To wonder how people will find jobs in their late 60s?

[Notcontent]

i was just thinking about pension ages, prompted by the Waspi thread and also fact that I spend a lot of time worrying about my own retirement.

i know the pension age has to rise but at the same time I think it will create even more inequality. There will be people with private pensions who can retire at 55 and then those who can’t - and are likely to struggle to stay employed until they can get the state pension - which is likely to be 70 soon.

i my professional job there is an expectation that people retire at around 55. There are no people in their 60s. When I look at people employed in retail, etc I also only see people in their early 60s maximum.

how is someone aged 65 supposed to find a new job?

if anything, I feel like there is more ageism now than ever before. Particularly in relation to older women.

I don’t think life expectancy is falling, it’s just not increasing.

I think it’s easier for people who are already in a job, if they can continue. But if they lose that job, then finding a new one will be challenging.

What job do you work where everyone retires at 55? Is it police or forces? Because in most other jobs, especially office based roles, people carry on working, often full time. Where I work, at a university, there are plenty of professors in their 70s. It’s only on Mumsnet that I see lots of youngish people claiming that they won’t be able to work past 60 because their body will disintegrate.

How does that work then? You start proper work at 24 or so (presuming you went to uni, which is increasingly the case, and then having a few years out). Then you retire at 55, so about 30 years of full working life. Then you die at 85, so 30 years of retirement. So for two thirds of your life you’re economically inactive and you expect that to be okay financially.

Once someone hits their fifties the risk of health problems starts to increase.

People have strokes, heart attacks, start to develop hip and knee problems etc.

So in practice some people will drop out if the workplace due to medical conditions. They'll be on either early retirement due to ill health and or benefits.

Others will be healthy but able to afford to retire early and maybe do voluntary work or a few hours a week paid. I know a lot of people like this - eg they volunteer for the food bank and have a few hours paid as a supervisor or doing the books. Quite a few people like this own their own house and have built up substantial savings as well so they plan to run down their savings until they get their private pension and then live off that until the state pension kicks in.

Yet others are way beyond state pension age and are still working. A friend of mine is like this - he's a lorry driver and couldn't afford to live on the state pension plus his army pension, he'll be working as long as he can.

So it's not just about pension, it's about what you've built up in your working life.

If you can sell a house in London or the Home Counties and retire somewhere cheaper you can retire pretty early.

Outside the police and fire brigade what profession expects to retire at 55? That is insanely young.

And a lot who retire at 55 don't stop work they go on to other things. Mr Monkey plays football with a lot of retired police officers in their early 50s - they all work. Usually things like security or jobs with public bodies that require the kind of skills police officers have.

Most cleaners I see locally are in their 60s; my nearest Waitrose has quite a lot of staff in their 60s.

Personally, I'd struggle and don't think I'd survive it, but I'm struggling with early mornings and work in at 50. I'm hoping there's muchmore sleep and energy after menopause.

Army

Although most do go on to other civvie jobs

The ONS has a lot of broader data on this, but I’m talking about cohort life expectancy for people approaching retirement rather than somebody born today which won’t be relevant to state pensions in the next 10 to 20 years

Physical jobs are much easier when you’re young. We all know elderly marvels running around in Homebase etc (I know a ward nurse in her early 80s who puts us to shame) but they’re lucky to be in good health. I also know quite a lot of elderly consultants who really should have retired as they’re no longer up to the demands of the job.

The government really need to think about what jobs will be available for the elderly to occupy, bearing in mind the spectrum of good or bad health they will be in and that their output and hours worked will likely be lower than someone younger.

There are people in their 80s at my work, civil service.

It’s not and it’s also skewed because if you are middle class in an affluent area, chances are high that you will live until 90-ish. The average (which is now around 82 for a woman) includes those living in deprivation, whose actual life expectancy will be a lot lower. So how can you contribute say 10% of your income during 30-40 years and then expect that to be enough to live well on for another 30 years? The maths don’t add up.

When state pensions were first introduced, the male life expectancy was 68. It was intended that people would live about 3 years after they retired. Not 33, which is what people retiring at 55 are likely to have.

Our local Waitrose has lots of staff over 60 and M&S always seem to as well. Lots of older ladies do after school childminding where I live as well.

