Retirement age for ladies - why so upset? R2 debate

[AiryFairyUnicornRainbow]

Listening to R2 today - a lot of ladies (who have picketed for equality all their lives, presumably) are now up in arms, that their retirement age has moved in line with mens

So before, women could retire at 60 and men 65 - but womens age was 60.

What exactly are pple upset about?

Have ladies been requesting equality since the dawn of time?

Why do you feel hard done by, when my Generation (your sons and daughters) will have to work long past your retirement age?

I have a relative, who is completely up in arms about this, but has only worked probably 15 years in her working life - as was the done thing stayed at home with kids way beyond school age. No private pension, nothing. Yet is a massive womens libber.

These days, women are felt rushed back into work the minute they give birth, and are literally worked to death. SAHM's are frowned upon by the working mothers

By the time I get to that age it will have gone up again I suppose.

Where's our missing money?

It isn't "your" money though. Each and every generation in work is paying towards the current generation in retirement. As each generation reaches an older age, the next has to find EXTRA money to sustain them in retirement. No one person, unless they are on a very high salaray, is paying sufficient to cover all their health, welfare, and pension costs if they live for a further 30 years in retirement. There was no "contract" with the government for your specific pension. Rules on all sorts of things have changed over 40 years, that is just the way it is.

Viragoknows, surely the ages of people getting mortgages to buy a property can depend on where they live?

Plenty of cheap houses in the north. Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire for a start have many houses for less than £130,000 (3 bed ones at that).

Three youngsters in my family bought properties fairly young and only 1 had money given to them

Yes i should imagine it’s skewed towards the cheaper areas. It’s still a very low statistic for the age group over all.

Hello older. It is our money. We paid our NI on the earlier understanding. I know pensions are paid from receipts. We didnt design the system. We didnt have an option to remove our pension contributions and invest on our own behalf. We paid as required. We are owed.

"What do we want?"

"Equality"

Well, not actual equality, of course. Like women in the US, we'll forgo some rights if it benefits us. We don't want to work as hard or for as long as men. We want the good stuff ...

Women more often take time out of their careers to look after kids and then later on older relatives.

Testing you appear to have misread the gist of the thread.

Also add into the whole reasoning argument the fact that many of the women affected were automatically entered into paying the married women's stamp which did not accrue pension benefits for the women in their own right. This happened to me when I married young in 1974 and was done for me by the wages office in the small engineering company I worked for with no consultation or explanation of the consequences. Hence I am now still trying to make up my full years to hopefully get to the full state pension. I have a later tiny pension of £400 per annum which with the state pension will be my total income at 66.

Women were not paid equally, they did not have the same opportunities as men and if you worked part time while bringing up a family the work pension schemes were closed to part timers as well as part time hourly rates being less than full timers. And you really couldn't work full time in normal (non high flying) jobs with average / low wages because the type of child care provision you'd need to make that possible just wasn't available or would cost as much or more as you were likely to earn.

Working from home was almost unheard of so husbands couldn't just swap their times around to do child pickups so it really did fall on mothers to run the household and child care side of life while working part time.

Food shopping and cooking had to be done and if you had a twin tub washing machine you were doing well and tumble dryers were unheard of so laundry was not a five minute job like it is today - nappies had to be sterilised in a bucket then laundered. One car which the man used to get to work. Life was very different. Mortgage rates were 15% which meant if you did manage to scrape together a deposit you had no money left and private pensions were unheard of for the millions of clerical workers and secretaries like me.

Teste. Read more. Think harder. Excellent.

I don't think when people are young they can get their heads round how different society was and lives were in the past (for good and ill) so it can be pointless trying to explain the attitudes and expectations of society then. It comes with age and experience I think, and knowledge - I find history much more interesting now than I did when younger. But find it very difficult to explain to my adult DCs what the limitations of society's expectations and restrictions were on my choices when their age.

That's true, Silkie2 but it seems wrong to me that it is often the younger generation who make changes when they have no concept of the reality behind the lives of people who are so affected by the changes they implement.

That doesn't just apply to pensions, it's across the board affect

Oops, posted too soon.

Affecting everything from care of the elderly to mentally ill people in the community (some people really can't take care of themselves) down to traffic where people decide on inner city one way systems and bypasses without ever having travelled the roads themselves.

Older, well it's more "our" money for people that worked than those who couldn't be bothered.

As I said, I paid full stamp for over 40 years. I know several people who barely worked just because they did not want to so claimed benefits for years. A couple of them are slightly older than me so already getting their pensions, bus passes, cold weather payments etc. Not very fair

That's true gold but I think it works both ways. Im not sure older generations (and i include myself in this) understand hiw much things have changed for the young. And I dont think the current debt-laden, under housed younger geberation dhould be the ones to pick up the tab for other people's 30+ years of retirement when they themselves will be working til at least 70 and may actually have a shorter life expectancy.

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/09/pensioner-poverty-rises-bnefites-freeze?CMP=share_btn_tw

The cost of housing is skewing cost of living. Perhaps with a reduction in immigration this will improve. Im not sure why the young are so debt laden.

Equality doesn't always mean being treated the same.

Childbirth takes a huge toll on a woman's body, every child born knocks a year off a woman's life expectancy.

Really? I have never heard that before M4J4.

Really, where have you been? In a world where women's biology leaves them having babies that need to be cared for I would have thought that m4mj's statement was kind of obvious?

Can you provide a link to the source of that information M4J4 or Cups? I found a study that suggested having sons might shorten life expectancy by 34 weeks, but having daughters might have a very small lengthening effect, but it said more research was necessary. Just interested.

I too would like something to back that up. My grandmother lived until 91 and had 8 children.

Women still live longer than men, so if equality was adjusted to be fair then women's state pension age should be higher.

M4 that a bizarre statement- women live longer than men on average. Everyone recently had their state pension age increased. I don’t see why older women are any more deserving of sympathy than anyone else. Younger people have it very tough these days. Unless they work in the public sector they are unlikely to get a pension at all.

Zsazsa. Keep your sympathy for yourself you might require it when the government lifts a few thousand out of your pocket.

Truly spoken longwayoff.

The government have picked a soft target here.