To think the old style pensions should be capped.

[Blindering]

ok, I am in Ireland so unaware of how UK pensions function but my neighbour who worked as a college lecturer but retired in 2008 in his 70s gets 600 euro a week in pension, equivalent to 513 stg.
This is on top of a 150k pay off he got when he left the job which I believe all civil servants here were getting.

But aibu to think a bachelor living in a house with the mortgage long paid off has no need for over 500stg a week? Like what would one need the money for at that stage in life?

@Blindering

''You really don’t understand how pension funds and investment work, do you?''

he didn't pay 500stg a week or 2000 a month contributions into his pension every month.

That's not how any pension works...

@Blindering

''You've been able to buy a house/flat. Good for you.''

only not in a city or near it, in a place with poor unemployment and poor quality of life.

Fancy a game of Trumps? I'll tell you where my daughter lives and you tell me where you live and lets see who has it rougher. Maybe I'll show you my first and second properites and you see if you fancy living there instead.

I'm not actually going to do that, but you get my point.

Bitterness or goading (not sure which this is) will not make you happy op.

@Blindering

''So your neighbour isn’t living it up in the suburbs as you suggested earlier?

Or is your house magically right on the dividing line between leafy suburbs only affordable to piss takers from the generation who had it easy* and shit-hole just barely affordable to people now?''

neighbour is next door to me when I have to stay in the city if you must know for my job. I can't afford to live in it cos of housing. I only stay in 3 days a week.

So your neighbour, who isn’t actually your neighbour at all, gives out his financial details to someone who stays in the b&b/rooms next door three days a week?

It must be attainable or nobody would be buying those houses. This summer the houses you describe were being snapped up at prices over asking as soon as they went on the market. Someone’s buying them.

There is a lot of articles out there stating a lot of people buying houses at the moment are cash buyers or investors, not first time buyers. Which doesn't help the issue of inequality.

This thread seems to be more about inequality between generations. I agree there is no point in being bitter, it is not my parents fault they had more opportunities with property and I'm glad they did. As mentioned before, we aren't really holding the right people to account about inequality between generations, just fighting between generations instead, which solves nothing. The issue is, if we are a progressive and equal society, all of this inequality should be a distant memory and it isn't.

We need more action and less bickering over who has the biggest pile of turnips, especially while people who are feasting on lobster and caviar are ignored and happily watching us fight amongst ourselves. Sadly, I'm not exactly sure what we can do as individuals to change this though, but blaming each other certainly isn't a good start.

''So your neighbour, who isn’t actually your neighbour at all, gives out his financial details to someone who stays in the b&b/rooms next door three days a week?''

I have connection to said neighbour but revealing nothing else x

@Blindering
I keep coming back to read this thread and I still can't get past the fact that you can't change the past.

It's a bit like saying you are unhappy and it's unfair because when i was young I could get the bus, go to the pictures (cinema), have popcorn and coke and still have change from a shilling (12p)

If you had been born at the same time as me you would have had access to those things too, and you would have taken advantage of that.

Each generation will take advantage of what's on offer. I could be pissed off because I didn't have two pennies to rub together but tax credits weren't around then so why should people get them now when I had to struggle? I could be pissed off because had my children been born a couple of years earlier they would have got 500 quid from the government, but they weren't so they didn't. And how come today's generation get away with 1-2% interest rates when I had to pay 15+%?

It is what it is. We can't know what's going to be on offer as we grow up and buy homes, get jobs, buy pensions. We just have to take everything that's on offer at the time and try to make it work for us. You can't just take away things from the older generations in order to make things fair.

You own a property. You are already much better off than a large proportion of the population. You need to start living in the here and now and plan as best you can for your, and any children you might have, future.

So it's a relative then? One who you resent?

Always a bit wary when stories change like this due to drip feeds.

We need to start looking at housing. How much it costs, and who lives where. Where I live there are lots of big houses with pensioners rattling around in them, and families in 2 bed flats. We need in incentivise these pensioners to move on and free up housing stock for larger families. We need to invest in council housing to bring down the amount of government funds spent on paying housing benefit to private landlords, making buy to let less attractive and reducing the price of flats. Innovative ideas are needed, yet we still get the same help to buy schemes that just serve to keep house prices high.

I expect most loving parents would want some form of inter-generational fairness.

Post-2010, the spending cuts have disproportionately fallen on the young.

Fair and stable societies probably require some form of inter-generational fairness or need to spend more on policing and criminal justice and even the rich probably face an increased risk of violence. My investment banking acquaintances are clear about the absence of a magic money tree unless there are losses to be socialised.

Governments in the UK seem to prioritise the voting elderly. There is an argument that the retired can't easily return to work to earn but IMO this is driven more by an electoral agenda, supported by the UK press. I don't see this government being driven by similar notions of fairness in many other aspects of their policies.

Houses are much less affordable in England. Government schemes like help to buy appear to lead to further increases in prices as basic economics would have probably predicted.

Relying on the cascade of wealth, much like 'trickle down economics' doesn't work.

The impacts of house price rises, zero hour contracts, young people studying longer to enter careers that now have a baseline of bachelor or post-graduate degrees leads to hard decisions about settling down and family size. People always had to make decisions about funding families but the changes compared with thirty years ago+ feel adverse though climate change will probably require reductions in family size. I can see the wealthy might like the poor to reproduce less.

