To be angry with people who describe the old age pension as a "benefit"?

[FlubandSlub]

When I started my working life, aged 16, I entered into an agreement with the government for them to save my pension money for me. It was stated that it would be until I turned 60 which would be when I could starting drawing my old age pension. Even though I made my FULL pension payment contributions by the time I turned 51 the government has decided it will not abide by the original agreement and that it is going to keep MY money until I am 67. Probably hoping I will die before then.

Consider this, not only did I contribute to my pension, my employer did too. It totalled 15% of my income before taxes. If you averaged only £15 000 p a. over your working life, that's close to £220,500. Read that again. Did you see anywhere that the Government paid in one single penny?

We are talking about the money that I and my employer put in a Government bank to ensure that I would have a retirement pension. It was not money that the Government had any right to spend on other things! Upon reaching the age to take it back they've started to call the money we paid in a "benefit" !

If you calculate the future invested value of £2500 per year (yours & your employer's contribution) at a simple 5% interest (that's less than what the govtpays on the money that it borrows from overseas), after 49 years of working you'd have
£892,919.98.

This money was supposed to be in a securely locked box, not to be used as part of the Government's general funds.
Successive governments borrowed the money to spend on other things but that doesn't make my pension some kind of charity or handout!! If a private pension company did this we would sue them. Unfortunately the Government can legally rob us blind and get away with it

IT'S MY MONEY! IT IS NOT A BENEFIT!!

But they're not Pension Contributions, they're National Insurance Contributions. You need those Contributions to apply for Contribution based benefits sich as Jobseekers or ESA these days, you can't claim those without enough Contributions. So unless Contributions based benefits for working age people should also be known as pensions then they certainly aren't pension contributions.

Wow, the entitlement. You know that probably the majority of mumsnetters will get sweet FA when they reach pensionable age right? Gen X onwards have had to have private pensions (the only kind you "enter into an agreement" for), with larger contributions, to avoid destitution when they retire. Talk about first world problems.

Look up SERPS, we entered into an agreement re pension.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Earnings-Related_Pension_Scheme

Firstly; Wikipedia? 😂
I don't need to look it up. I know precisely what SERPS was (State Earnings Related Pension Scheme) and it was not a contract. It was a government-run additional state pension scheme from which you could opt out (the only contractual element of SERPS), known as "contracting out". Contracting out involved paying lower National Insurance contributions to fund a personal or workplace pension instead, aiming for a larger retirement fund. Also, it was scrapped over 2 deceased ago in 2002, so I fail to see your point? SERPS was additional to and separate from the basic state pension, which I suspect very few of my generation (X) and those thereafter will benefit from, after slogging their guts out to fund "current" pensions.

This! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Add to all of that that NI also covers medical insurance. That would be AT LEAST £150 a month off your national insurance contributions. plus a deductible every time you need a gp etc.
Then there is unemployment insurance etc.
Average NI payment in thd uk are about 6-7 k (employer plus employee)
deduct the 2k minimum for health insurance
4 k left
Deduct unemployment insurance and ling term sick insurance: about 3 k left
you end up with around 270k in your pot
this gives you an annuity of about 18k per year from 65
you will of course still need to pay medical insurance, so take 2k off that, plus deductible of sbout 2k per year.
With any dort of health conditions, means you have about 14k left per year.
That is about the same as the state pension - for somebody who ears 40k a year over 35 years.
Everyone who earns less would get ALOT less

So you agree most people extract more than they put in ?

Financial services compensation scheme

https://www.fscs.org.uk/

Financed by levies charged on financial services firms

@LoopyLouUKYou should read the government website more. Interesting that this idea is being promoted though. I’ve been wondering for a while how Reform actually plan to finance the economy, given they say they won’t raise taxes, but lower them, and it’s 100% they won’t tax the rich. Maybe the plan is to steal our pensions.

I suppose at some time they will publish an actual policy, so we can find out.

You're being very generous in assuming they have a plan at all.

Sounds like you're getting muddled up with the new pension contributions those in work should pay, which are on top of the NI contributions. They are a separate thing. As a qualified welfare rights advisor and payroll assistant there's not a week that goes by without me looking something up on the government website.

For all the unsympathetic posters claiming that OP is whining baselessly, shame on you! Your lack of empathy and understanding is appalling.
I too paid all my taxes and contibutions for as long as I worked. I too paid expecting a pension at age 60.
I and my fellow WASPIES wish we'd had had a crystal ball so that we knew to magucally transfer to higher paid jobs 26 years ago so as to save for our 60s. We wish we'd know to ask our dependent parents and other elderly relatives to kindly and conveniently die after a 24 hr illness so we didn't become unpaid carers, giving up full time work for their sake to the financial detriment of our own futures.
To all you younger moaners snd whiners out there, you horrify me. Your utter lack of sympathy for older women casts a shadow of selfish greed over your entilted generation which understands its rights, but precious little of its responsibilities.
Your old age may be a dire, suffering wilderness of poverty and deprivation.
May you then rue your holier-thsn - thou attitude to OP.
Again, shame, shame shame on you!

