to be scared of the future? what will become of people like us?? pensions / housing related

[applejacket]

dh is 42, i am 34, we don't own our house, and never likely to (bad credit in past plus not high enough income for mortgage and barely any savings for deposit etc). we rent a council house atm

dh has worked FT consistently since 15 but he has only just started paying into his company pension as they have to now. but will probably be worth fuck all when he retires

i am a SAHM with 2 dcs, 4 and 7, and one on the way , i worked from 16 - 26 full time and last couple of years have done a bit of self employed cleaning work but hardly anything really and not doing it anymore now i am pg.

dh earns ok money but not enough to either get a mortgage, or save anything. we don't struggle day to day at all really, but dont really have anything to save. and recently i have been really worried about the future

i am intending to go back to work when the dcs are older but god knows who would employ me, i have no qualifications other than some average gcse's and a levels from nearly 20 years ago. and i can't afford to re train in anything either

what will happen to us when we are older?? when we are still renting and retired? will we be homeless? tbh its the fact we are renting that scares me the most, i would feel so much more secure if we owned our house.

i honestly sometimes feel that our only hope is a lottery win or something

Ok, how does it work if you've been part time for a number of years (say lone parents) so worked but didn't earn enough to make NI contribitions?

Don't you also automatically get an NI "stamp" if you're claiming child benefit for a child under a certain age? Seven maybe?

Just checked. You get credits for children under 12 if you claim child benefit.

Ok thanks VivaLeBeaver

sleepyhead so if you need at leat 30 years of NI contributions what happens if someone does not meet that?

and is that 30 years of working full time?

i know someone who is approaching 50 bil and has barely worked all his life and has mostly claimed unemployment benefits, what would happen to someone like that for example?

and yeah i am sure i have heard somewhere that you get some sort of automatic NI contribution if you are claiming CB? might be wrong though

It isn't 30 years of working full time but there is a threshold of level of NI contribution you have to make.

Various other benefits such as JSA get you credit.

If you don't get 30 years, you get a reduced state pension. Many current pensioners do not get a full pension.

so the criteria for getting the full pension could conceivably be tightened in the future?

It has recently been loosened. You used to need 40 years of NI contributions.

Oh!

There used to be something called the Married Woman's Stamp which allowed women to forgo paying full NI contributions on their own account. The reasoning was that they could save on NI and then live off their husband's pension in retirement.

The result of that was a generation of married women who didn't qualify for their own pension, or qualified for a tiny pension. I remember when my aunt retired her state pension was something like £1.50 a week.

I suspect many divorced women of a certain age were royally screwed by that one.

And anyone who worked abroad for any length of time, inevitably has a reduced state pension.

aha ok thanks

am shocked at that married womans stamp thing, sleephead your poor aunt what happened with her then did she have a private pension as well to make it up? or did she have to claim benefits or something?

www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/pensions/article-2025686/Pensions-plight-forgotten-fiftysomething-married-women.html

Oh my aunt's fine applejacket. She has a University final salary pension, as does my uncle, plus they relocated from the SE to a much cheaper part of the country.

It worked out ok for her and she says they really appreciated the extra cash when they were younger and paying off an enormous mortage, but retrospectively it was a huge risk and many women of her age were not so lucky.

When the new single tier pension is introduced in 2016 everyone will need 35 years of NI contributions instead of 30 years.

oh thats good then sleepy re your aunt. and yeah i bet loads of women ended up in shit situations because of it :(

Can I jump on this thread to ask a question? I've seen anger on here about landlords. Can I ask why? Hubby and I lost our equity on our house when house prices dropped so we decided to rent it out and save a deposit to buy another house. As we are both self employed and don't have pensions we are planning on keeping the house, paying off the mortgage and living off the rental income in our old age. Pensions seem unreliable so keeping our savings in our rental property seems sensible. What's wrong with that?

I can understand why people get into BTL.
After Gordon McRuin raided pension funds people were looking for somewhere safe to put there money and what's safer than houses.

I guess part of the problem is that it means you're heavily invested in house prices continuing to rise and a buoyant private rental market. (you and a lot of other people).

So, you wouldn't be in favour of anything that made property more affordable or capped private rents at an affordable level, because it would be bad for your investment, and that puts you at odds with those struggling to get a foot on the ladder or finding themselves paying out large proportions of their income on mortgage or rent payments.

We'll always need private landlords, although personally I'm hugely in favour of social housing in public hands, but "accidental" or amateur investor landlords often don't realise their obligations and may not treat their tenants well (caveats re: good landlords/bad tenants etc).

It's interesting though, sleepy. The stories I hear about bad landlords tend to be cynical people not carrying out proper repairs and legal checks, and expecting people to live in damp and unsafe housing.

I believe that a lot of the problem is actually landlords who runs buy to let business with multiple properties and a very small profit margin, who sail barely inside the law.

Small private landlords who have just one property and take a pride in giving good value for money and treat their tenants well, don't seem to me to be the main issue.

I disagree sleepyhead. I was an accidental landlord for a while, I knew my obligations, managed my property myself and treated my tenants very well, indeed we are still friends.

However the professional landlard we rented off was a tight-fisted twat who never sorted repairs and put the property on the market 2 weeks after we reluctantly agreed to pay more rent (we didnt want the hassle of moving)

Just my experience.

I don't think what I wrote precludes the existence of decent amateur landlords or complete bastard professional ones, and as in all things there are the shades of grey in between...

Of course that is true, sleepy. You said it could go either way.

From what I see in the local press, there is a bigger social problem with badly run BTL businesses trying to maximise profits and minimise expenditure. The little landlords, if that's the right phrase, tend to be a bit less financially stringent about what they will spend. But of course there are also people who stumble into it, let with no contract, don't declare tax and generally make a pigs breakfast out of mantenance and safety.

I would be all in favour of national registration of all landlords and unannounced inspections of rented properties.

Oh ok. We don't have a BTL business and we have a good relationship with our tenant, his rent is fair and we deal with maintenance issues promptly.