Women and pensions

[Gin96]

AIBU to think women are short changed when it comes to pensions? The amount of women I speak to who don’t have a private pension. A lady I work with is 67, she only has a state pension and can’t afford to retire. Ladies in there 40’s with no pension at all, they don’t think it’s a problem as the state will provide for them. Why are we not taught in school about finances and pensions? As I get nearer to retirement age I am suddenly taking an interest and it is a mind field trying to work it out.

Why is it just women? I know several men without company pensions. One of my friends just turned fifty he rents, is in debt, pays child maintenance and has just got a loan for a top of the range Mercedes.

I agree we should be taught as teenagers but I think it’s a very difficult concept to grasp, so you’re being slightly naive to imagine they would listen. It is almost impossible to imagine yourself being 30 let alone 70, so the idea of preparing yourself financially for old age is mind blowing.
I also think society and the state has changed a vast amount in the last 40 years, so the life assumptions the women you’re talking about will have changed massively.
Personally I’m lacking in pension because I took a good decade out to do family stuff. As a result I’m making massive AVCs now to make up.

I’m the wrong side of mid 30’s and it’s now that I’ve had enough years working that I realise I don’t want to work forever, and have tipped over into the later part of my life, with my family complete, that I suddenly understand that life is for living and how good it is to be financially comfortable. Pension suddenly seems VERY important to me.

Auto enrolment should help reduce the number of people with no provision at all, but yes, it definitely should be taught in schools

They are taught in schools about finances and pensions. The curriculum has evolved in the 40 years since I left school.

I had a pension from the day I started work. I've always made sure I had state sector jobs with a pension. 1 in 4 people have worked for the state in one form or another.

Many of my generation have used property as pensions. Many of my friends, acquaintances, neighbours are selling and massively downsizing to get equity release.

There's been enough coverage for people to be aware. There are other welfare benefits that go hand in hand with a pension for those in need.

I dont buy into the whole 'retirement is 50 years away so we'll stick our fingers in our ears and go lalalalala' attitude. People chose their path in life. My generation had it drummed in: 1/4 for the tax man 1/4 to save (pension) and you can spend the rest.

There’s other threads in a similar vein - pensions are a big issue. Thing is, people bury their heads in the sand and when they’re in their 20s and 30s don’t want to visualise life in their older age.

Also (and someone else has made this point on another thread) look at the number of women who give up work when they have kids because they say it’s not financially worth working because childcare will take up almost all their earnings. It’s so short sighted because they’re ignoring the fact that their pension contributions will continue if they stay in work.

And then there’s women who go part time when having babies (understandable when they’re really tiny) but never return to full time work. I have female colleagues with adult children who still won’t work full time, not because of any caring needs but because they just don’t want to. Which is fine, their choice, but a bit wearisome when they get into their fifties and realise their pensions are crap.

I think there’s actually a lot of publicity now about the importance of future proofing and getting oneself financially sorted. Trouble is, you can’t force people to listen

I think a lot of people about the retire now have Been burned by dodgy schemes in the 80s. My dad lost all his pension in some kind of pension fund scandal- it was then common not to trust another.

My mum was a SAHM like most women with children in the 80s- how was she supposed to get a decent pension?

I agree. My mum has little to no pension and she's almost 60. She'll own her home outright in a couple of years and has around 60k in savings. I think she assumes the state pension will be enough for her to live well.

It's only the other day that I had to breakdown that she'll need at least £1200 to maintain her current lifestyle (assuming just household bills , a few luxuries and holiday ) that she finally realised she has a big problem. She's in a reasonably financially robust position. I despair for those women who have nothing else to fall back on

I'm fortunate that I started my pension when I was 22 because my dad forced me to. He used to check my payslips to make sure. I hated his insistence back then but I'm deeply grateful today

I am in my 40's with no pension. I wasn't entitled to join my work one initially as it was for manager only. When the brought in stakeholder pensions I had bought my first house. When my employer got taken over I joined their scheme, then got pregnant.

I was going to start paying into my pension again when DD started school and I could increase my hours. XH fucked off leaving me a single parent. I had gone self employed the year before to work around DD, so no longer had an employer.

So my priority has to be paying the mortgage, bills and feeding and clothing DD. XH pays a pittance of a maintenance. I had to remortgage til I'm 67 after XH came off the mortgage. So I should be mortgage free when I retire, but will only have the state pension.

I would love to pay into a pension, but the money simply isn't there.

Auto enrolment is great for the employed, but of course there is nothing for the self employed as we are our own boss. Maybe if the government allowed a % of the Class 4 NIC to be paid into auto enrolment type pension, that would be a start.

@MyOpinionIsValid I left school 16 years ago and we were taught nothing, annoying my parents also taught me nothing about money management either and so I ended up drowning in debt in my mid 20's with no pension provision at all. I'm now 32, well on the way to paying off the debt and paying into a pension a small sum, but nowhere near enough. There isn't enough money to do it all though.

Op, the 67 year old you work with should get a benefit check to see if she would be entitled to any means tested benefits if she stopped working. Older people often don't claim all the benefits they are entitled to.

I'm fortunate to have some pension entitlement overseas and am 6 years in to a final salary pension here. OH is not in a good position at all, pension wise. I've got to be honest, the climate news makes me wonder whether there's any point in worrying too much given how far off retirement is for us, but I appreciate that's a bit fatalistic. I just don't want to spend my life saving only for the planet to go up in smoke and take us all with it.

