To think that fairly soon it will be impossible to retire unless you're a homeowner?

[Echobelly]

... at least in some parts of the country.

I'm sort of amazed this isn't being talked about - we have more and more people who can never afford to buy, whose rent payments take a significant chunk of their salary, and that chunk only goes up and up. How are they supposed to save for a pension when all their money goes on rent? And there's very little social housing to go round.

Homeowners at least will mostly be able to pay off mortgages, that are likely to be less than rent and allow them to pay into pensions, and have the option of downsizing to help manage retirement.

In the next few decades it seems likely we will see increasing numbers of people who reach retirement age, or may simply no longer be well enough to work, yet their pensions will not cover rent, let alone anything else. But no one's thinking about how society is supposed to cope with this and won't until it's too late it appears.

Exactly. A 1 bed flat in my area is £600 a month rent. You would need a 250k pension pot to just pay rent. You would be better off saving nothing and getting pension credit and housing benefit.

Housing benefit won't pay all of your rent for the majority. There is a set allowance, per bed, per Local authority. So where I am the maximum you can get is up to £795 per month for a 3 bedroom.... 3 bedrooms here are £1100 upwards so you have to find the difference from your other benefits or wages.
I rent, I'm single, I'm dreading getting older, it might be better for everyone if I don't.

In my experience it is the other way around - older relatives who never owned a house and retired on the state pension have always been housed by the state, whereas those who bought and retired on a state pension struggled to maintain increasingly dilapidated houses.

@TheYearOfSmallThings my thoughts entirely. If you have nothing, the state generally picks up the tab.

Yes, someone without any assets and without money will get a form of financial provision; those without assets but with money won't, as things stand now.

It needs to be addressed - generation rent are increasingly reaching middle age and a lot of them will be realising that they will never own. If they start to join the dots about what that means for them 30 years down the line then they will stop paying into their private pensions.

And then we really will be fucked. Because their landlords will want that rent, and we'll be giving it to them from state funds via housing benefit. It will cost us tens of billions, every year.

I interpreted that post as maybe older people living in a large family home of say 4 beds and moving to a smaller house - not necessarily a bungalow of flat.

MIL is 96. Two years ago, she fell and broke her hip. She got little physio, even in a rehab care home for a few weeks. She hasn’t been able to go upstairs since. She already couldn’t step in or out of the bath, and hadn’t used it in years! The only toilet is upstairs. She has a hospital bed and commode in her dining room, and moves between there, the kitchen (she can’t stand to cook) and lounge, where she watches TV all her waking hours. Carers come in to empty the commode and microwave her meals. She can only have a strip wash in the kitchen sink. She can’t step out of the house.

That has been an object lesson to me on old age - and I don’t want to end up living like that!

You’re assuming that because that’s the situation now it will always be the same. If the demographic of pensioners changes, governments will change their policies accordingly.

Agree that the HB ceiling will probably change. Pensioners in social housing can already have a spare bedroom without losing any of their HB.

I think it's pretty unlikely that we'd be funding them to stay in three bedroom private lets (!) but quite possibly there will be tweaks to take the limit above the single room rate, for eg.

And tbh even the single room rate is going to cost the country a fortune, if we're paying it for a third of retirees.

YANBU- I’ve talked about this to friends until I’m blue in the face (I used to work in pensions policy).

A generation of renters and massive under-saving by the generation below the baby boomers (thanks to Thatcher doing away with necessity for workplace pensions) mean the next generation of pensioners are screwed.

State pension and pension credit for the poorest will help a bit, and auto enrollment will be better than nothing - but no, for a lot of people they’ll never be able to retire completely.

@VestaTilley agreed but would add to the catalogue of errors: all of those mergers and acquisitions that were all the rage twenty years ago where even those who did pay into pensions ... lost them.

Which in turn made people turn to property investment, which contributed to house price increases, Yadda Yadda Yadda.

Also, people being advised to opt out of SERPS ...

I’m not « writing off a generation ». I’m saying that as generation boomers (at least as pensioners) as a generation vote Tory. As I explicitly said in my post not every individual in the generation is the same but as a whole they tend to turn out to vote and they tend to vote Tory. So they are favoured by the current government.

I was responding to @MidnightMeltdown who most definitely was writing off an entire generation. 🤷‍♀️

I see your point, but lots of that money will be used to help the next generation pay off their mortgages/top up their pension. The rest will help the wealthy few younger generation get on the housing ladder. Not sure much will flow into the economy.

Nobody is 'writing off a generation' but it is a simple fact that the baby boomers have, by and large, had things work in their favour politically. There have been countless articles written about it. They are a large generation so have had more voting power.