@IamMoodyBlue

I and my fellow WASPIES wish we'd had had a crystal ball so that we knew to magucally transfer to higher paid jobs 26 years ago so as to save for our 60s.

The increase in state pension age for women was known about 26 years ago so you wouldn't have needed a crystal ball. It was common knowledge with the rules being changed in the 90s.

It is the OP that has a complete lack of understanding.
She has just copied and pasted something that is doing the rounds on the internet, and it is completely untrue.
Whether she posted through ignorance or through a desire to post misinformation we can't tell as she hasn't then engaged with her own thread.

However, as a woman in my 60s - yes, when I started work, people were able to collect their state pension at 60 (women) or 65 (men). But, as life moved on a bit, changes were made, and widely published and talked about on the News, in newspapers, down the pub, on 'magazine programmes' or the day, in magazines, in conversations with neighbours or friends, with colleagues, in correspondence and material published by unions.

I too paid all my taxes and NICs on full knowledge that I wouldn't be able to collect my state pension until I am 67. Hardly news.

I'm not sure if this angry rant is another cut and paste job or your own original work.
Either way, it is exactly this kind of thoroughly hypocritical rant, demonstrating such a lack of awareness and empathy, that causes inter generational division and makes younger people angry. The Waspie women had decades of notice of the pension changes. If they decided to ignore all the publicity, that is their responsibility. They should be grateful and count themselves very lucky as younger men and women will not have such advantageous state pensions or many of the other benefits their generation have enjoyed.

You didn’t need to transfer to a high paying job 26 years ago. you just needed to be aware of changes around YOUR retirement - just like you have to be aware of changes in law. Wilful ignorance does not protect you from the consequences - just like you can’t drive 50mph in an are that is now 2mph just because it “used to be different “.
60 is no age to retire, unless you have significant physical impairments.

Another non answer.

What if a pension company holding billions (if not trillions) in assets goes bust and (say) a million pensioners stand to loose £100 a month as a result.

Companies that can't go bust aren't companies. They are organs of the state.

And having seen the mischief that companies can get up to at the moment over fraud, tax, bonuses and shareholders, I am afraid that any confidence I have that we can just shift everyones pensions in to private companies (like we did with the countries water supplies) is non existent.

As previously ignored, look at the way the Mirror pensioners were treated after their pensions were fraudulently stolen (under the watchful eye of the regulation, I shouldn't need to add).

Not a single word of which changes the current situation that the state pension is a benefit, and as such it is linguistically if not politically correct to refer to people in receipt of the state pension as "on benefits".

It therefore follows that without some further information, pensioners are included in the pejorative term "benefit scroungers". If you wished to exclude them you would properly have to say "Benefit (except state pensioners) scroungers". And that's got too many words for the readers of the Telegraph who are busy people and can't be doing with nuance like the Mail readers obsess over.

It may be Sunday morning.

As previously ignored, look at the way the Mirror pensioners were treated after their pensions were fraudulently stolen (under the watchful eye of the regulation, I shouldn't need to add).

Which is why the rules have changed since then, and there is now both the FSCS that a previous poster linked to and the Pension Protection Fund. That doesn’t mean people couldn’t lose any money, but it gives them a lot more protection than the Mirror pensioners had.

But, as you say, not relevant to State pensions

To all you younger moaners snd whiners out there, you horrify me. Your utter lack of sympathy for older women casts a shadow of selfish greed over your entilted generation which understands its rights, but precious little of its responsibilities

I don't understand your logic. All the younger posters, who know fine that they will also be old one day, are subject to the same raised pension age, if not higher, than you. Other things being equal, why exactly are they greedy, what rights do they have that you don't?

I agree, and I am a WASPI woman.

i mean, most of us under 50 know we’ll never get a state pension. Its just not financially feasible. so i have little sympathy for people moaning they can’t retire at 60…
For us its save privately, keep working (probably both) and means tested PIP when we are properly unfit to work and have spend all our assets (probably in our mid/end 70s).

The OP is saying ‘don’t call it a benefit’ when it’s literally a benefit.

We are talking about National Insurance contributions, not pension contributions. As already stated, there is no "fuckton of interest" to be added because it is NOT a "pension pot" into which you make contributions to later draw on as a pension. As already stated, it runs on a "Pay as you go" basis with current contributions being paid to current claimants. And it certainly is intended to partially fund the NHS. Once collected, a portion is taken to go towards NHS expenditure. The remainder goes into a "National Insurance Fund" where it is used to pay social security benefits including the State Pension. It is projected that at current rates, this National Insurance Fund will reach £zero around 2043.

There's a full explanation and history here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04517/#:~:text=The%20National%20Insurance%20Fund&text=Money%20in%20the%20NIF%20is,as%2Dyou%2Dgo%20fund.

Thanks @ilovesooty. Just to be 100% clear, my response was directed at the poster and those who write similar rants on social media. I know that there are many other people of a similar age and older who do not agree with this view at all and are worried for their children and grandchildren.