Pension credit only £3 less than State Pension

[SpanishBaguette]

Maybe it's been obvious to others but I've only just found out that Pension Credit will top you up to no less than £227 per week which is only £3 less than the state pension.

AIBU to be hacked off that I need to pay 35 years of contributions to end up with a near identical pension to someone who gets it for free. WTF?

There are still quite a lot of elderly people on DLA.

I’m calling bullshit. Let’s look at this:

She doesn’t get the mobility element of DLA, but gets a mobility car? 🤔 That means that even on higher rate care, the very most she’d get would be £110 a week DLA, which would just about cover the cost of a leased car.

Her only other income is £227 a week pension credit. That’s less than £12,000 per year. Out of that she runs a home, feeds herself (from Waitrose), buys clothes, pays for petrol for her car, has an expensive gym membership and flies business class(!!!) on numerous luxury holidays every year. From £227 a week!

For an “ex-friend” you seem to know the ins and outs of her bank statements!

She likely gets full pension, DLA and then if living alone the severe disability premium of pension credit which equates to an extra £80 odd pounds a week so likely around £420 a week in benefits. No council tax or rent to pay as on Pension credit so the £420 is all available to her each week. I guess it depends how frugal she is but perfectly possible to pay for expensive holidays form that. A 3k holiday only requires £300 a month to be saved per month from that figure of around £1800 odd pounds a month to live off.

Around £420 a week as above. If she lets the savings build up then the pension credit goes down so I guess spend spend spend is the most sensible course of action !!!

Only if they were born on or before 8th April 1948.

Yes there are still an awful lot of people born before that date still claiming DLA.

To be fair though, in pp's case, if want she is saying is accurate and she has all of the information, this ''ex friend'' is claiming fraudulently if she no longer qualifies for the mobility element but hasn't mentioned a change in circumstances.

My dh is self employed. Has been for 30 years and has always paid tax and NI. So it can be done. Many self employed people make good money.

Yes definitely. From my experience there seems to be an awful lot of these older people still on DLA that have just been getting the higher rate mobility component and been getting it for years as it was obviously a lot easier to get with DLA than it is now with PIP. One of my most common jobs at work is people who are on HR mobility and now want to claim the care component so need help with the review form. I honestly don't think that they even re-assess the mobility component , you can actually say on the form what part you want looking at . Obviously mobility part can't be added or increased after state retirement age. So invariably they end up on top whack of both as they get older with more care needs, but most have been on HR mobility for years on end.

They definitely do for children on DLA but maybe not the case for the elderly who are still on it?

She is an over sharer and got me to help her book the holidays so I know how much they cost). She told me she’d paid for her gym membership in one go

She gets high rate dla, full pension credit and higher mobility (despite no longer being eligible as they don’t check up on her).

im guessing - but don’t know - she has savings that are hidden as I literally have NO idea how she gets these hokidays

But I swear on my daughters life there is no bullshit, 100% truth

It seems the review is literally has anything changed and unless you say yes, the award runs for another 10 years.

Yes it’s fraud - one of the many very complex and not for this thread reasons why I ex friended her. It doesn’t sit well with me

It's rife.

I'm assuming back then that is how a review worked on high rate with the 10 year thing? Now for child DLA, you might get an award for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years etc depending on their care needs and when that ends, you need to fill out a form again and send more evidence and they review it all.

Between that, it's up to the parent to report any changes in circumstances should their care needs improve or get worse.

It is something that applies to those past pension age, it’s the same for PIP

um, it’s quite simple. You would have contributed to your lovely fat final salary pension when your employer told you about it, then retired at 50 (your house only cost 4x your salary anyway), with those minimal contributions having funded that buy-to-let you bought in the 90s on an interest only mortgage. Then your state pension kicked in when you were 65, paid for by those who are working and contributing knowing full well by the time they retire the state pension won’t pay out anything. Unfortunately the Governmenr are now means testing the winter fuel allowance, which is annoying for you as that was your Christmas champagne budget.

I don’t really know as this is accurate though. We’re a young couple in our twenties with a mortgage and our household income is 45k approx. We go on two holidays a year and don’t particularly want for much, we also have 2 cats. If we really needed to we could cut a lot back. By the time we’ve paid off our mortgage I don’t see why we couldn’t continue our lifestyle on considerably less income 🤷🏻‍♀️

i will caveat that by saying we obviously live nowhere near London! And if we did the scenario may be different.

I think we need to be mindful of who is generating the data for income in retirement!

When I was 17, in 2000, a work place pension guy came in and talked to me about the benefits of putting some money in, even if it was only a fiver a week (I was an apprentice so earned 100 a week). Most companies had a pension scheme well longer than 10 years, it is only since then that we have had auto enrolment.

Pension provision was much patchier. Its great that your employer did that, but when I was a similar age (but in '96) support staff were not eligible to join the scheme at my few jobs. I could have made a private arrangement entirely, with no employer contribution - but the prevailing view was the state pension would be enough for low earners anyway and i seem to feel some schemes outside of employer ones had restrictions around minimum contributions too. I wasnt until stakeholder pensions were introduced that I was given access to a fund.

I think stakeholder were before auto enrolment was introduced, employers were told they had to offer stakeholders pensions to everyone and that would have been in 1999 the law was passed, and around 2000 they came in. So you might well have been the first batch to be encouraged.

Just want to politely point out that only 40 % of the UK workforce work in large companies defined as 250 employees or more. The remainder work in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or are among the roughly 10% that are self employed. Until 2018, when it became compulsory for all businesses of whatever size to provide a pension scheme, many SMEs didn’t. (This was phased in by company size starting in 2012). Please don’t assume that everyone who was in the workforce prior to 2012 has a company pension. They don’t. This is largely ignored by the MSM, BBC etc. who presumably all have nice company pensions.

Lots of people have not had access to pensions until more recently. Those who are claiming pension credits now were born in the 1950s or earlier. The majority of women did not have access to workplace pension schemes for quite a chunk of their working lives and even if they did pay in when they became available, they will not have been contributing for many years.

I was born later, but didn’t have access to any workplace pension schemes until I joined the public sector. Even then a lot of part time non medical workers were not eligible to join the pension scheme until April 91. Whilst payments into the pension scheme for those who were excluded was allowed to be backdated, it was unaffordable for most.

Agreed. I am tired of this false narrative that we all had it so good, had our own houses handed to us on a plate which are now worth millions, we’ve all got gold plated pensions and no-one was ever made redundant, list their business or had their houses repossessed. And now we’re a huge drain on the younger generation allegedly. It’s just ageism and spite dressed up as social justice.

I don't think you can just dismiss it as false narrative and spite. It's an undeniable fact that demographics have changed and there is a growing older population being funded by a shrinking workforce. That's unsustainable. Successive governments have failed to address the issue despite being fully aware of it. I'm in receipt of the state pension, by the way, before my comments are defined as ageism.