I know this will be contentious - cost of living rise

[qualitychat]

My mum is a pensioner and gets Disability Benefit and Mobility Benefit and Pension Credit. She receives almost what I get in a month. She is moaning about the Government not doing enough about the cost of gas and electricity, which I agree with. The thing is they have said that people on benefits and pension credit will be given lump sums towards their bills. I am a middle earner and so is my husband. We will likely get nothing. Do you not think it will be the ordinary working families who will be squeezed the most if something is not done?

It’s not true that » many » pension schemes went bust. A few did - the pension schemes that did have financial difficulties were generally private sector defined benefits schemes - not available to the younger generation.

It was expected to save for a pension before auto enrolment just lots of people didn’t do it.

its not easy to save for a pension of course with many competing demands on income. But I take issue with your claims that over 40s were not expected to save and that today’s pensioners didn’t have workplace provision. As a whole they did, at least for most of their working life. So basically there was an opportunity to save at least something for most and certainly easier than for today’s youngsters.

I just worked out that if I wasn’t with DH (but he contributed to DC in the same way he does now), I would get ~£1000 p/m in UC and other benefits. and would be better off than I am now. Which seems really generous to me. Need to re evaluate our relationship 😂

Me too!!

Pensioners, like everyone else, won’t enjoy the same quality of life as others if they make bad financial decisions. They were dealt much better cards to achieve this than we have - if they are renting in later life, it tends to be because they haven’t made sensible decisions throughout their working life and have relied on the state pension to ‘save’ them at the end of it.

And I think a lot of people forget just how astronomically high the cost of living is if you have small children. Full time nursery is a minimum of 1k p/m. It’s utter madness. So posters on here with a couple of young kids on £60k could actually be doing worse than people who rely on benefits.

If your DP is giving you less than you would get under UC for you and your children, including paying mortgage/rent and bills, then he is treating you badly.

Horcruxe you said that working people can increase their income , but once you are on a pension thats it , there is no.way you can increase your income.
Thats not true. We are on a pension and both work pt !

I guess it depends on your demographic and what financial literacy your parents taught you. As I can say with surety that no one I know from my parents generation (boomers) had any workplace pension their entire working lives. As I said too, the messaging in the 1980s was that if you had a workplace or private pension, you were encouraged to opt out of SERPS (the state pension). That was the expectation I started work under- that you don’t need both one or the other will do and I’m in the over 40 but under 65 bracket. So 35 years ago it was very much a case of you don’t need a private/workplace pension to fund your retirement so long as you have NI towards a full state pension. The baby boomers were by the 1980s in their mid-30s to mid-40s. Not to mention of those who were married women most were told pre-1977 to pay a reduced rate and claim state pension off their husbands records..and most baby boomer women were having their children in the 1970s. So the whole first half of their careers plus their time out for child rearing they were definitely not expected to even have the full state pension via their own working history and certainly not to have a private or workplace pension on top.

In addition, while awareness grew in the 1990s that people should not just rely on a state pension, but also opt into a workplace pension over half of Britons had no workplace pension available to them and many of those that did there were no employer contributions. Yes not all workplace pensions were raided and disappeared due to lack of regulation, but even those that were not raided did not really increase much in value. There were repeated crashes starting with the .com bubble in 2001, then a crash in 2004, the big crash in 2008 which devastated even those pension accounts that survived. So even if in the 1990s boomers did get access to workplace pension, and paid attention to the changed advice they were already mid 40s to mid 50s by then. How much can you realistically save when you only have 15-20yrs work life left assuming you stay in good health (and by this age disability/chronic health condition rates hover around 40% of the age group). These are the reasons why the average pension pot for pensioners is only £66k not due to lack of planning as you imply.

So it’s not really a matter of “should have prepared better” for many over 40/65s today it’s the fact that the messaging wasn’t there, the opportunities weren’t there, the regulation of private pensions wasn’t there, the employer contributions did not exist, and by the time they did for only HALF of Britons, the boomers were already over half way to pensioner age.

Not at all. I simply put in the figures if we were to split, but he carries on paying for childcare (as he does at the moment). In my hypothetical situation, I would be living in my own house (I live rent free in his house but still own my house from before we got together), with no childcare costs (he pays). I would get £800p/m UC simply because on paper my income is much less than his. I would also get child benefit which we don’t claim because his income means we’re over the threshold to make it worth it.

