To think the standard of living for retired people had to change

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I'm a millennial. I will retire in my seventies. Many in my age group will be still paying their mortgage off well into their sixties. Many will never be able to buy. This is not a moan about that.

My mums generation were able to buy cheaper houses in the eighties. Some have also inherited well (houses which their parents owned and didn't have to sell to pay for care, which had risen in price to above a million). They had better pension plans. Some were able to go to university for free and their degrees actually meant something in the workplace: They often paid off their mortgages in their forties. I see a lot of my parents relatives have retired early and have very enviable lives.

Two uncles have retired in their early sixties. They are both in good help. They spend their days on many holidays, eating out multiple times per week, going to garden centres, renovating their beautiful houses, helping children financially and with childcare. They will have presumably worked out their finances and could afford to continue to live like this for the rest of their lives! Possibly thirty more years!

I think they are possibly going to be unique in their quality of life. We will never have that and I don't see my children's generation having things any earlier.

In essence the generation before me were mostly fortunate, unless personal situations changed their financial situation or they lost their homes during the nineties interest rises. Retirements and pensions were never designed to support people for three decades and that things had to change hence raising the retirement age and making people pay more towards their care.

My mum and dad are both 72. They live in a small 1-bed bungalow worth £120,000. They live on the state pension and a private pension each bringing in an extra roughly £100 a month.

I'm 'generation X'. My house is worth £185,000. It has 2 bedrooms and it really needs a new bathroom and kitchen because both are over 30 years old, but we're saving up for them by cutting out things like takeaways, starbucks, and holidays. My husband and I share an old car. We have cheap android phones that cost about £70 to buy outright and we have sim-only deals costing £6 each a month.

Both my parents and me and my husband 'cut our cloth'. I don't recognise your narrative at all.

I know one couple that fit this bill, just turned sixty, but both still work and their sudden wealth which is being spent with breathtaking speed, came from her inheritance when her parents died. I do sometimes wonder whether it would be better spent giving their children a house deposit. They spend hundreds a week - thousands a month - on eating out, theatre, weekends away, several foreign holidays a year. Meanwhile their young adult DC are finding it hard to pay rent!

Its quite a generalisation to say that all older people have it easier. Not all do. I didn't have access to university despite it being free at the time. I come from a working class family and there was no encouragement to aspire for higher education. I left school at 16 and did crap work but saved every penny to take myself to college and retrain as a secretary. There was no financial support for that. I then did mediocre jobs until I had my children which changed everything as I had to give up work to care for two disabled children. Life has been a struggle and we've had to rely on my husband's income; micromanaging every penny and doing without. I realise that my situation is not unique and probably not much different to other SEND families but what upsets me is the assumption that because I'm older life has been easier. It hasn't been easier; my whole life has been a struggle and I'm tired and worn out. The only pension I will get is the state pension but after years of caring, I think I will have earned that.

My inheritances? Zero. A big, fat zero.

Yes, I'm one of the lucky generation who've had everything handed to them on a plate. May all the whinging posters be as lucky as I was.

The generation before you is Gen X, trust me when I say most of us will probably be working til we drop. My pension fund is worth diddly squat and state pension won't kick in until I'm 67 at the earliest (I'm sure they'll shift that again when I get close to it). My parents are both dead and had nothing to leave their very large family so no inherited wealth. Everything that I have I give to my Gen Z kids and they'll inherit my home. They've had an amazing education with huge input from two invested parents which neither of us had growing up. As others have said, it's swings and roundabouts to what each generation benefits from and suffers from.

Disagree! YABU you have not clue about how retired people outside your bubble live. Also, if your family have all that presumably you will benefit from it at some point. I hope you are threat it like shit when you are old and you remembered the poison you were spreading.

YANBU. It’s a population size thing too.

My granddad worked for the civil service and retired at 55 on a full final salary pension. As healthcare had improved, he lived to be 98. That is a long time drawing a pension. 👀

Absolutely quality of life is going down for everyone in - well I was gonna say Britain but perhaps I mean Europe plus the middle east? 😫

Where has this idea come from that previous generations had it easy? My parents were children in the 1950s and it was not easy for them growing up; my dad grew up in a tenement flat and shared an outside toilet with several other families and my mum went to a secondary modern school where she would have had no chance of going to ‘university for free’. All grandparents and parents died young before they had a chance to claim much pension. I was a child of the 70s and we had no spare money. I never went on holiday until I was 19.

No they don't.

@WeightWhat The current OAPs did not ‘earn it’ - they just changed the rules so they were entitled to it. It’s today’s workers who are earning it.

Please return to the thread & explain this, because it makes no sense. What rules were changed, by whom & in what way?

Also, many things were designed for it to be temporarily. Taxes for instance. If anybody would be vulnerable out of work is an elderly person that can’t work. I find your views a disgrace tbh.