Were most women with children in the 80s really SAHMs? Not in my experience. My mother went back to work when her youngest child started school. That would have been about 1970.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s all my friends' mothers worked (admittedly usually part-time). I remember my mother being annoyed because where she worked part-timers weren't allowed in the pension scheme. She therefore took out a personal pension.

My mum wasn’t allowed to go back to work. She worked for a big bank and they didn’t employ mothers. It was only in the early 80s women got maternity rights. In the civil service married women weren’t even employed in the 70s.

I knew one person who worked “properly” which was very unusual. Doing a couple of hours a day bar work or cleaning was more common but certainly no pensions offered with those jobs

Some of us know only too well what we should be doing, or have done, but for any number of reasons it hasn't been possible. I'm a victim of the early 90s scandal where people were persuaded to come out of their occupational pensions and into private pensions, which turns out to have been the wrong thing to do. My case was taken up by the Ombudsman and found against the IFA who did it, but the amount of compensation I got is nowhere near sufficient to restore me to the position I would have been in had I remained in my occupational pension scheme.

My compensation has been invested and will give me a small additional monthly income to the full state pension, but I'll have to work until I drop to have any reasonable standard of living. My mortgage won't be repaid until I'm 68 (I'm 56 now).

Your OP smacks of victim blaming tbh. There are all sorts of reasons why people might be facing an impoverished old age and none of us has a crystal ball.

In the civil service married women weren’t even employed in the 70s.

I think you're getting your dates wrong. Civil Service was quite happy to employ married women in the 70s; even in the 60s MIL was a married civil servant with children. And I remember seeing job adverts in the 60s, I think it was Civil Service, with different pay rates specified for men and women.

There were still differences up to the 60s, eg I don't think women could join the pension scheme, they certainly couldn't get provision for their spouse. And in the 40s, I think it was difficult to be "established" rather than temporary.

But the main point is right - for women retiring now or already retired, the workplace during their early working lives was very different, with access to full time professional jobs more difficult, knocking on to worse pension; no access to occupational pension schemes for part time workers; and a general presumption that you would drop out of the labour market once you had children.

I do understand when people say "but I can't afford to pay into a pension now" the fact is you really can't afford not to.
Compound interest makes a massive impact, even saving £10 will leave you slightly better off.

I worry massively about my parents in their 50's they bought a house for half what we paid as a deposit on ours on an interest only mortgage and never saved. Now they face retirement in a decade and a pension pot not much bigger than mine. I'm 30 and until recently was on a relatively low salary as I raised a child on my own.

My pension always seemed very important to me, no matter how tight my budget was I knew it would be so much harder when I was 70 and had no capacity to earn more.

I spent my mid 20's trying to study/work my way up the career ladder. I spent my late 20's paying off tens of thousands of debt...but I always paid my (future) self first.

I think women are so unaware the impact of not earning during mat leave or being a SAHM. If you haven't paid your stamp you may not even get your full state pension.

I think the way finance works should be seen as far more important in society. Lots of us know all the names of the contestants on love island or what team is top of the football league and yet we spend zero time studying how pensions work or what APR means, how to do a tax return or how to compare mortgages. It's terrifying

I think the biggest issue with women’s pensions at the moment is the generation of women who spent their life beliving the would get their state pension at 60 and planning as such only to then be told a few years before no it’s going to be 66 now

I don’t read it as victim blaming... more about recognising that pensions are an important issue and that all adults have a responsibility to consider how they will manage financially not just in the here and now but in the future. Women are particularly vulnerable - historically that was because of some of the reasons described: lack of access to good employment, lack of regulated childcare, less good maternity legislation. But things are much better now and it’s up to women to make the most of that. How often do you hear women say it’s not worth their while working because of the cost of childcare? It’s a depressingly common theme; women can be the worst for talking themselves down rather than looking at the bigger picture and realising that chucking in a pension is a bad idea.

Also agree with 5thtimelucky... the bad old days for women really were quite a long time ago, before my time and I’m heading towards 60. Granted, ML was very short in my day (3 months) and childcare wasn’t subsidised but I and pretty much all my friends who had babies back then returned to work. Out of my NCT class there was only one couple where the mum was intending to be a SAHM.

Its just the finances never add up to they,

I'm a high earner and got £40k in pension age 36. I pay in £1200 pcm. But however much I build it up, stock markets are unreliable. Job market can change overnight. And I'll probably live to b 95.

It's actually incredibly worrying. I can't see at all how I won't be extremely poor for decades when I'm older.

My husband has no pension apart from state and a few £ in various private pots that is worth about £100/year, he has made lots of stupid financial decisions before he met me.

I have a BTL house, final salary occupational pension and will get full state (if it exists).

Not all women are crap at financial management. My Mother is 70 and had her act together.

Not all women are crap at all - agree! But women are affected disproportionately. Historically because of the reasons described upthread. But for a long time now, women have had access to the same careers and pensions as men. I think a lot of women are still playing catch up in not recognising how important their career and pension is though

But things are much better now and it’s up to women to make the most of that.

Things are not any better for disabled people, unable to work on benefits; and SAHPs, caring for a disabled child, particularly with medical conditions, because of lack of specialised childcare, all the appointments and paperwork - who can only get carer’s allowance!