When the UK's billionaires worth has risen 8% over the last year, while the wealthy employ accountants to dodge every bit of tax they can, while the average worker has seen nothing but a steady decline in his/her spending power since austerity 10 years ago, I think it's a big mistake and a wasted opportunity for those of us who are suffering to fall out and point the finger at each other.

There are real inequalities and injustices in the UK, but the ones between the pensioners and mid-to-low earners is not the genuine problem here.

@Discovereads I think you make some valid points about pensions but the age group you are referring to seems way out. I'm mid forties and was certainly aware of the need for a private pension as soon as I started work. I don't think I was particularly financially savvy so would suggest that attitudes towards pension planning changed much earlier than you think? My OH is in his fifties and similarly made private pension provision from his early twenties even when on a very low wage. I think we're in the majority rather than the majority so think your "people over forty" grouping is way off.

People forget how women used to be treated. My mum was shafted in her divorce when the man's pension was usually ignored in the divorce - the only asset he had as he spent every penny he got. She was supposed to get maintenance but got none. There was no afterschool clubs or nurseries. She worked by cobbling together help from a few neighbours - her family ostracised her as she was divorced - the stigma was real then.
Through working and bringing up children alone with only help from a few neighbours who looked after us for money, she managed to pay for everything. But I see so many people here with partners say how hard they find it bringing up children with no other family help. My mum left for work at 8 am in the morning after dropping us off at a neighbours and then picked us up at 6pm. As soon as she was back from work she had us 24/7. She had zero help from anyone.
Women were still often paid less than men legally until 1970 and even then illegally for quite a bit after, various court cases changed that.
She rented. Not because she relied on the state. If she had she would never have worked. But because she when younger could not get a mortgage without a male guarantor and had none. And by the time that had eased, she was getting bad arthritis and knew she would be unlikely to be able to work until 60, the retirement age. She did have to leave work young as the arthritis especially in her hands made simple tasks like turning a tap on and off extremely difficult, she could not use a laptop to work.

I find some people pronounce from their ivory tower about what people should or should not have done with zero understanding of real people's lives. Another relative was also divorced and never worked, instead living on benefits and buying her council place. You would see her as more worthy because she owned a property. A property incidentally that she did not have enough money to maintain and over the years it deteriorated badly.

I repeat. If you are living together which it sounds like you are, and he is earning over £50k, but you would be better off alone on universal credit, then he is financially abusing you. He is paying for childcare but is leaving you to fund the total cost of your and your children's other costs. You do not get child benefit because the state assumes he is paying a lot towards the children, not simply the childcare bill.
No one living with a partner earning over £50k should be better off if they were alone on universal credit. You said the amount you would get in universal credit seems loads to you. That is really worrying.
Financial abuse is very common and rarely talked about.

Such an excellent post. I know widowed women with children who never caught up financially. My own parents divorced went from a lovely home to renting then sheltered accommodation as they aged. People who lost businesses in the 90s folks have forgotten that recession. So many reasons

I think it's unreasonable to make this a competition. It should be a given that, in a country like ours, people shouldn't have to worry about having a home, being warm or having enough to eat.

My mum is a disabled pensioner. She lives in rented sheltered housing with inefficient heating. Last year she was scared to put the heating on because she struggled to afford it. She has already cancelled her care because despite being entitled to it the only providers locally cost £10 an hour more than the council will pay. And they are not overcharging- they can't keep staff because they can't pay enough. I've been through her finances, she has nothing left to cut out.

That doesn't mean the rising costs are affordable for "middle income" families. I got a 7k pa pay rise with a promotion in May and I don't feel a penny better off for it, just incredibly grateful.

The proportion of the country who are having to cut back on fairly fundamental things is ridiculously high and that needs to be addressed as a whole

@antelopevalley im not judging your mum, and I’m certainly not in an ivory tower.

Your mum’s story however is not typical of that generation. It was far more normal to get married in early 20s, give up work to have a few kids, and go back part time once they were in school, if they ever really did. I don’t move in particularly wealthy circles, this has very much been the case for my Nan and MIL’s friends, quite a solidly working class bunch (from Burnley and Hull respectively). Of course there was the odd divorcee and I’m not saying that life wasn’t hard for them; I acknowledge it would’ve been harder than being divorced now, by a long shot. But the pensioners I know who are skint, frittered their money away when working and didn’t seriously give any thought to a pension or paying off the mortgage. The ones who did, however modest at the time, are doing really well.

