Pensioners now better of than working families - is this right?

[TeaCake5]

www.theguardian.com/money/2017/feb/13/pensioners-now-20-a-week-better-off-than-working-households

What do you think? I think that this is going to cause more resentment in the medium term.

I hate the idea that generations are being compared.- the truth is the younger generation has got a rotten deal since the financial crisis.
I have just retired, aged 60, worked really hard both of us, we are not wealthy but we have managed to accrue a little pile of money via property price rises and always buying " doer uppers" which we worked hard on at weekends and after work.
We are OK, can still afford a holiday. We have 6 kids and have tried to help them all with the proceeds when we downsized.
One thing is for sure, there is a much bigger gap now between the well off and people on a normal wage. When I started work the local health Service manager lived in our community - in a bigger house admittedly just like the Drs he worked with. Bonuses were not part of the vocabulary - you got a voucher for a turkey at Christmas! Let's address that huge inequality rather than one generation being pitted against another.

Well I'm just into my 60's, I was stuffed over by the mortgage companies with endowments which I have no redress against having taken it out in '82. My dh had a major accident 2 years later so we were never in a position to pay anything into a pension fund, we survived on my humble income and his disability benefits but I made sure my mortgage was paid along with what turns out now to have been pointless endowment payments. Now Im approaching retirement age only to be hit by 2 hammers, incurable cancer which the NHS say they can't afford to treat as they did in the past and a rise in my entitlement age to a pension. So don't you dare say that we are better off than the younger generations. Every penny for every bill was hard earned, we went without and didn't run up bills or take foreign holidays. But now I'm not even getting another stem cell transplant nor am I entitled to pension credit in my own right for over another 5 years even though I can't work now. If my dh dies before I hit retirement age I will be living in poverty. I'm planning on selling my hard worked for home so that we can build a granny flat onto the side of one of our dc's homes, move in there and live off the equity in single storey accommodation with my wheelchair and the walk in shower I need, I can't afford to sell my house and buy a bungelow, the costs of moving etc are crippling, but even doing what I'm doing the powers will hammer us again and instead of leaving anything to our DCs they will get nailed for higher council tax when we die. I have to make sure we don't build anything too big and that we spend the rest of what life I have left in a 'home' no bigger than a holiday caravan! So lucky aren't we? Don't envy me, use that energy more constructively. I'm not bitter, just bloody annoyed sometimes especially when our goalposts are moved and the youngsters are so busy being jealous they don't see it.

Sally im so sorry to hear this

It is an MN myth that older people arent being hammered.

And mixed age pensioner couples will be affected by UC They will both be classed as being of working age even if the older half of the couple is is their 70s or 80s if the younger one is under 65.

It really annoys me when say the older generation have "worked all their life", as if young people are liable to down tools indefinitely any minute. Younger generations are working hard, and will continue to work hard well over 65, they just haven't had the whole life yet to work through.

Not all the older generation have worked all their lives though, have they - house wives (not SAHM) are practically non existent these days - whereas in my mum and definitely grandmas generation, they were normal to be a housewife with no kids at home. These woman didn't retire early, they just didn't work, and financially relied upon others to pay the bills

Same as not all of the younger generation have, for genuine reasons or otherwise

PandorasAlmightyBox

Ops sorry phone crashed

Apparently, the Guardian had another article yesterday about us old folk and what we've got away with. However the figures on which these articles are based does not include people in care homes. A bit odd that.

Like other posters we would just love to have an income even close to the average working wage, but that's never going to happen.

Yes, highly paid civil servants almost certainly do get a pension higher than the working wage, but there are certainly a lot of us who don't. Depending on who you believe, it's possible to say for some the average pay out is anywhere between £4044 and £7388. Also the local government scheme is a funded scheme, "The liability for pensions is not a direct burden upon the taxpayer, as it makes use of investments whose income exceeds the benefits it receives from the public sector," Local Government Association.

The doctor's pension scheme is heavily in the black as well.

As a Trade Union activist in the 1980's I can assure you that the public sector unions were pleading with Saint Maggie to make our pension schemes funded ones. She declined because the Treasury told her the government was making far too much profit on what we paid in to the scheme. In those days the average length of pay out was five years. How times change.

I object to pensions that I've paid for being called benefits, however, I do think benefits such as Winter Fuel Allowance and Free TV Licence should be treated as taxable income. In fact I think it would be better for our £100 WFA to be used as a National Social Care Fund.

And wonder of wonders, when I reach 80 in a couple of months my State Pension will increase by 25p a month! I promise to be careful as I have all my life.

In any case - where is it written in tablets of stone that retired people must be worse off than they were when they were working?

The classic idea was 2/3rd of final salary ( very high rare pension these days) was enough because you were no longer paying for children nor paying a mortgage and most people do need less in retirement than when working.

Plenty of older (and younger) people are pretty badly off.

I do think protecting state pension three ways however is ridiculous when inflation is really low! No one else is getting that kind of protection. okay by all means increase it by a link to prices but not a higher pecentage even if there are price falls and that kind of thing.

Yes Enormous we do need less for every day living. We were told (in the public sector) that it's right to pay you less than the private sector because we will give you a pension, when you retire. Once again I say, 'How times change'.

