Women's state pension age: Parliament debate - add your views?

Is that a reason to just lie down & be walked on?

Whenever I used to say that something wasn't fair, my father used always to say "life isn't fair". He was right, it isn't - and never will be.

life expectancy and health are still (and i'd be willing to be now increasingly) issues of economics and class and gender btw. so essentially those working class people still dying off young relative to their rich peers would be taking 6 or 7 more years work and tax contributions on the chin in order to pay for the retirements of the richer of their generation who could afford to retire younger and with better health and longer life expectations ahead of them. hardly seems fair and yes, looks a lot like serfdom.

we don't work only to support ourselves though itmustbe - we work as a collective, a society, and we pay taxes and NI to take care of our collective needs and as part of a contract which shouldn't have it's termed changed by the party with all the power. we also raise children, care for elderly relatives, volunteer, are happy to contribute to the costs of looking after the sick and elderly, pay overseas aid, take in refugees, uphold the roads and infrastructure and the arts and education, etc etc all of which contributes to that society and uphold our end of the contract. we DON'T live in a system or an ideology where we just work to support ourselves and ourselves only

if the contract becomes work till the day you die, watch every public service (and the jobs they were made up of) be slashed to nothing, have the rules changed at whim etc without any consultation whilst the rich keep raking it in and profiting from selling off and cutting everything, avoiding even paying tax and those in power take care only of their own groups interests then that contract has been torn up.

note also these changes disproportionately effect those who have the least power to influence policy and the least ability to financially prosper.

it's not as simple as oh look it's a balancing of the books sillies. there is ideology, class, power, gender, protected interests etc involved. working to support yourself is dead simple sounding and neutral if you don't factor in these elements and take myopic and frankly deliberately deceiptful meritocracy type perspectives of reality and society.

And the statistics about life expectancy are always based on babies born now. It is lower for people born in the 50's.

That is the issue. The changes were made far too quickly for older women to make additional provisions for their pensions.

Slaves? Really? Working to support yourself is slavery?

There needs to be provision for people who are too old to work, simple as that. No one is entitled to a long leisurely retirement just because, unless they're funding it themselves. Although I agree the changes have been made too quickly for the current generation of retirees, who couldn't plan for what they didn't know would happen.

I'm starting to believe more and more in the conspiracy theorists/ factists that people are slaves. Work them till they drop. There's always more to replace them.

Fill them full of medications with horrible side effects...that should help them on their way a bit quicker.

Cynical old me I know but older people are not revered In our society. I cannot think of a time inmy lifetime where they were.

I agree with needs anecdotal evidence that people aren't living longer.

I believe we are fed so much propaganda that in the end we start to believe it. In the recent deaths of family and friends of the last 18 months out of just four people not one reached 65. The other three men were 55, 57 and just 60! They didn't even get to claim.

Pensions require long term planning. But how can people plan long term, if Governments change the rules. For most people a private pension will only ever top up a state pension, never replace it.

I also do not understand how young people are going to live to such an old age, when we also have an obesity crisis and supposedly this generation will be the first to die before their parents. It simply does not add up.

I don't know how people are expected to work into their late 60 s or even early 70s.

It's just ridiculous.

My DH took early redundancy at 58. With many years in computers and even having his own businesshe thought he would walk into a job. He didn't. In 6 months he had five interviews and got down to the last two or three but was never offered the job. Disillusionment set in . He felt he was there to make the numbers up. Now at nearly 63 he's not decrepit but he's having health problems. A recent small stroke for eg has affected his field Vision so he cannot drive. He has the usual aches and pains of a 63 year old. He didn't have a physical job. I feel for those, men and women that do.

Is there another cynical ploy/ agenda to kill us all off. Apart from those with dementia living until their late 80s or 90s ( my own theory is lack of stress and care home nursing keeping them ticking over) the only other long livers I know about are the royal family. ( lack of stress/ good health care?)