Of course not everyone has benefited. Nobody has said that. But as a generation, on average, they have done extremely well for themselves by virtue of the fact that they are a larger generation with more voting power. This has been to the detriment of the younger generations that followed.

It’s got nothing to do with being a larger generation with greater voting power. Those of us who have accumulated money - because, let’s be honest, that’s your real gripe - have done so purely by accident. The houses we bought for ninepence in the 80s and 90s have risen in value. We were offered pension schemes standard at the time so we paid into them. Our parents are mostly dead and many of us inherited from them - again largely due the rise of the property market.

Basically your criticism is based on us doing the right thing. We bought houses at the market rate at the time, some of us did well, some of us lost everything in the early 90s and our houses were repossessed. We paid into occupational pensions so we wouldn’t be a burden on the state and we paid two generations’ state pensions while qualifying for our own. Hell, up until 2006 we were paying for a war that ended before we were born.

Yes, we’re an exceptionally fortunate generation because that’s the way the cards have fallen but condemning us for being fiscally sensible is grossly unjust. Nobody has any control over their date of birth.

I think some people get frustated because some vocal boomers (who are not the majority, by any chalk) do seem to fail to understand how much harder it is now. They were able to 'scrimp and save' in order to buy a house even on a modest income and some like to be very vocal with the view that people should be able to do the same and buy homes now, without understanding that homes are so expensive that no amount of 'leaving off luxuries' could help some people to buy.

But I agree some people forget that not all boomers are comfortably off.

This is something I've been banging on about for ages. Homeownership should matter to left and right as if you abandon it the state will end up with a pensioner housing benefit bill it simply cannot meet. House prices need to drop and wages need to rise otherwise in 25 years we're in deep trouble as an economy

I wonder what the incentive is for buying your own house anyway ?

When you get old and decrepit and have to go into care home, you will be expected to sell your house (bought by years of careful budgeting and 'doing without') to pay for your care.

Yet those who have never saved a penny, spent money on smoking, drinking, 99" colour TVs, Sky bundles etc get care for free.

There is something wrong somewhere.

I don’t think it is just those renting this will affect though. So many people (including me) have very long-term mortgages. I fully intend to pay mine off before the term ends at 70 but lots of people won’t be able to.

I'm planning on a retirement career of sorts, something like therapy which I'd love to train for if and when I inherit from my parents (yes I know no guarantees).
I reckon I could do that from home part time until mid 70s.

I think this kind of thing will be more common. My daughter had tutoring from a fairly elderly lady (late 70s) she's backed up with requests but only takes on a few kids at a time. Charges £40 a session.

The thought of flat/ house sharing again, like student days but in my 70s, fills me with horror.

May work for some I suppose. Would there be post it notes on the milk in the fridge I wonder.

My plan is to save up and move abroad somewhere cheap. There is no other option for me really. It will be shit as I will have to leave my sons behind,or if I'm in poor health, stay and rely on them, which I terrible because they will probably have fewer opportunities than me.

At the moment the birth rate is either flatlining or dropping globally, so I'm not even sure I will get a pension. Nobody wants to have kids in such a shit unfair world, that hasn't managed to get its shit together and sort out its political, social and climate issues.

I do think we need to let our current government know they are paid to sort our these problems. They are burying their head in the sand or are too busy feathering their own nests to care.

I had to explain to my own mum that while she worked very, very hard (and she did), she had the opportunity to buy her council house at a reduced price on one low income in the first place without needing thousands for a deposit. No deposit required at all. Those lack of 'luxuries' I had as a kid really was to our detriment too and we really did live a basic existence. However she is housed now, so it is to our benefit now.

I do honestly think that some people of that age avoid admitting things are more difficult now because it devalues their sense of having worked hard and sacrificed to buy their own house. I also think they are more vulnerable to propaganda - I see all of these money saving programmes on TV which have families who are an extreme of consumerism and they think that is what all young families are like! Utter bollocks! I think people promote this extreme as it keeps people arguing amongst each other, rather than looking at the actual system that is failing people and why it is being allowed to carry on. Thankfully people seem to be sick of divisive media and politics and are starting to blame the right people.

I don't blame older people for putting their money in a safe asset, but it does upset me when they lack compassion. Young people need to equally stop blaming the housing market on them too and actually vote for something better.

@Notlosinganyweight you make some really good points.

That’s fine by me. If either of us needs residential care in the future having a house to sell means we’ll have some choice in where we go. Why shouldn’t our house pay for it? We won’t need it any more. If anything happened to my bloke I can very well envisage joining forces with a couple of lifelong friends, it seems eminently sensible to me.