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

Dunno. Sounds good though doesn't it?

OK. So what are THEY doing about it?
Because pps on this thread have been very vocal about greedy, grasping and selfish boomers who deserve to be poor because they have not done anything to help themselves.
Yet ... it's apparently perfectly fine and understandable that 45% of today's workers (who have far more opportunities to pay into a pension than the despised boomers ever had) are not paying into a pension because ... because ....because.
I will say it again - there is nothing unique about the finances of today's young families. The circumstances they are living in are unique, but so were mine in the 80s/90s amid soaring interest rates, or the families living through the house price crashes of the late 90s/00s. The years of bringing up children have always been and always will be the most expensive of our lives.
You can't on one hand advocate for pensions to be scaled back but then not acknowledge this is likely to be an even bigger problem in the future. The ony difference is today's workers seem to know what they are doing in a way workers in the past didn't.

I started saving into my pension as soon as I had my first job that offered a match (2002). I figured if I did that I’d get used to not having it in the first place. Then every year when the personal tax allowance went up (hah, those were the days!) I’d increase the percentage I saved.

My pension pot is quite healthy now.

It’s almost too hard to start when you have a whole range of commitments but if we can encourage our young people to start in their first job then they can get used to the outlay. Then they can cut their cloth accordingly and hopefully never stop paying in.

DH and I have started stakeholder pensions for our DC. We only pay in £20 each per month but one DC has 48 years of growth and the other 52, so who knows!

Please explain “wasting their good fortune” when most people have done exactly what they’re supposed to: worked all their lives, bought a house, saved into a pension scheme. In what way is that waste?

Taking out even more? Eh?

They dont “blame” them for their good luck. They blame them for not acknowledging it, for taking out even more just because they can and for wasting their good fortune

dh and I are looking to retire soon. Our occupational pensions will be about 2k a month (DH) and 1650 a month for me (I went down to 3 days a week work for a short period of years when the kids were babies so my pension took a bit of a hit.) We’ll both get decent lump sums as well. When one of us dies, the other will get half of their monthly pension payments. The mortgage is paid off so we’ll be ok. We won’t get state pension until 66 and 7 months (DH) and 67 for me.

tbh there’s no way I’d want to live on the state pension alone. I’m very glad we both worked full time apart from that small number of pt years I did, and that I continued working during the bloody awful era of high interest rates and all my net pay going on the nursery bill.

It depends on multiple factors, of course. We're only semi-retired at 70, because DH is still running the business he started 34 years ago, although he's no longer hands on onsite. But he retains oversight of the commercial aspects, and is the memory bank for the company. I still look after the pension funds that we have, but not all the routine admin tasks which are mostly automated now.

Our home costs as much or more to run as ever, mainly because at 70 we don't have the stamina for a steeply sloped garden, so we need a contractor to do the heavy lifting. We shall move and downsize a bit, but we are also helping our DC with their rent in the Southeast for the next year or so. None of the everyday costs have gone down because we are retired: we have to eat and drink and stay warm. There's no longer a mortgage, which helps, but CT is £365 per month.

This makes sense. Given that 25% of working age population are economically inactive, 45% makes sense because is includes self employed who very frequently work cash in hand of have mechanisms to save under business umbrella

We have £3000 per month. No mortgage though. Direct debits are about £450, food, petrol etc about £550.

We pay council tax, car insurance and tax, football and golf season tickets and fees and tv licence from the interest on our savings yearly.

When we both get our SP we will have £5000 per month. First one in 3 years time.

The posters who are so venomous in their hatred of boomers obviously forget that many of us who they despise have adult children in their 20s and 30s and have a very good understanding of the particular challenges facing that generation. I can see that the housing market for renting or buying is the biggest challenge - and I wholeheartedly support far more and faster building of affordable homes and rent controls. The job market is also difficult, though less so if you’re prepared to do whatever job comes up. And many young people are sold a dud when it comes to university…. It was a ridiculous idea to aim for half of young people to go. There are way too many people in uni who just haven’t got the academic ability and would have been far better off learning a trade.