That's a really good idea 80's mum.

fuck that idea - many, many people don't live till 80 and a vast number of people could never secure personal savings and pensions to be able to retire without a state pension.

it would see working class people, people who were carers for a long period of their life or suffered ill health and disability or were sahp with partners who then died young or became disabled or buggered off and left them with nothing etc working till they died or being forced to live with the humiliation of benefits assessments etc until their dying day.

It is awful that these changes were made for women so close to retirement. How can women save more money for their pension when they are suddenly told very close to retirement, that they are going to have to work another 6 years. Totally unfair.

The calculators are of course only a guide, based on averages.

None of us knows how many years we will have to support ourselves in retirement - and that's the problem with retirement saving. How can I tell if I have enough saved to retire in 2 years time, when I will be 60, when I don't know if I will need to finance 10 years or 40 years?

My father died a few weeks after his 70th birthday. My mother is still ticking along at 89 and in good health (her mother lived to 97). Will I take after my mother or my father? Or neither?

Here's a radical idea. What if state pension was payable from the age of 80 and it was actually enough to live on? That would mean that I could be certain that, if I retired at 60, I would have a maximum of 20 years to finance. It would be so much easier to plan.

Of course, the pension age can't suddenly be changed to 80, but it could be phased in, so that anyone aged under 20 today would know that their state pension age is 80 and could plan accordingly. People slightly older today would receive theirs proportionately earlier. This could be phased in over a period of 60 years, so everyone would have plenty of notice.

Pension saving should be made compulsory and a person's pension savings should be protected by the state and not subject to the fluctuations on the stock market.

The calculators have predicted that I'll live to 94, 94 and 95. I doubt it, frankly.

The scary bit is where one of them tells you that you can expect to have however many more years to live. Mine said 58 years, but what if it says 2 or something like that?

I got 76 and 81 on the other two calculators. I think 76 is more likely for me, and I deserve more than ten years of pension! Somewhat off topic, I guess, but it certainly adds to the stress that's shortening my life.

Wow - on those calculators I get 92,93 & 95 !

I'm another one affected - now 60. Luckier than most on here because I have an occupational pension and was offered early retirement. I don't have many years in it as I was busy with children, but it gives me about 3k a year. I had planned to work till 66 to build up that pension, but my employer was making redundancies and basically asked for volunteers to jump. I decided that early retirement was the more sensible option than redundancy. I'm living on savings. When that runs out I will sell the house and downsize. as I say - one of the lucky ones but I do have friends in much worse situations. One, a teacher, is signed off work with ptsd following an incident with a teenage boy - she is horrified at the thought that she will have to keep working to 66.

Couple more calculators
www.confused.com/life-insurance/life-expectancy-calculator
media.nmfn.com/tnetwork/lifespan/#0

I lost 8yrs on last one for having used recreational drugs (oops)

It thinks I'm going to live to 89! I so am not

That calculator probably works much better for people who are in their twenties or early thirties.

I think that Aviva calculator may be on the optimistic side (which makes sense in making sure people don't underestimate their longevity). It estimates my life expectancy as 94, and thinks it's more likely that I'll live to 100 than I'll die in my mid-80s.

This Life Expectancy Calculator is a good rough guide.

'Average' person living 30 years past retirement? What does this mean? Some people are living until they are 110 and some are only living until 75? And I agree, people living until they are 90/95 is still rare

Yep - UK life expectancy expected to rise to late 80s by 2030, NHS.

And that is for babies born in 2030.

For people born in the 1950s it is 65-70!
But if we live past 65, we can expect an average of 20 years more.
overview
data
Perhaps the govt wants to shorten that by giving us more stress & less comfort??
Male life expectancy is going up faster than female, btw.

it's beyond difficult to believe. no one on my father's side of the family has lived past 72 (working class and worked full on their whole lives from a very early age) - they didn't get much out of their pensions.

i'd rather they added an element of means testing before they started depriving people who have worked hard for 50 years on low wages of a decent retirement age. why make someone who has done that keep working in a job that they're no longer really fit enough for and in fact is seriously damaging their health now but can't afford to stop for an extra five years to pay the pension of people who have hundreds of thousands of pounds in savings?