To not have realised that my pension age has gone up?

[IIdentifyAsInnocent]

I'm 45, 46 this year. Checked online 2 years ago and my state pension age was 67, which I thought was bad enough, for some reason checked again today and it's gone up to 68!!

I knew that the govt were thinking of doing this but I have no recollection of being told it had actually happened. This affects my work pension which I now can't take until 68 too as it aligns to state pension age.

Annoyingly, my brother who is 2 years older can still retire at 67!
Have I missed some huge public announcement?

The WASPI women were mainly ignorant of the news. And they have tried to blame someone else for their ignorance.

There were many letters in The Times last week on this from WASPI women who (like me) were fully aware of the announcement, years and years ago.

If you dig into the cases of the Waspis, most of those women were 'head in the sand' and ignored letters they were sent.

I knew, as did 1000s of other women.

When I left school we were told we would get our state pension at 60. Now it's 67. I have never received a letter telling me.

Average life expectancy is around 85

For whom? Born when?

Well it is about money, obviously, as people want money, i.e. their state pension, and someone else has to pay for it, which currently is the next generations who'll have to pay the interest and deal with the debt of the ever increase national debt, as we're just constantly borrowing money to pay for today's costs, at a national level.

Maybe equalise pension age when the gender pay gap closes? Perhaps women's state pension should higher than men's based on the pay gap percent?

This is so depressing

i I didn’t realise work pension was so often linked to state retirement age

like all of you I’ve been squirreling away into my pension all these years but now it feels pointless

Your NI goes into general taxation, no one is investing it or putting it aside for later, it’s paying for all the current spending including current state and public pensions. There are forecasts of future pensions spending and future taxation incomes, which is where the ‘affordability’ calculations come in, but no one is actually paying into a specific state pension pot like they would for a private pension or savings plan.

The pension you get on retirement is linked to NI contributions, as in you have to have paid a certain amount to qualify, but that, as we’ve seen, is all subject to change and is fairly arbitrary, some people will pay a lot more NI than others based on income level and years worked. If you die before pension age you don’t get a penny.

It's quite scary the ignorance around pensions and NI contributions. I think there should be educational programmes about this and if people don't understand their own financial situation how can they really understand what they are voting for in terms of political decisions? I guess this is why we ended up with Brexit!

What makes them unique in their inability to work beyond 60, I wonder?

They certainly don't seem to care that others who also contracted for a pension at 60 have had their T&C's changed too with ZERO tapering.

No wonder babyboomers are pretty much reviled by every other generation.

I think the riots will start if ever any government is daft enough to pay out due to WASPs own ignorance, wilful ignorance, bandwagon jumping, and outright lying about 'not knowing'.

The WASPI womens’ case wasn’t entirely based on the fact that they didn’t know. It was that they weren’t given enough notice to adequately plan for delayed retirement. They had to deal with two retirement age changes in quick succession and for a lot of these women, it wasn’t so much the change from 60 to 65 that was the cause for complaint, it was the additional change from 65 to 66 with virtually no notice and little official communication. And awhen they did find out DWP gave incorrect and misleading information as a result of their enquiries. I’m a WASPI and I can assure I didn’t ignore letters I was sent. I wasn’t informed. Simple as that.

It’s not the inability to work beyond 60. It’s the fact that they had already planned financially for retirement at 60 and those plans couldn’t be reversed at such short notice without significant financial loss. The further change from 65 to 66 didn’t help either.

It doesn't help that successive governments over the past fifty years have changed things so many times.

There were a few decades when your state pension was at least partly based on your earnings and NIC contributions, i.e. with graduated state pension which morphed into SERPS (State earnings related pension) which morphed into S2P (State second pension) which was ultimately ditched completely. Over the same period, the qualifying period (years for which you needed "credits") changed between 30, 35 and 40 years. And of course, there were 2 or 3 decades when people could "contract out" so some of their NIC deductions were directed into private pension schemes in return for losing eligibility for the earnings related state pension extra. So for some people, they would have received an enhanced state pension based on earnings, the higher the earnings (and NIC contributions), the higher their earnings related state pensions, others would have received state funds into a private pension, etc.

Far too many changes really for people to keep up to date with.

But for that reason alone, people should have been more aware and done more for themselves to keep themselves aware of the changes and implications.

And, of course, the changes between 30/35/40 years and the changes to SERPS/S2P etc affected men and women, not just women.

Just because it was "hard" to keep up with the changes doesn't mean people should have just ignored them and made no effort to try to understand how it affected them.

They had from 1995 to "plan" for the change from 60 to a higher age. That was probably 20 years for most people, so half their average working life, so it was plenty of time.

I do have more sympathy for those affected by the 2011 changes where notice was a lot shorter.

But no one had just a few years' notice of their pension age going from 60 to 67. They "may" have had a relatively short notice of it changing from say 64 to 65 depending on their date of birth, but the really large differences of a few years arose mostly from the 1995 change.

They had years of notice.

Financial rules change all the time. I'm going to be paying more tax soon because the dividend allowance is being cut- can I get out of it because Jeremy Hunt didn't tell me personally? No. We all have to take responsibility for our own affairs and that includes keeping up to date with the changes. The idea that we should take money away from public services or increase the taxes of working people in order to pay out to a bunch of women who didn't do the absolute basics just beggars belief.

Imagine what the WASPI women would say if millennials complained that they only got a couple of years' notice that tuition fees were going up to £9k pa and therefore shouldn't have to pay 😂

Great idea…… but how are you going to differentiate between those of opposite gender who have been paid the same v those who may or may not have been?

Because if you don’t, that’s discrimination.

For Public Information:
Anyone , young,newly arriving in the country are ' Engineered' to NOT find work.
Due to state pensioners working.
Reason ??????
Its cheaper to pay UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFIT than State Pension.

On a positive note: The Government want congratulating for encouraging women to work and separating 2 year olds from their mothers for hours on end.

I apologise. But people have to take financial responsibility for their retirement. That is the ‘message’ that I ‘received’ many years ago as changes were coming in, it could be I did (and do) read and listen to financial articles. We can’t expect younger generations to keep bailing out older ones as the system is unsustainable in the long run.

You lose 3% a year if you're an active member and 5% if you're not. Lots of my 30-something colleagues are paying the extra to go at 65 rather than 68 so that's an option, it's not a lot spread over 30 years.

I'm one of the younger WASPI women and can retire at 66 in a bit under two years time.

I work in health and social care, at 60 I was loving my job and coping just fine four years down the line I am really struggling with exhaustion from a full working week and with no choice but to see it out.

There are other sectors where similarly doing the tasks required will not be possible for many people until they are 70 so I think a lot of people in their fifties would need to consider retraining but what realistically can they all do? We're not all in careers many just have jobs.

Only if they want to claim UC. If people can fund the luxury of being a SAHP themselves, they are not expected to work.

I have a private pension, I also have a work one. I have a LISA too. Not really the point of the post though which is about state pension age, not how I'm paying for my own retirement.

Equality with pensions has bit most women. It's still women who tend to take caring roles, drop their hours for caring. I halfed my hours and work term time due to disabilities of my children and no other suitable childcare. My work pension will be rubbish. Dh work only started paying pension when it was law and we were too skint for private pension. We are saving like mad now kids are a bit older but I'm still stuck with same hours. I'm terrified we are going to be very poor at retirement

Surely it can be claimed any time from 55 but at a reduced rate? That’s how it works in the NHS at least. You just have to work til retirement age to get max amount per year. The reason they drop it before that is that is based on about 20 years worth of payout, so it just spreads the 20 year payout over more years if that makes sense.

I’d double check.