Is State Pension Alone Enough To Live On?

bostonerimus

marycanary said:

Speaking of strawmen, where in anything I posted does it say landlords have to change a light bulb? If a particular council do that it's because they are a super good, caring landlord. It is certainly is not standard. practice, much less a legal requirement in single occupied homes. 

It should take time to evict someone from their home. Delays in doing this are not due to the "nanny state" they are created by an inefficient, underfunded court system. We are often urged to feel sorry for landlords who don't get their rent but we seldom hear about tenants evicted for complaining about unsafe conditions. 

The bulb in question was in an "outdoor light" and, certainly where I live, exterior maintenance is the responsibility of the landlord. Inside light bulbs are not generally the responsibility of the landlord, but I do supply my tenant with energy efficient LED light bulbs.

marycanary

Please correct me if I am wrong, but didn't I read your property in a foreign country so not very relevant to the Housing Act 2004?

Albermarle

adonis10 said:

I wouldn’t bank on it. Given your age, it is fairly certain that there won’t be a state pension when you retire. I’m 38 and don’t factor it into retirement income as it’ll either be abolished/eroded so much by inflation it’ll be worthless.

It is fairly certain there will be a state pension when they retire . Any government that does anything negative with the SP will almost certainly get booted out at the next election as older voters vote a lot more than younger ones . In that case no government will commit political suicide on this scale . Just look at the fuss about the Triple/Double Lock and the value of the SP has actually been increasing in recent years compared to wages , not decreasing , although the gyrations in the economy due to Covid make a comparison difficult recently.
The age you get it will go up to 68 in a few years time, but unlikely to go up much more than that.

Retirement planning should err on the cautious side, but not include very unlikely super pessimistic scenarios.

coastline

There's certainly something changed around 2000 onwards. Private renting boomed. First link shows the data from 1918 until 2005 .  
BBC NEWS | In Depth
This link shows from 1980 to 2016. 
Social housing stock has fallen over the last 30 years - Full Fact
Currently homes on mortgage or owned outright stand around 60%. So we have 40% in the social and private rental market. How has this happened ? I know of six people without thinking about it that are private landlords. Only two have any academic qualifications the others very ordinary jobs. Two of them have 20 or more properties. All of them were born in council houses so no backing from parents. When I was 20 yo this wouldn't have happened nobody thought about it. Get a job and work until 65 Yo. Was it hard to do in the last 20 years ? Was it the television shows that encouraged the situation. I don't know the answer but what I've posted is true. Government are still building around 200,000 a year but it's not enough. Young couples are still struggling.
Can you live off the state pension ? Well it looks like millions renting might have too ? Probably some in owned homes as well. Government have introduced the second pension scheme and maybe it was all about reducing state benefits. Some will do well out of it . Once people see they might not benefit much could well reduce their contributions to a minimum. A respectable 250K pension pot with a SWRate of 3% ?? that's 7.5K.  Throw in £600 x 12 months rent is 7K. 250K will be one million pounds in 40 years at 3% inflation. System needs a rethink as ever.
 

sevenhills

Albermarle said:

It is fairly certain there will be a state pension when they retire . Any government that does anything negative with the SP will almost certainly get booted out at the next election as older voters vote a lot more than younger ones .

I agree, if they wanted they could force employers to increase the workplace pension by xx% whilst lowering NI xx%

The only reason that a Government would do that, is to lower the figure paid out in benefits, which I believe is what the state pension is classed as.

zagfles

marycanary said:

Speaking of strawmen, where in anything I posted does it say landlords have to change a light bulb? If a particular council do that it's because they are a super good, caring landlord. It is certainly is not standard. practice, much less a legal requirement in single occupied homes. 

Did I say you did? Someone else mentioned it above. Which is why I wrote "as above". I was answering your question, not imposing assumptions on what you meant, like your "Do you mean not expecting people to pay for unsafe homes which will make them ill or put them in hospital A&E?"

It should take time to evict someone from their home. Delays in doing this are not due to the "nanny state" they are created by an inefficient, underfunded court system. We are often urged to feel sorry for landlords who don't get their rent but we seldom hear about tenants evicted for complaining about unsafe conditions. 

The usual rule is if you don't pay for a product or service, you don't receive that product or service. If you deliberately take a product or service with the intention of not paying for it, you get arrested for theft. That's what would happen if you shoplifted at Tesco for instance. That's why you you get "no DSS" on adverts for rentals, why landlords want references, why people with troubled pasts find it hard to get somewhere to rent.

If Tesco weren't able to get a shoplifter arrested for stealing, and had to let them walk out with stolen food and had to go through a 6 month process to get them banned from their store, you can be sure they'd have "no DSS" notices on their stores, that you'd need references to get a pass to allow you to enter etc. Poor people and people with troubled pasts would find it hard to buy food even if they've turned their life around. Just like now they struggle to find somewhere to live.

