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.

You can't possibly generalise about the pensioners' lot by looking at a fit 66 year old who drives a brand new car and goes on several holidays a year. This is the section of society aged 65+ so you're talking about several generations spanning around 40 years.

Most of them didn't fight in a war though. Many of them would be too young even for National Service, for which conscription ended in 1960, before the baby boomers even came along.

My dad is in his 80s, he was born in 1935 and was only 9 when the war ended, although he did do National Service. He has never worked in a mill or a mine, he was an electrical engineer his whole life after qualifying during his National Service.

He and my mum aren't wealthy, or even comfortable. Mum says she has to die before Dad because she wouldn't manage without his pension, such as it is.

They were fortunate enough to capitalise on the housing boom, though, so the profit they made on the family home has paid for their retirement so far. There will be very little left to pay for any extra care either of them is going to need for the years to come though. It's a big worry.

its reminds me of watching "place in the sun, place in the country" and its literally full of baby boomers with £500K to offload

I don't resent them, they just lucked out

How does a 12% interest rate on, say, £50k compare to a 3% rate on £140k? I'm rubbish at maths

rest assured mners your dc and your eventual gc will be on here in 30 /40 /50 years time complaining about having to work until they are 80 /85 as those millenials /tweens/twenties moped up on pensions
i can't see things changing that much tbh.

ann you mum is a chipper bunny ! seriously though what a thing to say in this day and age. having said that surely she would get benefits if that was the case, she would hardly be out on the street.

The main issue here is that, yes, some pensioners appear to be better off at say, 70 than previous OAPs and the ones to come, BUT all that accumulated wealth will come to nothing because as soon as dementia hits, or some other awful long term age related condition, that person will need 24/7 care.
If they have any savings or assets at all, they will need to be sold to pay for care lasting the rest of their lives - and it ain't cheap!
Whilst some pensioners may escape this, and truly enjoy their golden years, the vast majority will be forced to sell their assets or hand them over to their children in order to be looked after to their death, which nowadays is easily 90+.
I see it all the time in my line of work, social care funding only goes so far...its a shame that everything you e ever worked for basically gets handed to the government.
But when people diagnosed with dementia can live 10-20 years plus, the money for that care has to come from somewhere. Sad state of affairs.

Tax credits and housing benefits weren't of a necessity then, the cost of living wasnt out of proportion to the average wage

I didn't know anyone who earned anything like the "average wage" and have you forgotten the inflation ? Ranging from 10% to around 25% in the seventies.

I have friends who are pensioners and still working. Their children are grown up, they have paid off their mortgage, and are working full time. No wonder they are better off.

It's nearly impossible for pensioners to downsize around here. No-one can afford to upsize to a bigger house, as they're just too expensive. So a pensioner trying to sell their large, expensive house can't find buyers. And any house/flat under £3OOK is snapped up within days. Everyone is chasing the smaller, cheaper houses and as such anything over £450K sits on the market for years. Basically the housing system is not working! Permission has been granted near here for 4000 new houses and not a single one is social housing. There are some so-called 'affordable' houses (part buy, part rent) but nothing to replace the council houses bought up by tenants at low cost. Ridiculous!

Of course they have more disposable income once housing costs are removed. That ain't rocket science.

Most pensioners I know are comfortably off, and most of them help out their children by contributing to their education, house deposits etc on a regular basis. However, most of them also have one or more elderly relatives in care at thirty grand a year, and also face the likelihood of having to fund their own care in the future.

Like PPs, it should be looked at as wealth belonging to the whole family, including all generations.

You do know all these kind of stories are placed to justify cutting help to the poorest pensioners? Just like the DLA stories were used off able bodied people cheating on disability benefits were used to justify cut DLa.

Pensions today are, for the large part, utterly incomparable.

Final salary is all but gone. Defined Benefit is generally closed to new enrollments. Defined contribution is the norm, where you are entirely relying on good market performance for any growth to your fund. Yes there are tax advantages too but they feel irrelevant when you're told that a 25 year old should be investing at least 12% into their pot at a time when tax takes 20%, NI 10%, student loans 9%, rent is at least 50% for many. Doesn't leave a lot left.

And yes, people struggle when young, then and now, the point is that for our parents generation, whether through hard work, canny investments or just good luck things got very, very much better eventually.

That's something that I can't see happening for us. No matter the sacrifice we make nor the effort we put in. We're crippled by high house prices and low wages.

My parents were hard-working but the reason they are wealthy now is because of the phenomenonal increase in house prices in the SE and because of their final salary pensions. They didn't have to pay to put their children through university either.
They are no more, or less, deserving of a comfortable retirement than most people (including very many who won't get one).

That headline really annoys me. As a pp said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. You can make statistics say anything you want to.

Yes SOME pensioners are well off. Stop generalising. For every pensioner having luxury cruises there are probably half a dozen living not far above the poverty line.

If you quote the "average" household income, there are just as many people living on less than that. So if I say the average wage is (eg) £27K and people should stop complaining they aren't getting 5% wage rises, how many people will scream "but I only earn min wage!"

My parents were born in the 1920's and ARE far better off than I am. Both have juicy index-linked final salary public sector pensions. THOSE pension schemes have long since been found to be unsustainable. I'm not going to trot out the argument that they lived through the war etc etc so they deserve it. Life in those days was hard for everyone, the war is irrelevant.

