming in even though you'll never leave the chair to spend it! But it isn't the NHS that does most of the nursing for that type of thing any more. It's our families themselves. And then, when families can bear it no more, or Uncle' Elvis' unique personality has left the building, lights on but no-one in, it's largely private sector nursing homes funded by selling off the patient's home.

Our blood SHOULD be boiling - there are now far too many inequities in pension provision which are no fault of the private sector workers themselves. Quite simply, a country with our kind of slimline national economy cannot afford to pay your pension for the 40 years you might live after working for 40 years. Once upon a time it could afford 20 years retirement. Now, the sums simply don't add up and will sink us unless a new government becomes brave enough to tackle it, either by taxing the hell out of the rich including rich civil service pensionists, or by breaking part of the promise to civil service pensionists, before it is too late

[Deleted User]

Odd, isn't it? This is the very site to come to if you want information about loads of things including finances.

Long term users of the site will be happy that they had the sense to investigate their options and make good decisions, saving or making themselves money. When that happens, it's congratulations all round and aren't we all clever.

Yet, when it comes to people's well informed career choices, when folk have clearly made better choices than others, those who don't like the successful outcomes others have achieved do their nut.

I worked in the public sector for over 30 years on a reasonable salary - not "mandarin level" or anything like it - and retired early with my pension lump sum and a pension that is easily enough to live on. I'll not be heading to the Bahamas twice a year, or buying Range Rovers, but I'm ok with that. Mortgage paid off and retired at 53. That will send some folk into an incandescent rage. I knew what I was doing, and followed the Ts and Cs.

There's loads of things I could have put my money into for 30+ years. Maybe even pursued an entirely different career path. I did what I did. Some folk will have done better, some worse. I can't really be too bothered if others made less good choices than I did, any more than I'd expect those who chose better to be particularly worried about the outcome of my choices.

(..... and by the by, I can't honestly remember when my public sector pay received a rise that met inflation; for most of the final few years it was a pay freeze. I do find it a bit ironic that the pension rises by the September CPI rate, even if the actual pay if those still working is frozen...)

WR

mollycat

I won't quote your post it's quite long.

I pay more into my pension than the OP does.

I will get less pension than he does.

I'm happy with my lot, he, (and you) don't seem to be.

I've tried to point out some facts, but you are determined that there are significant numbers of public service workers on £100K pensions; enough to send you on a rant in any case.

Unfortunately there are a small minority of people in this country who think what they read in the tabloids is the truth, it's not.

I'm out. Good luck promoting your small minded and incorrect opinions.

hyubh

Muscle750 wrote: »

we are not all earning £40k a year plus and ive had one pay increase in 10 years.

Right, the salient difference between you and many of the people you envy is not private vs. public sector, but low vs. high value in the labour market.

mollycat wrote: »

You need to realise that the average public sector pension, (even with full service), is not "gold plated".

'Gold plated' is a pretty meaningless buzzphrase, yes. To deny the terms of 'the average public sector pension' are extremely good is to deny reality however.

people on even £20K pensions are also rare.

Absolute figures aren't particularly helpful. E.g., quoting the mean LGPS pension tells you very little because many members are only in the scheme for a short period of time and/or with low pay.