to call people out on their public sector pensions when they complain about changes and insist they are self funding as is

[sPJPPp]

Got into a bit of a discussion with someone I don't know that well, anyway she was complaining about her pension changes and kept insisting it was self funding (civil service). I just started a nodathon, but I wanted to tell her it sounds a lot better than my private pension and hers even with paying a bit more money for a few more years is probably still massively unfunded.

Aibu to actually tell her what I think next time?

Mm well completely fucked off with my nhs job, transferred to the same job in the private sector, 10% pay rise and bonus.....and other perks
Pension not as good but with my extra pay I can put something away .
Pension isn't the only thing to decide on regarding a job , I would have been far better off in the private sector for the last 22 yrs eprather than the nhs

Public sector workers are obliged to join their pension scheme and contribute a large percentage of their salaries each month. The pension fund may well be badly managed but that's not the fault of the employee.
Private sector have got away with offering crap pension schemes or none at all. Work place pensions are now being phased in but no one knows if they will be any good.

To have the benefits of the pension you've been contributing to for years changed and cut without consultation must be galling.

I find pointing out public service workers, who pay into a pension, only qualify for basic state pension, unlike all my private pension friends, who get a "contributions" based one. this I think you will find is not self funding and is subsidised by taxes.
Oh and one of my public service pensions is self funding and doing so well it is in surplus, the Daily Mail decided to have a pop at it... For being invested in "unethical" companies...oh do fuck offs DM!

I work in the public sector and have a pension. I agree rhat the terms used to be quite good, it was one of the benefits of working in the public sector.

However, the situation has changed massively. I still contribute a fair chunk of my (pretty low) salary but now the terms are that it's a career average rather than final salary which completely screws someone like me who opted to spend 10 years of my career working part time whilst the dc were small. I might have made different choices had I known what the pension situation would be. It's hard to pay into a pension for 20 years and then have the terms and conditions totally changed.

I also now have to wait until im 68 to get my pension.

So yes, yabu.

YA definitely NBU

DH is in NHS pension scheme and expects to retire on at least 50k a year. His consultant colleagues often go through a series of pseudo-promotions and clinical excellence awards for the sole purpose of bumping up their final salary and inflating their retirement amount. He still complains that his T&C's have changed and it's less generous than it was. One of our friends is an actuary and explained to us both how large the fund required to provide his pension would be. He has stopped moaning!

The question of whether or not a scheme is self-funding is a bit of a red herring. It is only a snapshot and the fact that it is self-funding/contributing to HM Treasury now does not mean that it will still be doing so in 10 or 20 years. For example, there was an expansion in the number of NHS staff under the last Labour government. Right now, everything is rosy because they are all contributing into the pot to pay out a smaller number of pensioners - but liability for their pensions when they retire is enormous.

meandjulio

May I ask how old you are, what you do for a living and a rough, ball park figure for your current earnings?

The reason I ask is that we have just had an professional valuation of my DH's pension pot.

He's in his early fifties, a fairly senior professional who has worked and paid pension contributions for 35 years, he's on a very healthy six figure salary and has been for quite a few years now. He has had a mixture of company and personal contributions paid into several pension schemes across several large, household name employers.

The overall cash worth of his pension as it stands now and the amount that we are currently considering transferring out to various investment vehicles is just shy of 1 million.

If we leave it where it is, would anyone like to have a guess at what it will pay out when he reaches retirement age?

I don't moan about my pension changes to friends in the private sector and in return they don't go on to me about their bonuses, company cars and private health insurance. I guess it's why we're all still friends

Very sensible Flo. Along with never discussing politics and religion should also be never discuss your earnings and benefits!

I think tbh people should be thankful we have a functional economy, bank bailouts and QE and low interest rates have stopped a financial meltdown and serious civil unrest..
Instead of moaning about how hard they think they work and how they think the poxy contributions they make enable them to have a decent pension payout at the end..
There's tons of material on the Gaussian Copula function, cdo's, bond managers and investment banking, sovereign debt crisis etc,etc..
I'm just glad I can buy a loaf of bread in the morning..

and sorry, meant to point out in my post about DH's pension that he is, and always has been in the private sector.

What does 'call people out' mean?

Well we are all glad for that frank but some of us might be a bit miffed at having worked long hours in a difficult/stressful job for 30 years and having paid in quite large chunks of our own money each month to end up with the same loaf of bread as someone who hasn't.

apple and oranges, and all that.

Some public sector schemes are fully funded and not out of general taxation.

So I suggest you check your facts first.

And even if they're not - plenty of private sector schemes were the same. The reason for closing were because of a change in accounting rules which highlighted the future liabilities and changes to tax made by brown. Not because they couldn't meet payments to pensioners.

And actually public sector pensions are much more affordable ever since the labour party started making changes back in the 2000s.

I used to think like you, OP.

So you know what I did? I saw a job in the public sector, applied for it and got it. Now I have a "cushy" pension and decent maternity leave.

But I don't have all the perks of my old private sector job (foreign travel in swanky hotels, opportunity to earn overtime and expenses, opportunity to earn a higher wage).