Indeed. I'm 65 and yes, I had a free university education. However, my life before then was lived in what today's young people (anyone below about 45, I reckon) would class as squalor. I was brought up in a house with no bathroom or inside toilet, no central heating, coal fires only in the two rooms downstairs and only 2 bedrooms - I shared with the elder and then the younger brother (the elder then slept on a sofa bed in the front room. NONE of us had any privacy and as I've often said to my tyounger brother - the father of 18 and a 23 year old (very middle class now) daughters - just imagine what is was like for me, hitting puberty in those conditions.

I didn't go out of the UK until I was 18.

I was finally able to afford to buy a one bedroom flat (with my then partner) when I was 28, furnished with crappy, second and third hand bits and pieces. It didn't have central heating, either. We couldn't afford a car until I was 31 and we had one between us, a 4 year old Fiesta.

We had none of the lovely, expensive gadgets (laptops, tablets, mobiles, gaming consoles, etc) that younger generations see as essential to their lives.

What I'm saying is, we had shit lives before we attained anyhthing like a reasonable standard of living, after working for quite some years and saving like fuck. Nobody helped us out with deposits, much less paid for shedloads of stuff for us as youngsters.

Two uncles have retired in their early sixties. They are both in good help. They spend their days on many holidays, eating out multiple times per week, going to garden centres, renovating their beautiful houses, helping children financially and with childcare. They will have presumably worked out their finances and could afford to continue to live like this for the rest of their lives! Possibly thirty more years!

You really, really grudge that they've worked out their finances and can afford a pleasant retirement, don't you? guess what - they will have paid into those private pensions for years, probably very substantial sums as well for which they made sacrifices at the time, and they'll now be taxed on that. Your post absolutely reeks of envy and sour grapes.

Going to garden centres? the absolute CHEEK of them actually enjoying their retirement!

I should have added that - obviously - my parents never owned property and left me bugger all.

Not always true that staff don’t know who is self funded. In the hime where DM was the front office had a glass wall on to the corridor. Each resident had a large box file on the shelves, clearly marked with names in large letters, and self funders’ files carried a large red stamp on the spine.

Do you feel the same about benefits for young and middle-aged people who irresponsibly procreate, or is it just older people you have a problem with?

🍿

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow my dad retired at 65 and got extra pension for my mum who was much younger as did many of my relatives- most married women did not get a pension in their own right as they had paid reduced NI once married

You can’t have it. It was paying for THAT generation of retirees. See how this works?

The absolute STUPIDITY of people who think they have paid into some mythical pot.

Your NI ‘since 1975’ was spent by your government on your behalf every year that you earned it @MrsDanversGlidesAgain You are now sponging off the actual people at work. You know, the same people that don’t have homes to put their can’t-afford families into.

I think that somewhat garbled post is saying that current taxpayers are paying for today's pensions - which is the way the system works. Hard to be sure, though.

It was easier in the past to buy your own home

Yes, but we're talking late 90s / early 2000s, which is a relatively short period, when 100% mortgages and banks relaxed the ration of what amount they would lend to salary. And that actually led to house price inflation in a lot of ways, because people were encouraged to push as high as possible what they
I know someone who bought their first house in the 30s. It was a whopping £200. They had to have 10% deposit and that was quite a generous bank. They earned about £80 a year, and that was doing 60+ hours weeks. Saving that £20 for the deposit was a struggle and also the bank would only led maximum 3x salary. The woman's wage wasn't allowed to count towards salary at all.

Then in the 80s, there high interest rates. People here panic about 5%, it was at 17% at the beginning of 1980. It got down to around 9% over the 80s but was nearly back at 15% by the end of the decade. I remember lots of houses being repossessed too.

It's really easy to say "oh we have it worst now" but not realise what other generations have coped with because we're not living it.

Aged 61, still working, paying tax and NI will be working until at least 67 if I live that long.

It's only really in the SE and London where average homes are worth £1m +.

Op I do t think our generation will ever retire. We will drop dead working. every generation had hard points. My mum bought her own house at 21 100% mortgage. The last interest rate I was offered was 7% with a 20k deposit. I heard our retirement age may be increased to 72, happy to be corrected if I’m wrong. I do think some people had their heads screwed on with retirement then there was people who didn’t really think about it, then it stung them

@downdowndowndowndown I am one of the sandwich generation, a very late boomer who gets to pay for both parents and children.
I will be working until I drop. There was no auto-enrolment when I started work more than 40 years ago and consequently many of us do not have gold-plated pensions.
Inter-generational jealousy suits politicians of all stripes. Had you considered that when recessions happen, pensioners with their guaranteed income can keep businesses afloat? It's hard when you're starting out and younger people would do well to make their presence felt at the ballot box.
Should I vote with self-interest for the next 15 or so years I might be around, or for future generations? My £50,000+ in tax each year is far above any benefit that I get or will get from the state - that's just being part of society, but it does rankle somewhat to be told that we've lived an indulged existence that we didn't deserve.