I'm classed as a baby boomer (born in 1953) and already things have changed so much that I cannot look forward to the life of luxury they enjoy. For most of my early life we did not have the consumer-driven society of today. We grew up with very little, and we didn't mind. Perhaps it was easier to save because there wasn't as much to actually BUY - and certainly not the relentless pressure to keep up with the latest gadgets. It was extremely rare for people to have computers and mobile phones until very late 20th C. Yes I have a house - now mortgage free - but at times the mortgage rate has been as high as 15%. I'd love to downsize but this govt has blighted it by its proposed route for the unwanted HS2 extension.

My dad wouldn't get anything on HP. He saved for anything he wanted. We didn't have a fridge until I was 10. I had 2 orange boxes as shelves in my bedroom, covered with a gingham curtain. We made do with hand-me-downs - clothes, furniture. There was still an ethos of "make do and mend". (That's probably why I'm a hoarder)

In many ways I wish I had been born 10 years earlier, then I might have been able to benefit from some of the things my parents have. But I don't blame today's younger people for the mess. Its all down to successive governments - of BOTH parties - for failing to plan further than the next general election.

The world has changed. Perhaps the golden era really was the second half of the 20th century. But there were a lot of bad things there too, and we shouldn't overlook them.

pipsqueak, she's quite a positive person really! I guess you think about that kind of thing a lot when you and your partner reach your 70s/80s and you see friends and siblings around you dying or becoming widowed.

It's interesting.

My mum and dad retired in their late 50's, mortgage fully paid off, sufficient income for a comfortable life. They do not see themselves as well off at all and indeed complain bitterly and at length about the state pension changes that affect them.

Do I begrudge them or others of their generation a decent retirement? Of course not. But I do envy them. They do not understand that whilst they are not rich, they are well off, especially in direct comparison to my generation, who are asked to pay higher pension contributions, for a longer period of time, to get a smaller pension, and who if they want to buy a house face significantly higher prices. They seem not to get that it is not possible for their children and grandchildren to achieve exactly what they had. It can be hard at times not to let the envy become outright jealousy- but it is important to guard against that because once we resent the older generation, we're more likely not to resist their being targeted for further cuts. And the way to improve things is not to make those doing OK suffer, but to help those less well off.

Someone needs to have some money to prop the bloody economy up. Locally I live close to a pretty affluent area and from what I can see the ones that are spending money in the restaurants and independent clothes boutiques are the rich retirees. It makes me wonder what's going to happen when that generation dies. I think s lot of businesses will close as that money will trickle down to the next few generations who are still working and shopping in Aldi and Lidl.

I don't think it comes down to deserving really. Or fair. It just is. What we need to address is trying to fix what has changed since then - Not blaming the people who did good out of what just was back then.
Lots of social housing, low(er) house prices, Free university education etc...

"the cost of living was lower as a percentage of wages,"

Not true! Food and white goods were more expensive and we had double digit interest on mortgages! It is true that many do have gold plated pensions, mainly in the public sector. However many of us have no pension provision for large parts of our working lives, due to the harsher rules on pensions if you changed jobs frequently. We didn't spend as much on going out or technology - no pcs, tablets, xboxes or mobile phones. No StarBucks, no Zizzis. Pubs served booze and snacks - no fancy restaurants.

Drivingmebonkers my parents left school at 14 and put in a total of 104 yrs work before they retired. My df died 4 years later. Yes my dm has more disposable income than me, and I think she earned it and deserves it. And why should she leave her home and garden? Because you want it? They worked harder than I have ever done, no holidays for years and years, not a penny to spare and brought up in what would be classed as fairly extreme poverty now but then was pretty standard for wc people.

100% agree on the generation now aged 55-70.

A large number of this generation are helping with childcare so their children can work and dealing with their older families members. So they may have money but I bet for many it's not all that rosy.

My parents went through hell with older relatives - hugh strain- and while they haven't been able to help us with childcare have done so for Dsis and continue to do so. I know many people in that age range in similar situations.

Obviously you then get people, like IL , that this doesn't apply to - I do find them almost wilfully ignorant about stresses on younger population - refusal to acknowledge hugh deposited need to house buy or cost of childcare - but also about future costs they may yet face.

And no foreign holidays (we camped) or decent furniture (ours was orange boxes or junk shop stuff).

I think part of the problem is that younger generations today have much higher expectations of what is a 'reasonable' standard of living. Nothing wrong with that, but it does colour any comparison.

It is harder to make a living now. I'm surprised anyone still disputes that. The social safety net that was put in place after the wars has gone: the dole is gone, we have benefits that need to be earned and can be taken away randomly, social housing is pretty much a thing of the past, and free education is under threat at a time when it is more important than ever. There are fewer jobs that pay enough to live, you need, as they say, a degree to clean the streets and there are ever-increasing demands for greater 'skills'.

Yes not all pensioners are well off, but they are better off as a class than those behind them. And yes, they worked for it, blah blah blah, but what exactly are people working (usually much harder with today's higher expectations in work) for now? Will they get hard-earned pensions?

When you get inequality you get divides and you will get resentment. When you have the modern insecure way of living you will get fear which leads to anger. Throw in modern communications and spin, vilifying those at the bottom and lauding only greed, and you have the elitist wet dream - lower and middle groups squabbling among themselves over crumbs while the top 10% walk away scot free. The only way to combat it is to stop focusing on the people down the street who have a little bit more or less, and rebuild the safety nets.