I see plenty of people older than me who are working (I'm 65). In one place I worked they hired a man who had retired from his full-time job to work part-time - he's still there, and has been for over 10 years!

I was hired when I was over 60 for my last job.

Very good question.

People will only be able to continue working in their 60s/70s if:

• we address ageism in the workplace and employers' reluctance to employ and retain older workers
• the NHS functions better so that people are not stuck for long period of times on waiting lists and as a result unable to work/off sick
• we improve social care/care for the elderly as people are often stuck caring for older relatives and having to leave the workplace in their 50s/60s
• there are affordable opportunities for people to retrain in middle-age, not just for younger people
• continue to encourage people to lead healthier lifestyles (less alcohol, junk food, smoking)

Basically just saying 'people need to work longer' without looking at the bigger picture will not work...

We had an all staff meeting at work this week and it was noticeable that older people were a tiny minority of staff. A colleague was also telling me that two of his friends in their early 50s had just had major health issues (heart attacks/strokes) after years of working in stressful office roles.

I think the expectation is that ‘Retirement Age’ and State Pension Age become ever more separate.

The implementation of compulsory employer contributions signalled the fact that the state pension is not enough , and cannot be made enough, to cover a retirement from an age that many would want or need to stop work.

Meanwhile, I can tell you from experience, women of middle age onwards become increasingly invisible, except to be belittled or patronised. My sector was also a young person’s sector (rightly, in many ways). I intended to work until 65 but the pandemic vanished my job and I used my retirement rainy day fund to survive for 3 years until I got my state pension.

I just hope that global disasters don’t trash the pension funds for the generations now working so hard to build a pension as well as survive COLC .

Nurse with SCS can retire at 55 as long as they meet certain conditions.

I retired at 55 from my professional job. Maxed out my private pension for 5 years. It helped that my husband and I married young and got on the property ladder by the age of 21, sadly not possible nowadays.

My husband was in a physical job. He was made redundant in his late 50s when the company he worked for went bust. He had employers being open that his age was a problem even then, but still got a job eventually because of the shortage of workers.

He then got made redundant again at nearly 65 when the next company also went bust. He is physically shot now with bad arthritis in his hands which means a lot of jobs are extremely painful. As he only had just over a year to get to state pension age he has decided not to go back to work, but is fortunate that he can take his very small private pension to do that. Until auto enrolment he didn't work for an employer with a pension scheme so his pension provision is pretty bad anyway which means stopping early is a tougher retirement financially.

@Happyearlyretirement And presumably had a very high paying job. I earn pretty well but the idea I could max out my pension by 55 is for the birds.

I can relate to this. In my fifties, I decided to do training for a different job; it didn’t work out, so I applied for positions that I had held a year earlier - and got nowhere. Fortunately my DH didn’t mind if I didn’t have a job, and we were able to manage financially, but I was astonished at the way in which nobody wanted to know - it wasn’t as if I didn’t have the qualifications and experience. What I hadn’t particularly appreciated, though, was that I would be left a few years short of NI for my pension, which we had to pay - it really makes me angry that I was costing the state nothing but had to contribute, where people who have spent their whole lives on benefits, or who have arrived here and never even paid tax, get pension credits which are now worth more than the state pension.

I thought it was going to raise to 58 in 2028.

Ignore -I’ve just googled and seen it’s 57. For some reason I thought it was 58 as it affects me personally.

I retired in 2019 a few days before my 58th birthday on a voluntary early exit scheme(civil service) and took my pension. No regrets.

I don't know a single person who has retired at 55. They may change jobs at that age to do something less physical or strenuous, but they still work.

I don't see how it's possible for the country to support millions of people in their late fifties to just do...nothing? Who's going to pay for it all?

Supermarkets, cafes and shops are full of people in their fifties and sixties, the same goes for offices and hospitals and hundreds of other workplaces. Stopping work at 55 and expecting to be supported for 30+ years in retirement is insane to me.

But like a PP said, I don't know anyone in real life who acts the way MN-ers do about working full-time until retirement. It's not like your body falls apart at 55 - many, many people are perfectly fit and healthy into their seventies and can quite happily cope with work.

Isn’t that part of the problem? Taxpayers funding your early retirement isn’t fair on the majority of citizens.