To cry over state pension age speculation rise to 75-81

[feellikeahugefailure]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/georgeosborne/12179375/Work-till-youre-75-or-even-81-under-Government-review-of-state-pension-age.html

Where has it all gone wrong? My parents could buy a home one one income for 3 times annual wage. Dad retired at 55, mum never needed to work and has been claiming a state pension for over a decade since 60. I do a similar job to my dad.

Where I live the average house price is 13 times my wage. My pension I've been paying into for over 10 years will if I keep paying into it for almost 40 more years give me 2'000 a year if it does averagely and 1'000 if it does poorly, and it probably will do poorly. Then no state pension until I'm about to drop dead. Can't afford a house or to put money away for retirement.

People need to stop thinking the state will provide for them. Because there is no such thing as the 'state' - only other people working and paying taxes!

My DCs are now putting money into their own pensions in their 20s because they are bright enough to know that the state pension may not exist in 40 years and if it does will be worth very little.

If people looked after their health more then they would be fitter in old age. Early retirement applied so that men working in physical jobs- factories, mines etc, could have some kind of life after work and life expectancy was very low.

This has changed. Most people are living for 20 years post retirement. They have very good lives - money for cruises and other holidays, new cars etc. Not all ,but an awful lot. They also often work as volunteers proving they have the ability to work , so why shouldn't they be doing it as an employee?

The way forward is a staggered retirement so that people gradually work part time and are eased into retirement. Look at actors- Judi Dench and Maggie Smith going strong still in their 80s. Presidents of the US in their 70s ( historically).

People of my generation are surely likely to live until 100 or thereabouts (I am 32)

I'm also 32. I fucking hope I don't live until 100.

All the people I know in their 80's now, retired around 55 - 60. I think they are living longer because they have had no stress and time to exercise and enjoy themselves. Even the jobs they retired from were relatively stress free compared the the equivalent today. Teachers in the days when it was an easy profession and office workers when you weren't expected to be constantly available due to mobile phones & emails.

Younger generations will now be working until we are around 70. The stress of this and the fact that generally now 1 person does the work of around 2-3 people years ago will mean life expectancy will be reversed and we will start dying younger again.

I'm a 50yo GP & plan to retire at 60, when my pension will be around £21,000*, according to predictions. If I go before, which I'd like to do, it will be much, much less than that.

I can't imagine being a GP into my 70s or 80s - keeping up to date & managing the workload is already very difficult. I certainly wouldn't want my surgeon husband & his colleagues operating on people into their old age

I don't expect I'll stop working completely, but will move out of medicine altogether - anything would do - I'll be bored just "being retired" & will not be well enough off to splash money around on unlimited travelling.

*probably less than many of you might have thought - I have worked part-time for some of my career, also certain GP jobs have not been pensionable over the years

I can't think of anything worse than working until I'm in my 80s - I want some time to enjoy life, not work until I'm about to drop dead. I work to pay the bills, nothing else. Someone once told me they worked to live, not lived to work and I've always thought that's a good attitude.

What do the optimists think we can and should do?...

Look after your health
Keep up to date with technological and cultural changes
Be open minded, no one can know how things will pan out

"What do the optimists think we can and should do?..."

A few thoughts for a start

1. Rebuild the social housing stock
2. Rebalance rental contracts not back to where they were pre Thatcher, but tilted a little more back towards the tenant
3. Reintroduce a state 2nd pension scheme
4. Encourage a situation whereby people expect their careers to be a bell curve, winding down rather than working full tilt then stopping (maybe eg a GP moving into medical sales / health promotion?)
5. Address inequality as a number onen priority - there's an excellent book by Tony Atkinson called 'Inequality, what can be done' which I don't agree with in toto, but has lots of good starting point suggestions.

Basically, until we address inequality and the housing crisis, we'll never come up with a decent solution to the demographic problems that doesn't involve many people ending up in desperate poverty in their old age.

My father worked full time as a doctor until 77. Some people want to work until they are older. In fact a lot of his patients got depressed when they retired - you lose a sense of purpose. Work can keep you happy actually although the lazier amongst us may not like that idea. It gives you a focus to the day and keeps you young.

@AliceInUnderpants,

I'm also 32. I fucking hope I don't live until 100.

Ask yourself this question when your 99? Maybe you'll have a change of opinion.

I don't think not wanting to work until you're in your 70s or 80s is necessarily lazy. For me it's about wanting time to enjoy life and I could definitely find a focus to the day without sitting at a desk!