@Wouldloveanother You are judging her. I come from poverty class, not working class. My gran was in and out of mental asylums her whole life. People with mental health problems or disabilities were treated terribly then and many have ended up as pensioners in real poverty.
If you come from a background of working-class people in decent jobs then it sounds like you do not understand the poverty-class families I grew up with. And nobody would have bought their council house where I grew up, anyone decent was trying to get out of there. The estate was knocked down by the mid-eighties as it was notorious. I grew up around nightmare chaotic families, people who had a hard time because of disability or divorce, and lots of migrants trying to build a better life. There was no public transport, one of the reasons my mum dropped us off early is she had to walk one and a half miles to the nearest bus stop.
I have improved my life and that of my family and clawed my way up to the respectable working class you are talking about - and it was hard work to do so. People who all work reasonably paid jobs, living in reasonable areas and with decent lives. You have zero understanding of the families I grew up around. Even the teachers in my school thought all the kids would amount to nothing and that the best we could hope for was a factory job.
It is easy to judge people and say they should now own their own house or have a decent private pension, when you know nothing of their struggles.

And coming from Burnley and Hull is no big deal. Rich people and poor people live there.

@antelopevalley but you’ve proved my point - while I have total sympathy for your mums position, it was unusual - not even typical of working class (lower earning) people. There are always people in history who don’t fit the narrative, but broadly speaking people do. We can’t have this discussion in such specific terms because that’s not how society works. You discuss the whole and the overall picture.

I think demographics also play a part. It’s certain though that in the 1990s/2000s that the message you need a private pension had not reached the majority of Britons because even in 2012 when auto enrolment was started, only half of Britons had a workplace or private pension. So obviously pre-2012, this was less than half of Britons, and so the majority either did not think they needed anything above and beyond the state pension or had no access to a workplace pension.

It all results in the same thing though, the majority of Britons were NOT making private pension provisions until after 2012. So no, you are not in the majority on a population level. You may be for your social circles, but we all live in our own social bubbles dependent on geography, job, income, education and culture.

When you have population level statistics like that, you don’t have a leg to stand on to say that an expectation for and having a private pension provision in the 1990s/2000s were representative of the majority of Britons working then who are currently over 40.

The watershed was post 2012 because that is the point after which we glide into the majority of Britons having a workplace/private pension and only then is it true to say that there is a societal expectation to have a pension that is in addition to the state pension imho. Everyone who started work from 2012 onwards is currently under 40.

Where was your estate?

When did I say he lets me find my kids costs? You’re making stuff up then criticising the outcome to sound as dramatic as possible, because you would rather do this than admit maybe some benefits aren’t as stingy as you want people to believe 😂 would you like me to do a breakdown of who pays for what?

@Wouldloveanother

@antelopevalley experience isn’t unusual. You forget that society is a pyramid, the class below you is always much larger than the one you are in. So the upper working class who with hard work and a bit of luck manage to accumulate property wealth and high pension incomes, and thus get a foot in the door for an almost middle class retirement is the unusual case here. Not the life @antelopevalley describes. Most people in poverty are born, live and die in poverty no matter how hard they struggle. You are thinking the uncommon success you know of is more common than it is in reality.

@Wouldloveanother But you made a sweeping statement that any pensioner who does not own their own house were just bad at managing money. Now when I give you a specific example to show that is not the case, then you say that does not count.
The majority of pensioners do own their own home. There are reasons for those who do not, some will be bad financial decisions, others for good reasons.
By the way the worst housing in the country is privately owned houses by pensioners. Too many are asset-rich but cash poor and unable to pay for maintenance or sign up for equity release schemes. This is not my view. Research into housing stock finds this demographic of housing to be the worst maintained housing stock in the country.

This thread is so pointless because everyone is just put in boxes that assume all experience the same level of income.

The only added differentiation I’d make is for single occupancy / single parent households, which overall are at much greater risk than couples or families etc. This group should be prioritised for help no matter what their age
This is a perfect example:
Single parenthood comes with very different income. The single mum on benefit to two disabled child, who owns her home mortgage free (say through divorce) and gets over £1000 in child maintenance will be much better off than a single mum working in a professional job who gets no maintenance at all, have a mortgage of £1000 and childcare costs of £1000 too.

You then have all the single parents in between. There is no such thing as whole single parents, whole pensioners, disabled, working people.

@antelopevalley then they’ll have to sell their homes. What else is there? Yes I talk in sweeping terms because there simply isn’t enough time to discuss every single individual pensioner’s circumstances.