45% of working age people not saving toward a pension at all

My next-door neighbour’s wife died of cancer leaving him with a disabled child. The first thing he did was put the kid into full-time state funded residential care.
If more parents/carers did that, perhaps they would take the role more seriously.

The 5% are just those actively looking for work

I believe 5% are those claiming JSA. People who are actively looking but not claiming wouldn't be part of this stat. And yes, about 25% of working age population are economically inactive.

I've never earned enough to save for a pension, will have to rely on the state pension

I agree that anyone who can pay in absolutely should and it needs to be a high priority.

But that’s 25% of working age people not working, hence presumably not saving into a pension. Leaves 20% of employed people making inadequate provision, which might be younger people or people who absolutely cannot save right now due to cost of living.

I would say, even £100 a month (if you can) really increases with compound interest. Plus then the government top up

11 million working age people are out of work. Not all will be claiming benefits. But only three quarters of people of working age are in employment of any kind

That's nice for you.

This is a totally average percentage though and many countries with virtually no welfare state have a higher percentage of their working age population not working.

25% of working age people don’t work. The 5% are just those actively looking for work

This.

I think that's comparing apple and pears somewhat. The point is that children once they become adults are independent financially, as well as in every ither way. However, if that adult is not able to live and work independently and needs round-the-clock care, the/one parent either cannot work as they are fulfilling this role and gets a paltry contribution towards unpaid work or if they are unable or unwilling to do this, some kind of permanent residential care will need to be found which the state will probably have to fund. The first option is therefore by far the most cost-effective from the point of view of the government!

Do you have disabled children ? Have you any idea how much it costs to support a disabled family member ? 60 years ago putting a disabled child into care was the norm. It was horrendously expensive. The introduction of disability benefits changed all of that and was considerably cheaper than 24/7 care. The institutions closed and care in the community became the norm. Now the focus is on how much that costs - on the expense of disability benefits with no recourse to how much more it would cost to provide full time care for the people in receipt of them.

A measure of civilised society is how it provides for the sick, the disabled and the elderly. We’re failing on all three. ‘Soft value’ is a sickening term to describe the lives of those who are vulnerable.

I'm not rich. Our household income is under £60k with two full-time workers.
But i think your attitide pretty much sums up the way lifestyles have crept way beyond what they used to be. And what used to be considered a extra - eg a holiday - is now seen as a basic need.
We are constantly told on here that families are spending every penny and struggling to make ends meet, yet when i walk past a nursery in my very working class area, you can't move for SUVs no more than three years old.
Soft play, play cafes, takeaway coffee shops, ice cream parlours, nail bars, beauticians, tanning shops, vape shops, endless hairdressers, dog grooming shops - someone must be using these places, yet they none of them existed 40 years ago.
So every penny may be being spent - but is driving a car far bigger and newer than really needed, getting a dog groomed, a couple of takeaway coffees a week and a soft play session really more important than a pension?

I was interested by an article I read a year or so ago, I think it was Martin Lewis. Apparently, there's been a rise in people with private pensions cashing them in early as a lump sum to hand over to their kids to get them on the housing ladder/contribute to uni fees/ whatever is needed, leaving themselves much worse off for their retirement. Naturally, he advised against this.

The increase in people having children at an older age is having an impact on what people do with their pension pots, with more hitting late 50s with teenagers still at home and elderly parents needing care. It's tempting to see that sum of money becoming available as a lifeline for today rather than to keep you tomorrow.

In addition you have people headless-chickening about their children having to pay IHT without thinking about their own needs whilst they are still living.

One of whch is this poster. Actually. Carers are tax payers too. You clearly have no fucking idea how much unpaid carers save the state, so why the hostility ?

Many people may have been unaware of them and not done the required research to find out but that’s not the same as @Katypp ’s claim that they “didn’t really exist”. They have existed for almost 4 decades now.

To be honest it’s a lame excuse regardless because anybody responsible would have saved some of the money earned over their lifetime, in normal investments outside a pension wrapper if they were oblivious to the existence of pensions. Yet the people who makes these types of comments about how it was impossible for them to save a single penny of their lifetime earnings (when their working-aged life coincided with the most prosperous period in recorded history!) are usually the same economic illiterates who start banging on about how young people are lazy (when working aged welfare is still pretty much the same proportion of GDP that it’s been for many decades now and employment participation is at an all time high, as are average working hours…) because they simply refuse to accept that their entitled claims that they should receive far more in state services and welfare than they ever paid are supremely selfish and unsustainable.

It’s classic “whataboutery” to try to displace the blame, even though the national statistics refute their claims entirely. When that’s pointed out usually there’s a 4 Yorkshireman-style skit with their personal anecdotes as if these somehow disprove societal-level data sets. 😏🤔🙄

And praise the Lord you never had to make that choice.

@DrRylandGrace the pension industry did an inadequate job of publicising the existence and utility of SIPPS for the first ten or 15 years after they were created. There was little or no marketing spend devoted to raising awareness. I only discovered them because, as a freelance writer specialising in financial services (with previous work experience in pension marketing) I was engaged to revamp all the personal investment literature for one of the largest insurance firms.

When we set ours up in about 2001, it was the first one that the IFA recommended by our accountant had ever done so we learnt our way through it together. Thereafter, the same team did quite a few more, mostly for the owners and directors of small companies who bought the property occupied by their businesses and paid the rent to their own SIPP.

Are you kidding.
Did you not read because of the child’s disabilities, she could have gone into supported living at 16 thereby costing the government millions.

3.4% of the UK population which is employed is employed via zero hour contracts. It’s negligible and certainly not the reason why 45% of people aren’t saving for a pension per the article the OP linked.

This is primarily young people working flexibly around studying (12.5% of 16 to 24 year olds in employment have zero hour contracts) whereas for those in employment who are aged 25 to 64 the percentage is just 2.4%. Most of those are also people who want flexible/ optional work for various reasons (ill health, caring responsibilities etc).

What percentage of people works on 0 hours contracts for less than the minimum wage per hour where travel in between appointments isn't considered work and you they get paid per mileage? The answer - loads

SIPPs have been available in the UK since 1988. How old are you that you’ve had no opportunity over the last 37 years to use one? To have retired in 1988 at say 60 years old you’d have to be 97 by now. In which case you are excused for not having a private pension fund. Otherwise, it’s a lame excuse. And even before SIPPs were established it was still perfectly possible to invest your money post-tax, just as people still do today in addition to having pensions.

Yes, by far the majority is small funds that had been forgotten about. The long-delayed plans to build a platform to identify all funds in a person’s name and offer a simple way to transfer them together - if beneficial - may reduce this in time.