I doubt there'll be an appetite for broad reductions in pensions or directly taking savings though it may be that inflation and tax rises achieve the same thing if that is the way the UK government choose to handle COVID and structural deficits unless the successor to QE or a new invention can kick the can down the road. The wealthy have benefitted from 2010-onwards austerity but it doesn't look like it has helped a sustainable economic recovery though it has enabled a vast wealth transfer to the wealthy through asset price inflation. That didn't happen by accident. The 'triple lock' probably won't survive in the medium term.

I can see why the OP has said why they have and why young people feel relatively aggrieved.

@knittingaddict

So it's a relative then? One who you resent?

Always a bit wary when stories change like this due to drip feeds.

This thread’s been one long drip feed.

You say this "neighbour" (who isn't a neighbour) is a bachelor. Are you a bachelor too or do you have a family to help support?

This thread’s been one long drip feed

Or mistakes that needed a cover story.

There is a lot of articles out there stating a lot of people buying houses at the moment are cash buyers or investors, not first time buyers. Which doesn't help the issue of inequality

Can we have a link to them? Because most investors don’t buy in a red hot market.

Surely he is paying tax on that - in the U.K. he would get 12,500 toughly tax free then 20% on the rest - £2,500.
Plus when your 70 your odds of dying in the next year are higher and many of your family/ friends will have illnesses/ die / have died.
I'm that age would happily swop my riches for another 40 -50 years 😬

The OP seems bizarrely over-invested in judging his neighbours. He's posting on another thread about his neighbour 'who had smoked, had booze problems and health problems for years is still alive in her 90s'.

Don't move next door to this bloke unless you want to be judged by him on MN. It's all very strange

@Blindering

''You really don’t understand how pension funds and investment work, do you?''

he didn't pay 500stg a week or 2000 a month contributions into his pension every month.

Here let me help you…now you are just embarrassing yourself.

www.investopedia.com/terms/c/compoundinterest.asp

A lot of thus is due to interest rates.

In the 70s/80s/90s interest rates were high relative to inflation so money put into a pension pot would grow very quickly and you could end up with a very generous pension without necessarily putting huge amounts in. It also meant house prices were cheap becuase people couldn't borrow as much due to the high amount of interest that had to be paid (plus there'd been a ton of house builiding going on after the war, so no housing shortage).

Since the early 2000s interest rates have been very low so pensions don't grow much and therefore have to be much less generous. Also people pay very little interest on their mortgages so they can stretch temsleves to borrow much more for house than in the previous generation and this (combined with compartively little house building these days) pushes up house prices to ridiculous levels.

@saltinesandcoffeecups what happens to compound interest when interest rates are lower than inflation? In practice, you lose money, right?

In the long term, we are sitting on a timebomb because those who have bough expensive houses with low interest rates will loose out either way. Either interest rates go up and their mortgage goes up to a massive degree or interest rates stay low and their pension remains low as the y struggle to repay their huge mortgage debt.

In this regard, this generation is different from the last.

So much animosity and bitterness.

My father has a good pension, is still working part time in his 70s, has a nice house and pre covid holidays. As does my 19 year older friend. I didn't realise I am meant to be drowning in self-pity because they have what I won't have. It must be very consuming and tiring.

What they have is irrelevant to me. Im focused on how I can build my life for my family based on how society is working now. If I don't like something, I could choose to campaign agaisnt it or change my requirements. Better that than obsessing about who has more than me and thinking they have it because they are all flawed, greedy, selfish humans.

Don't worry op, it's the younger generations like mine and the other posters children who will suffer for all of this, so it will balance out eventually. Of course, that does mean several posters children will probably be living in poverty or unable to afford food, but it's fine as long as the current older generation gets their massive shares.

Although since every generation screws over the next, mine is going to really screw over the current MN populations children. They won't be able to buy houses at all unless very rich, and even then might struggle. And their pensions will be even lower than ours, with higher food prices. But meh we vote for this type of government, we reap what we sow. Tough luck basically. Do the best you can for your own life and don't care about anyone else's business, I'm not going to.

Our kids will survive if they are lucky enough to have wealthy parents and grandparents who can pass down their house price inflation wealthy to them. Does anyone think this is a good way for our society to operate?

@Blindering

''The stage of life when you've worked for 40 years and now are free to do what you want? I can think of loads to do with it. |''

and the entire generation below them can't afford housing because the govt is paying whopper pensions to older generation.

Eh?

Apart from taxing it, what has your neighbour's private pension got to do with how the government?

I don;t think you understand how pension funds work.
That money doesn't belong to the government, to allocate elsewhere. It belongs to the people who worked for it.
It's also got fuck-all to do with how government does or does not do about funding social housing.

@Wooollffff

I’m in the UK civil service. During my interview I was told that the pay was lower than I was getting in the private sector but the pension was effectively deferred pay.

Of course successive Governments have pulled the rug from under us and it’s worth a lot less.

OP. It’s none of your business anyway.

Same with the NHS pension. Despite people insisting it’s “gold plated”

@Blindering

''Benefits to pensioners are means tested.''

clearly not if he owns a property in Dublin worth millions amongst other assets and still received a 150k pay off at the end along with a golden plated 2500 euro a month. It's just madness.

Regardless he would still be rightly entitled to receive back the private pension fund that he paid into!!!

@Whycangirlsbesonasty

Our kids will survive if they are lucky enough to have wealthy parents and grandparents who can pass down their house price inflation wealthy to them. Does anyone think this is a good way for our society to operate?

Of course it isn't, and even that isn't guaranteed anymore with care costs. But the rich dont care do they? If they have a house, sometimes multiple houses, a healthy pension that is their final salary etc, why would they care about someone who has no house, needs to rent, has no private pension etc? Of course they will say they care, but not enough to do anything about it.