Increase to Minimum Pension age from beyond 57

Superdude0499

I’m in my early 50’s and we are always ribbing our kids on how much easier they have it than we did. Kidding aside this is not entirely true. I left university with zero debt and within 6 years had ‘bought’ our first home (2 bed semi) !for 75k with a deposit of 10k. That same house is now c500k requiring an income of over 100k to purchase now. This would have been considered a first time buyer property. There will only be a small fraction of twenty somethings able to afford this today. Without help from our generation who had at least this part east (albeit fewer telly stations😁). It has taken us 30 years to achieve an income level high enough to be considered for a mortgage if starting today. We will never achieve an income high enough to purchase our current home if starting today ( it has one extra bedroom than the aforementioned first home). Thankfully we will have finished paying for it next year and will be in a position to help our two out. Otherwise it would look fairly bleak with many years of renting/ saving ahead of them. 

SouthCoastBoy

Agree house prices are ridiculous, having said that you must live in a very affluent area if a 2 bed semi is 500k, round my neck of the woods that is more like 175k, which in 1990 would have been around 45 to 50k

Altior

That would be what, something like £175K equivalent today? What was the interest rate over the first ten years?

The one thing that is definitely tougher for everyone now is getting on the housing market. In contrast, there where no government schemes, LISAs, HTB ISAs, shared equity or anything of that nature, and practically no mortgage flexibility. This has coincided with rapid population growth, which ironically the younger generation vastly supports, and would like to see further expansion. Again, this trend is evidenced right across the developed West, as we've all followed similar policies (Japan perhaps being the outlier).

What percentage of people went on the 3 year jolly (uni) when you went, vs now? How did you sustain yourself through it?

Bringing it back to pensions, the flexibility in this area is now huge, we can all be our own fund managers via apps, don't have to purchase an annuity, access our cash, drawdown etc, robo investments, fractional costs. And there is still an amazing DB deal for anyone who wants it by going into a career within public services. 

QrizB

This thread seems to have turned into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

Grumpy_chap

Nebulous2 said:

One of our young people has felt very strongly for a long time that the state pension will never be a reality for his generation.

I've posted their viewpoint in this forum before, and got a lot of pushback from others who said I was speaking nonsense and it wouldn't be possible politically to make such a change.

The landscape seems to be shifting however, and more and more people are saying what he has been saying for some time.... 

Is that a new line of thinking, though?
Young people holding the view that there won't be a state pension by the time they reach SP age.
As far as I can tell, that is a view that a good proportion of young people have held for many years.  As those young people get older, they start to realise the value of the SP and the increases now having a value for everyone - not just protecting the old today

honeststeveo

Returning to the thread after a few days I see that it's strayed from my original topic 

To explain where I got the idea/sentiment of means testing the state pension - it was actually from reading a few threads in this forum which seems to be awash with the idea!

It has to be a candidate for change given the maths would struggle to work with a smaller number of workers (who need to pay higher proportions of their income on housing) supporting a larger retired cohort. The gov has got prior for meddling with pensions legislation so i see no reason why they would consider this off limits.

A likely implementation would start with a miniscule number of super high net worth that 99+% of the voting population dont care much for to get us used to the idea before playing with levers and thresholds to drag more and more into it. Combine that with repeatedly raising the age (which gov seem to get away with without voter revolt unlike the french) and you reach a point where many well off become indifferent as the age is so high that the amount at stake (no years life left X pension) diminishes.

cloud_dog

SouthCoastBoy said:

Agree house prices are ridiculous, having said that you must live in a very affluent area if a 2 bed semi is 500k, round my neck of the woods that is more like 175k, which in 1990 would have been around 45 to 50k

I think most of the youngsters feel demoralised by the cost of buying a property (ridiculous prices and more recent 'high' interest rates).  All we need is a bit of a housing market crash (like in the 90s) and that problem will reset / go away.  We lost almost 40% of the value of our very first property.  We decided to squirrel away the negative equity in savings in order to move on with the next property with a clean slate. 

Altior

This thread seems to have turned into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

Not so sure about that, when they attempted satire, they were actually funny.