Pension income

Fairly certain, and yet wrong

When you may not be able to claim usually , you will not get Housing Benefit if:

• your savings are over £16,000 - unless you get Guarantee Credit of Pension Credit

Read the article again , and also this as you clearly enjoy reading

When you may not be able to claim usually , you will not get Housing Benefit if:

• your savings are over £16,000 - unless you get Guarantee Credit of Pension Credit

Not sure grandma above intended to defraud anyone and good on her for being able to squirrel away money but I too am fairly certain that if you have savings of more than 16k you do not qualify for housing benefit. Council tax benefit is a different matter and takes into consideration age and other factors.

Really?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7251829/amp/Widow-86-punished-saving-pension.html

Fairly confident that my 90 yo mum whose income is only her state pension and pension credit, to get her to £204 weekly, is not going to be a victim of this.

There is no savings limit for pension credits. And the savings limit is not 16k for housing benefit if you claim pension credits. So think before you post lies about peoples loved ones who have passed away.

So she committed fraud because nobody with savings over £16k is entitled to pension credits or housing benefit.

Both my DF and my MIL lived in rented accommodation. They both had a small private pension under £50 a month. Neither of them really struggled on their total income as they received pension credits and housing / council tax support. When my mil eventually died, she’d accrued over 20k in savings during the last few years of her life.

My pot is & will be woefully small & I will be almost completely relying on the state pension. Was a SAHM for 18 years so wasn't paying into a work pension & what I did pay in to it has resulted in only about £18,000. I am now full time but pay is low & between now & retirement, won't add up to much. I divorced my husband 2 years ago & in order to get out quickly gave up my rights to his pension (He had got it ring fenced & after much wrangling, grudgingly agreed to give me a very small % which will be about £7 000 a year, so very little per month).. I had to sign a waiver to show I agreed to this. I find it really unfair that you gave to be taxed on your pension income.

I think that’s the thing, there’s two amounts of pension ‘needs’.

The minimum amount you can possibly survive on, v enough you can not worry about car needing replacing, house repairs or replacements.

I hope in retirement I don’t have to worry about turning heating on, or paying for grandchild to join us on days out, or buying new coat. I want to be able to replace washing machine without worrying or help Ds with something.

We are 62, both retired at 59, nice public sector pensions. Mortgage free, currently taking home c3000 a month, that will go to c4500 at 67 (state pension).
Run two cars, two big dogs, two holidays, hobbies, two DC who have both had 'issues'. It's nowhere near as much as it sounds it is. I know, 'read the room'!

My advice to the 30 year old me, over-pay your mortgage (I'd never heard of that and didn't even know it was a thing), bung as much as you can tax-free money into your pension.

@EmpressSoleil Would you mind saying what your job is? As I would love to find something that I could do flexibly into the future.

You can always get insurance unless you have a catastrophic medical condition, it just gets more expensive with age. I got it for my parents when they were both over 90.

@Heatherbell1978 they probably worked out they couldn't get travel insurance like my in-laws did. Why anyone would plan to travel long haul when they are that age is beyond me. I once had to help an old couple at the airport who had no bloody insurance and she had had a stroke in the hotel room. They just took themselves off to the airport after a week of hiding in the room and relied on good will to get them home!

That figure taken from the article in the OP includes the state pension. The pot is generating about £100 pcm of the total

Ah. That would explain it. 😩

I'm not at retirement age yet, but I have a LGPS pension that is set to pay about £25k pa at 65, I'll have a full state pension on top of that and I have a private pension that is forecast to pay about £8k pa. Should be about £40k pa in today's money. As I'm hoping to be mortgage free by then, that should be plenty I'm hoping!

Exactly! @DragonFly98 is the ignorant one, thinking just because she won’t need a certain amount of money, the rest of us won’t either. It’s such blinkered thinking. We all have different expenses & expectations of retirement. A shame we can’t share our own thoughts without being insulted.

I suppose that's what I mean as you just don't know what your life or health will be like after age 70. My mum and partner are early 70s and although huge lovers of travel and in good health, Covid put a spanner in the works for them as they had planned those years for travel and now just seem content on UK holidays with the dog they've since bought. My dad and his wife haven't been abroad in years and have huge pensions. So it has made me think that perhaps all those cruises think we're going to go on, may not happen. Factor in climate change too. I wish I had a crystal ball.

I'm not very well up with my understanding of "pots" as I have a (small) defined benefit public service pension. But from my limited knowledge £1k a month seems MASSIVE from a £37k pot. Where are you getting that from? My OHs pot will be about that size so he needs to do this!

Good point @MontyDonsBlueScarf . People tend to think of all the envious stuff; travel, meals out. They forget ageing carries more significant care and health costs!

I'd be wary of thinking you won't need so much after you're 70. I'm finding that as DH is no longer here to keep on top of house maintenance and do many of the bigger jobs himself, it's a significant expense I hadn't fully appreciated. It also costs a lot more than I anticipated keeping up my own health. For example I could get by with NHS hearing aids but I wouldn't be able to cope in groups of people, so I'd be completely isolated if I didn't pay for more sophisticated private ones. Luckily I can afford these things but it means foregoing things like the travel I'd hoped to do while I still can.

I'm finding this a very interesting thread and it's making me really assess the 'lifestyle' side of things. DH and I are hammering pensions just now, partly to make up for years with less contributions and partly to give us a nice retirement. We live quite frugally (or at least more than others on a similar income) as we have school fees to factor in too. But I don't want to forego holidays and experiences now when the kids are at a good age for it to fund retirement when we may not need that much after the age of 70 especially as we're not flashy people. It really is a balance and it's tricky as none of us can predict the future.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/should-i-get-student-loan/

That’s not what he says. It’s a reasonable idea for some people, not for others.

‘First, mentally double check that your funds are plentiful enough to easily meet you and your child’s other and future financial challenges.

If so, then mathematically paying in full is best for those who are likely to clear in full what they borrow within the 40 years (predicted to be 52% of university leavers), which will tend to be those who:
– Are consistently higher earners over their lifetime
– Are unlikely to take substantial time out of work before the loan’s repaid (think parental leave, travelling abroad, plans to do further study)
– Have lower initial borrowing (so lower tuition fees or living loan)’

For us it was easy.
What are we earning now (excluding some rather hefty pension contributions), do we live within our current means (yes), what have we got behind us (savings, investments etc) and what will our income be from taking pensions early (excluding SP as we are both many years away from that).
The figures (more than) added up so we are enjoying retirement a full 10-years before SPA.

We have a couple of expensive pastimes which we can still afford and we are going to be spending a lot of money on the house soon but it all covered so no sleepless nights (just nice lie-ins when Ddogs allow it).