But when I look at my adult offspring, there are also a lot of advantages they have over my experience of living through my 20s and 30s. They’ve travelled much more widely and their social life at uni was unrecognisable from mine. When I went to university only 8% of people got in, there was no messing around with gap years, if you got in, you went, and lived a pretty frugal existence for 3 years.

My eldest dd has recently bought her first flat and even with the more recent hikes in interest rates, her fixed term mortgage is a far lower rate than we experienced. And interestingly when she came to furnish it, pretty much every piece of furniture/ white goods was the same price as 30 years ago - so in relative terms, way cheaper. In our early days of home ownership, Dh and I had to take on second jobs in the evening/ weekends as well as working full time - that was the reality of home ownership. And then of course the crash and negative equity which made us wish we’d never bought in the first place.

And perhaps one of the most important things: should my dd have a baby, she’ll have the right to a year mat leave (compared to the 12 weeks I had) and on her return to work will get free childcare hours (compared to the zero I got)

This is why spouting venom at any particular generation is utterly pointless. There are advantages and disadvantages to being born into any generation and it shows a real lack of intelligent thinking to just cherry pick the good bits and ignore the bad.

https://www.retirementlivingstandards.org.uk/

There are some figures here.

How much do people need to live on when they retire?

The same ones who raised their families at a time of double digit inflation, basic rate income tax at 35%, with NI on top and interest rates ranging from 7% to 17%.

Are these the same ‘bratty’ children who fought for things like equal pay, maternity leave and pay, workplace pension provision for women, better childcare and more - from which future generations continue to benefit ?

And some desperately poor ones.

Exactly!

It has now, don't know why I didn't do it straight away.

I’ve never understood why MN condemns and blames boomers for the economic climate they lived through. Are they saying that being presented with the same opportunities they would have done things differently ? And levelling accusations of boomers being self centred and bringing up their children to be the same, is a bit rich when you look at the levels of bad behaviour and entitlement from today’s children. We do the best we can with what we have at the time and everything is relevant to it’s time. Boomers were responsible for fighting for and securing a lot of the things subsequent generations have benefited from. Conveniently forgotten in the rush to condemn.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/pensions/state-pensions/triple-lock-cannot-last-forever-scrapping-it-now-disaster/

Apologies that this comes from the Torygraph (although there's something very similar in The Times today -- for all of the ancients who still read broadsheet news). Both are behind paywalls though.

Not every child is born disabled. Any child is an accident or illness away from a disability.

My son was born healthy (and 1 week late!), he became disabled literally overnight when he was 8 due to complications from an illness. I can't even begin to imagine the costs it required to not only save his life but everything else that followed and now the care and support he will need for the rest of his life e.g he needs 2:1 TA support at school. I'd argue that the cost regarding all of his care including past and now is probably even greater than a premature baby's care.

In general, I agree entirely.

Regarding infrastructure and our lamentable record on building anything to replace the crumbling Victorian legacy, it is noticeable that all our politicians and civil servants are incapable of managing contracts.

Why this should be I don't know, but it's a national disgrace. Norway finished a nine-mile undersea tunnel (Ryfylke) in 2019 that cost under one billion pounds. HS2 has already wasted £100 billion. Spain's Renfe has built a national high speed rail network, at much lower cost per kilometre. Every city in France with a population of over 150,000 has a tram system or a metro. Because the rails are fixed, developers can plan with some degree of certainty what and where new infrastructure and housing should go. Don't mention the scandalous cost of PFI schools and hospitals.

I'm not blaming any one party, but it suggests that somewhere sometime in the last 30 years we lost any will to take the public realm seriously.

I’m amazed it hasn’t been reported. Far more innocuous posts on this thread have been.

You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself for saying that. For so many reasons.

Well, they did do that between 1939-1945... They had special Drs in special camps. Generally, they are not praised for their efforts though. I wonder why? 🤔