The triple lock was ridiculous, particularly ridiculous because I don't recall anyone asking for it. It was done to bribe me to vote for the Tories. Certainly failed in my case.

Pandora the women back then were only doing what was expected of them.

Should they now be penalized again for being victims of sexism back then and doing what was the thing back then.

Pandora as recently as the 1970s, some women were made redundant from their jobs as soon as they were married. They wanted to work, and their employer didn't allow it. When I joined the workplace in the late 1990s I had a colleague, then only in her 40s, who had been the very first employee who had been allowed to retain her employment after marriage, and she had had to fight very very hard to do so.

It was perfectly normal for married women to work in the 70s.

Although it was probably expected that they left once they had children and I guess for many this went hand in hand

The only problem I can see is the attitude that 'they worked hard for it'. I work bloody hard and won't have a fraction of the pension they have, I'm already 10 years behind them because I couldn't afford to buy a house till my 30's.

Chatting to my dad today about pensions, he started claiming his main one at 54 (nearly 20 years ago now) when he retired. He only started paying into it at 33. He worked before then, but in various training roles that didn't count. My DH has been paying into his pension for longer already and won't be able to retire for at least another 20 yrs, and on nothing like the same amount. Hey ho.

My FIL retired with a full pension at 55 when the nationalised industry he worked for was sold off.

His mortgage was already paid off, he bought his home for £3k in the late 60's, at the time that was around 3x his salary. MIL was a housewife/SAHM. Our home in the same street cost us over £150k in the 90's - which was around 6x my husbands salary.

His annual pension is more than my DH earns working full time - I know because I do his tax returns for him. PIL have a large amount of disposable income.

Do I resent this? No, not at all. FIL did a job that was hard and very physical, he earned his pension.

He was also born during in a war, lived in a house that was bombed as a child, left school at 15 and did national service.

You can't compare our lives, or resent theirs when times have changed so much.

Basic I'm not disputing that many women worked in the 70s but equally there were plenty who lost their jobs on marriage.

Those currently working will be a lot worse off when they reach pension age. Many will face extreme poverty in their old age. As a country we are being reckless by not providing adequately for the next generation of pensions.

There is a strong case to be made for some of the considerable sums being paid to pensions and benefits currently should be used to help those currently working. The system should be fairer and more equitable.

I think most people on this thread misunderstand how pensions work. Many, many retirees are on final salary/defined benefits pensions. Regardless of the value of their pension investment they are GUARANTEED a certain pay out. You might have heard of pension schemes being in deficit? Companies closing them to the outrage of staff? Even public sector ones being pulled back/less generous? This is because so many schemes are in deficit, to the tune of billions, especially generous ex public sector ones (e.g.: BA/BT). The public sector ones don't go bust because of the VAST amount of our taxes that go into them.

So, the pensioners hard work is neither here nor there. Whilst this is nothing more than what they have been promised/entitiled to, it is the children and grand children of the baby boomers who are the ones working for and paying to back fill the giant hole these over-generous schemes have created.

And whilst the boomer's kids and grandkids pay for the boomers pensions, we are denied similar benefits because most organisations have got wise to such generous offers - they cost more than they create.

It is terrible - terrible for future generations and that is before the rising cost of social care for ageing boomers and the flattening of property appreciation is considered.

EnormousTiger that's the reason it's being protected three ways - because interest rates are low.

Once the "protection" is in danger of being needed, watch it vanish.

Yes, I'm a cynic.

The triple lock will turn out to be a costless, chocolate teapot.

Treacle my parents always say you could walk out of a job on the Friday in the early 70s and into a new one on Monday. So letting newly married women go would have been a rather irrational thing to do - she'd get a new job easier than she would be to replace...... Not saying it never happened due to total dinosaurs but I don't believe it was common place.

user I think you have the triple lock thinking the wrong way round. Because inflation and wage growth are currently low pensions have been running ahead of both with the 2.5% guarantee. However I don't think the government will drop it now because RPI and wages are likely to be above 2.5% for the next couple of years.

On jobs for women in the 70s. My Mum took 10 years out of the labour market to stay at home with her DC. She walked straight back into a job just like the one she gave up within a couple of months of looking. It is extremely difficult for mothers today to do likewise and when they work and juggle childcare they will generally be working for nothing for the best part of 10 years.

What we need to remember is that it's always been the case that your material wealth is largely dependent on where, when and to whom you happen to have been born. Hard work is less of a factor, though it can of course make a difference, but your 'luck' and your life chances are very context-dependent. The new variant here is that the direction of travel in western democracies has been for each generation (on average) to be better off than the one before it, and that's changed. But the differences in income and wealth between the generations in the UK still pales into insignificance beside the within-generational differences.

The bit of the new landscape that I find most troubling is that, for younger generations, your family's capacity to help you out with (e.g.) a substantial sum towards a property deposit is going to be more significant than it has been for some time.

The other thing I think we need to remember is that if we argue too long and loud about what a good deal pensioners are getting, we're preparing the ground for a long-term deterioration in pensions - but not for the current 'rich' just-retired generation - it will be those yet to retire who'll lose out. I have to say, I'm not optimistic that the cash pension will survive the next ten years, and anyone due to reach state pension age after that will find it's a collection of means-tested benefits instead.