Swings and roundabouts eh. If you feel so strongly, go work in the public sector.

Are you kidding Running? Regular business travel isn't fun, it's a tiresome drag no matter how swanky your hotel, and the inside of one office or airport looks much like another. If you get any breathing space to do a day's sightseeing you've done well, but lovely restaurant meals are spoilt by having to suck up to boring people in suits.

Also most people other than in pretty junior positions in the private sector can't claim overtime either, and are expected to stay until the job is done. Public sector people are far more likely to be able to claim overtime once their contracted hours are up. And you have the safety net of everything being more unionised and protected if a problem or conflict arises - it can be almost impossible to get rid of someone in the public sector even if they've proven time and again to be useless at their job.

Admittedly the salaries and bonuses are often better in the private sector, but even that is not always true. Some very senior public sector workers earn on a par with their counterparts in the private sector and get fantastic payoffs at the taxpayers expense to to go away quietly when they fuck up.

My comment on general taxation funding was aimed purely at the Civil service pension and the local govt pension scheme, not any others.

Interesting fact of the day - the average local government pension is £5000 a year. Yes, some people get more, but some people get less. Hardly gold plated.

I am delighted with my 1% pay rise this year!

Good for you daisychain. We haven't had ANY pay rise since the crash, we're very underpaid for what we do, and our entirely self-funded pension scheme is being switched in the middle from final salary to career average which will disadvantage women in particular. I could earn literally 100K more in the private sector with my skills and abilities. I chose to do this job because the pay used to be sustainable, the work is flexible....and the pension was reliable and sufficient. I'm losing A LOT of deferred salary in the changes.

Many public sector pensions are good compared with the alternative, yes. And many will have taken pension into account when opting for a public sector role.

At this particulsr point in time, with pensions reforms many people are seeing their pension contributions significantly increase for a lower payout, alongside multi-year pay freezes. So they are taking home less in their pay now - painful for many - for less than they expected in pension.

While many PS pensions will still be better than private sector (for now), I can empathise with those who now feel worse off, and who wonder how much they will actually retire on - as there are no guarantees.

Some very senior public sector workers earn on a par with their counterparts in the private sector and get fantastic payoffs at the taxpayers expense to to go away quietly when they fuck up.

Yes, that neve happens in the private sector, does it? Oh, wait...

Its the massive overhang of 'old' final salary public sector pensions that bother me. They were never funded properly and will carry on being paid well beyond my retirement out of the tax on my pension.

The 'new' career average public sector pensions with contribution from the employees are far less generous and in line with the private sector which does not bother me. It has been a long overdue reform. Its the public sector employees who downgraded the pensions of staff below them whilst retiring on a huge pension themselves which is causing the unrest. Yet again the boomer generation pulling up the ladder after them is what it is.

The implied value of the investment in an annuity with a private sector provider required to pay a final salary public sector pension is enormous. At current interest rates the pot required to pay out a guaranteed index linked £50k per annum pension for 30 years becomes £1.5 million - the reason being that index linked bonds are offering zero real return for 30 years. The mathematics of the annuity calculation means the annuity effectively is simply the total sum paid out per annum multiplied by the expected number of years of life after retirement.

Mind you, private sector pensions for Directors of big businesses are beyond all reason compared to the pensions ordinary employees get.

Dont I'm not sure which public sector staff you are familiar with, but it is exceptional for staff at any grade in my public sector to get paid overtime. It would be junior staff if they were (same as you say for the private sector you're familiar with).

OP - I believe what the person you've been talking with might be referring to is that the pension reforms have been designed to ensure that public sector pensions currently in payment do not exceed the current contributions from current public sector employees. So it is self-funding in the sense that it will be paid for in the same way that national insurance "pays for" anybody's benefits/state pension/NHS.

And I agree with the earlier comments that pensions should not be a race to the bottom - we all need to be able to make reasonable provision for later life. I do feel that the average salary scheme is a reasonable compromise, between affordability and the employer carrying the bulk of the risk, rather than the individual.

Don'tdrink - did you miss the bit where I was talking about my actual old job?! I wasn't talking about some idealised vision of the private sector.

The sort of foreign travel I did was very cushy indeed and didn't involve any suits. Can't say much for fear of outing myself. But it didn't involve business hotels or boring conferences. It was fab - but it had a shite pension, no stability, minimum mat pay.

Just saying there's good and bad in both - all - sectors.

Yyyy to the 'race to the bottom ' comment. Nasty spiteful uninformed comments about public sector pensions seem to be predicated on the fact that somehow the world would be a better place if we all had no or rubbish pensions. And public sector pensioners are not claiming pension credit are they? Whereas those who retire wth no pension are being subsidised by the tax payer by needing topping- up.

I never understand how people just lump public and private sector into two great binary sections. How is a nurse the same as a top ranking civil servant, or a consultant surgeon the same as a newly qualified teacher, or an admin clerk at the local council or sports centre manager or... There is such a range of jobs, and some are highly specialised and qualified and some are low-skilled.

Likewise in the private sector, you can't easily compare the single external employee in a small family firm against the thousands in a multinational corporate, and there are all the variations in between.