My DH started pensions for our DCs when they were born. The contributions are seriously tiny, but the idea is that they will make a small difference when they eventually retire and hopefully develop a good saving habit. My DD 'took hers over' when she reached 18 but he will continue making the contributions til she leaves university. If it works it will mean they pay in at least something throughout their working lives instead of not thinking about it until later on. I remember sitting in a pensions seminar in my 20s at work and thinking, 'what's the point of this'...

Jizzy- obviously some people
May still have mortgages after the standard term of repayment. Maybe they remortgaged and agreed to work later (currently you must sign an undertaking to agree to this if you want to borrow money not die to be paid back until after standard retirement) but we can't make a nationwide policy based on those people.

Most men die before they are even 75! I doubt it, the news is full of how NHS is broke and doctors refusing more work out of hours. By the time we get to old age, NHS won't be free anymore and we wouldn't end up living longer.

We need to get away from this whole rhetoric of hard-working versus lazy. It's a fiction that has been created to discipline gullible people into doing what those that benefit from the system want them to do.

This is a very good article on it, through the lens of the Robin Hood tax (waits for people to say 'that's longer than 2 paragraphs, I'm not reading that because I'm too productively busy').

www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james-meek/robin-hood-in-a-time-of-austerity

waits for people to say 'that's longer than 2 paragraphs, I'm not reading that because I'm too productively busy'

Too productively busy reading a 166+ message thread on MN.

It is all very well people thinking its ok to work into your 70s and 80s, but totally unrealistic. Do they realise many people have health issues of some sort after 60? Or even earlier. People must get to a point where they can't work.
Do they realise that if you lose your job in your 60s, no one wants to employ you?
Its all very well saying everyone should provide for their old age but there are millions on people who struggle to pay their rent and for necessities and cannot afford to put by enough into a pension.
Just because there are people who have had a good income, provided well for their future and have stayed healthy, it doesn't mean everyone is able to do that.
It is bloody depressing to think you will have to work until you die and worse, won't ever even reach the age when you can claim your money.
I would like to know how many people die before they ever got to claim their State pension.

Shovetheholly I'm with you!

People may live to be 80+ but are they healthy enough to be working?

At work there a few 70+ staff, some have had to take long periods off sick which has meant increased expense for the employer. Maybe this is why empoyers don't want to take on elderly people?

I do feel cheated. I am in my early 50s, have been working all my adult life and paying into pension funds, and paying taxes. Now, when it is a bit late to do much about saving more, the rules have changed (again). It's hardly surprising that I feel sad about it.

I think after WW2 there was a strong feeling that we should all work for the collective good, that everyone deserved good healthcare, a good education and care when vulnerable. This has apparently been replaced by the view that we should all work for ourselves, if not that it is every man for himself, and that there is a selfish scrounger at every turn who can and must be stopped, whatever the collateral damage to the innocents they hide among. This is the result.

Headline should be reworded: "Retire whenever you want on your own dime".

I currently save 18% of my salary into pension savings and have done so for the past 9 years (I am 29). I know that not everyone is capable of this but the old age pension should only really be a safety net not something to be relied on for comfort.

I am very much in favour of these sorts of changes.

The rules are bound to change...any preparation for the future is a gamble because no one can foresee the future

Yeah, I am a bit of a Puritan & believe that people who can work should work. If ill health prevents that then there is option of disability benefits or drawing on private pensions earlier. It's not like we're in a system with no welfare state or ever likely to be. An arbitrary number of "65 now so you are not too old to work"... that devalues people, if anything.

I've been on loads of volunteer committees, we are overwhelmingly FT or near-FT workers. Actually, I can't think of a single volunteer on my committees who was/is retirement age although one committee is trying to recruit a guy who is retired. The one (sort of) voluntary group I know of who are heavily represented as disabled or retirement age are PPI reps who have to meet in middle of a week day. And that isn't all good because other groups lack input to NHS research.

Talk about older adults 'stealing' jobs upsets me. Or immigrants 'taking all the jobs'. An economy doesn't work like that. . More people means more jobs for everyone, on avg. each working person generates more work for others.

Just wait the new employee/employer pension contributions have just started at ludicrously low introductory rates. These will be ratcheted up very soon so it will be at least 10% contribution from both!! Watch this space.

I paid into my pension starting at 21. It will not pay much out at all at age 60, in spite of paying in continuously. I would have been better just spending that money on having a good time.

I am in my 50's. It is too late for me to do much about this. Pensions are a gamble and always will be. The rules change all the bloody time.

And I don't know any adults in their 70's without health problems. Most could manage a day a week working in an easy job, but most do not have access to that. We can't all be consultants.

Incidentally the people I know who have worked into their mid 70's more than very very part time, have all died on the job of heart attacks.