Pension credit only £3 less than State Pension

It's Scrooge's comment when he is asked for a Christmas contribution to help the poor of the parish 🙂

You are right. As a part time worker I couldn’t join my company pension scheme until I went full time in the 80s. As a woman born before 1950, I needed 39 years of NI contributions for a full state pension of less than £180 pw. I get nowhere near that amount due to some years of being a SAHM (before there were any NI credits, they came in later), and some years of intermittent, low paid work, where I paid the reduced rate of NI, also known as ‘The Married Women’s Stamp’.

But hey ho, I have a small occupational pension from later years of working full time. DH gets the full, old rate pension, with a bit of graduated pension. Less than £200 a week. He has no private pension. We don’t qualify for pension credit. We both worked part time after state retirement age.

A generous pension is worth saving for, a small one can put you just over the pension credit threshold.

No, I feel the same. A private pension of £200-300 a month and modest savings leaves you worse off.

You cannot have savings (well £10k but if retired that’s not much for the rest of your life) and you cannot have extra income. It’s in place where circumstances mean you haven’t been able to get credits for a state pension, remember in the past many women did not get credits, those women are mostly retired. Perhaps their ex spouse ran off with the money even

What is that meant to mean?

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

*Apologies to derail and it may be that her income is too high but I just wanted to point this out as some people don’t realise it’s a different system to Universal Credit after state retirement age and that they may have an entitlement to some help.

Yanbu.
Where is the incentive to work hard and save etc? People work their guts out for years and years in a low paid job - they shouldn’t have bothered.

The issue for people in SH, myself included, is that anything you have over state pension would go on rent. My rent is close to 1k a month now (god knows what it will be in 10yrs when I retire). If I have state pension alone then benefits will pay my rent. For various reasons I was never going to have a pension that paid over £1k a month. So there wasn't any point paying into one at all in the end as I wouldn't see any of the money.

As others have said in this thread, a small private pension can leave you worse off then someone without one. There should be some way for that not to be the case, otherwise more people will catch on and opt out of saving like I did. At the moment a lot of people still blindly believe that a small private pension is better than none but they will realise. Plus more and more people are struggling to buy a home now so even more will end up renting in retirement.

Not relevant to the main discussion but she should be claiming Housing Benefit and Council Tax Reduction from the council if she’s over state pension age.

This is certainly true and employers have only had to provide pension schemes since 2012. Before that, many small companies, which constitute the overwhelming majority of businesses, didn’t provide pensions, a fact that usually seems to go unnoticed by the generously provided for. Also, many of the circa 4 million self employed people, who tend to be lower earners, may not earn enough to pay into a private pension scheme. Even if you do or did pay into a private scheme as an individual, the returns can be very disappointing. For me, a bigger scandal than pension credits is the £54bn it costs per year to fund very generous, index-linked public sector pensions to workers who are are also able to claim the state pension! Yet we are told frequently that the triple lock must go.

A major factor is also if you own your own home or are renting. Various factors over the years, including the breakdown of her marriage after retirement, mean my mother has a reasonable workplace pension having worked for the NHS but most of it goes on paying rent. She is far worse off that someone getting pension credit but who owns their own home outright (which is not unusual by pension age).

because she inherited her husband’s state pension.

Does this still happen?

There are some real anomalies in the whole system. I get more state pension than my husband even though he worked many more years than me, because I’m older than him, had a better job and I was in SERPS. But my 91 year old DMiL gets more than either of us, even though she’s never worked, because she inherited her husband’s state pension. The figures you see quoted for both the old and new state pension scheme don’t give a very true picture.
And yes it seems unfair that you get pension credit if you’ve never worked, which is a gateway to other freebies, while if you’re just above the pension credit limit, you have to pay for those things.

I just realized its being counted as that, and edited accordingly. 🙂

They are in far from a better position when it comes to paying for care if they have assets.

Owning a house is irrelevant. It’s based purely on income, with a cap on savings.

I spent 18years raising a disabled child. No chance to earn a pension (yet!) I’m glad that safety net is there. I’m busy now paying into a private pension, trying to build savings whilst working and on UC so I’m limited to what I can save. I’ve only maybe 27/28yrs of investment instead of the 50 ish over my working life.

but fuck I am with you when I see people not even trying. I’m frustrated with my situation because it was beyond my control. But I’m making a point to fix it for myself.

I wish the system worked better but how do we fix it so workers have a fairer set up than those that don’t and those that can’t aren’t penalised?

Attendance Allowance is a disability benefit, albeit one without a mobility component.

People who become disabled after pension age can only get attendance allowance, which doesn't contain a mobility allowance as they are no longer expected to need to leave their homes.

Edited as I realize you're counting Attendance Allowance as a disability benefit

The premiums are for disability and or caring - not sure what other premiums you might be talking about.

Yes I'm not really talking about people who are carers and just getting the carers premium. I'm talking about multiple premiums building up on one claim which give some people huge amounts. I've had one couple recently getting £1500 a month in disability benefits and pension credits plus all rent and council tax paid. Neither needed to pay for carers. It's unsustainable.

And those who have saved towards a small extra pension will pay tax on that, too, so any rise in SP will be worth 20% less than it is for those on PC.

It's all very unfair, but what can be done without making a lot of older people very vulnerable?

Yes but they still have greater costs due to disability, hence the disability benefit. Premiums recognise this. And carers save the government billions each year, and most carers cannot get carer's allowance after state pension age and the premium is some redress for this.

There are no schemes like that now. My father worked in a decent job, my mum worked part time in a shop. They both retired at 55 with final salary pensions. My mum now makes more in pensions than I make working full time, she also owns her home outright! I will never have that kind of life as a prndionrt,