Many years ago a friend of mine was in this sort of situation after a messy divorce and loss of job. He kipped on my sofa for 3 months because he couldn't find anywhere to rent. He'd have probably been on the streets otherwise. It wasn't a financial issue, he could have got HB to pay the rent, it was that no landlord wanted to take the risk on someone in his situation. 

bostonerimus

marycanary said:

Please correct me if I am wrong, but didn't I read your property in a foreign country so not very relevant to the Housing Act 2004?

That is why I always preface my comments with statements like "where I live " etc. I hope that my statement will get some replies that might tell us whether or not replacement of exterior/communal area light bulbs is the landlord's responsibility in the UK. I would be surprised if it wasn't. So maybe you can tell us what the 2004 Housing Act says.

zagfles

coastline said:

There's certainly something changed around 2000 onwards. Private renting boomed. First link shows the data from 1918 until 2005 .  
BBC NEWS | In Depth
This link shows from 1980 to 2016. 
Social housing stock has fallen over the last 30 years - Full Fact
Currently homes on mortgage or owned outright stand around 60%. So we have 40% in the social and private rental market. How has this happened ? I know of six people without thinking about it that are private landlords. Only two have any academic qualifications the others very ordinary jobs. Two of them have 20 or more properties. All of them were born in council houses so no backing from parents. When I was 20 yo this wouldn't have happened nobody thought about it. Get a job and work until 65 Yo. Was it hard to do in the last 20 years ? Was it the television shows that encouraged the situation. I don't know the answer but what I've posted is true. Government are still building around 200,000 a year but it's not enough. Young couples are still struggling.
Can you live off the state pension ? Well it looks like millions renting might have too ? Probably some in owned homes as well. Government have introduced the second pension scheme and maybe it was all about reducing state benefits. Some will do well out of it . Once people see they might not benefit much could well reduce their contributions to a minimum. A respectable 250K pension pot with a SWRate of 3% ?? that's 7.5K.  Throw in £600 x 12 months rent is 7K. 250K will be one million pounds in 40 years at 3% inflation. System needs a rethink as ever.
 

As it happens I've just had a hospital appointment with a long wait, and one of the many "property p0rn" programmes was on the telly in the waiting room. One featured property was sold at auction for about £400k, buyer did £25k of renovations on it, and it got valued at £800k !! It's this sort of extreme example that leads people to believe "can't go wrong with property" or it's a "one way bet". That this sort of thing is the norm, that anyone can do it. And in a rising market, probably anyone can.

Remember the Property Ladder programme where what usually happened was an inexperienced would-be property developer buys a run down house, messes up the renovation, yet still manages to make a good profit due to rising prices. Funnily enough, that programme stopped just after the global FC when house prices started falling - I see from a google the last series was retitled more realistically "Property Snakes and Ladders" but then stopped, probably because there was less interest in failed property investments, and maybe less people who'd willingly tell their nation how their property investment failed.

Albermarle

As it happens I've just had a hospital appointment with a long wait, and one of the many "property p0rn" programmes was on the telly in the waiting room. One featured property was sold at auction for about £400k, buyer did £25k of renovations on it, and it got valued at £800k !! It's this sort of extreme example that leads people to believe "can't go wrong with property" or it's a "one way bet". 

We have some friends who for many years bought large North London properties , lived in them whist they were renovated to a high standard, and then sold them for large profits ( one of the pair was an architect ) . Then rinse and repeat, until one day they made a poor choice of property due to lack of suitable ones available, and by the time it was ready the London market had gone a bit flat . Took two years to sell at a big loss, whilst in the meantime very large mortgage had to be paid . Final result - separated - one bankrupt sleeping on his Mum's couch, and the other one up to their ears in debt living in a one bedroom rented flat .

Basically all their money /lifestyle was nearly all funded from property development , with only intermittent architect jobs, so when it wrong there was no Plan B.

It probably did not help that they did not think ahead and bank some of the previous profits, and preferred to spend somewhat recklessly, but it shows it can be a risky business having all your eggs in one basket.

MalMonroe

Hi, many pages later, I'd just like to say that no, the state pension is not enough to live on. At all.

I retired 12 years ago at the very young age of 60 and if I hadn't have had two small private pensions, I'd have been in a very poor financial situation.

However, having said that, if retirees rely solely on the state pension they can claim benefits and my next door neighbour (sadly now no longer with us) was able to claim pension credits which led her to being eligible to claim housing benefit and council tax benefit and she ended up in quite a good financial position. 

I realise that the way benefits are now allocated has changed and probably will always be changing but more and more people are now living well after the age of retirement (a trend that will continue - the so called 'demographic time bomb') so the government will have to find some way to help them financially in the future.

When I was younger I never worried about retirement or pensions - maybe I should have given it some thought but things haven't turned out too badly. I'm still able to maintain a good lifestyle, run a decent car, etc. and I'm also registered self-employed with a small online business.