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?

I thought you could still claim NI credits even if the partners earnings took you over the earnings threshold. You just wouldn't get an actual UC payment. If that's not the case it needs to be changed.

I dont know. Never tried it. Was brought up to be ashamed to claim benefits.

Cost me too much in the end.

This has probably contributed to the problems in the NHS They changed it back in 2019 Before then someone on state pension and their younger spouse could get it. It is quite often the case that the younger partner is the older ones carer especially if there is a larger gap. But now younger partners are on UC and have had to go back to work i hope they have got social care to step up. I would.

I retired early through ill health. I can’t claim benefits because I have too much in savings. I’m missing two years contributions as it stands, which at some point I’ll buy to make sure I get SP when the time comes. Luckily I can afford to do that.

I’ve worked and paid NI for 33 years, and been disabled for the past three. Just because a person isn’t eligible for SP doesn’t mean they’ve been sat on their arse all their adult life.

Shes ninety five Rules on working outside the home were different for women back then. Stop bloody gaslighting

@FunBiscuitNo one gets a care home place for free. You have to pay all of your state pension, plus hall any private pension and any savings above a threshold of about £14k LESS approx £30pw personal allowance for clothes, toiletries etc

I think there comes a point at which society will have to say, why did you not put a little bit in the bank for an emergency, because you are now an emergency, and where's your back up.

I don't want to see old people starving in the street, but old people understand that they are unlikely to go hungry in 2025 UK.

It’s obvious that a lot of young posters are very ignorant about opportunities for women back then.

In many jobs, women would be let go from their job as soon as they were married. Places wouldn’t employ married women. Their place was in the home. They didn’t ’choose’ to be SAHMs, they just were. That is what was expected of them.

Even women who were allowed to continue to work would only usually work part-time for pin money. Their wages were a tiny fraction of what a man would be paid (even for equivalent work) and they wouldn’t have paid tax or NI. Very few women had what you’d call a ‘career’ 70 or 80 years ago. It wasn’t a choice. Women didn’t have the luxury of choices in those days.

Stating a fact is not gaslighting.
Putting a current buzzword in your post doesn't increase its importance. My mil died 2 years ago at 97. During her working years she always had a job - yes things were different but she always worked. Not working was a lifestyle choice

I'm with you for the first half of your post, and have no problem at all with those not able to work getting credits, but I don't see why SAHP should get them when their children are at school, or why the self-employed should pay £182 a year (are you sure that's right?) when everyone else pays significantly more.

I would also like to see a gap between PC and the SP, but people can't live on £100 a week, particularly older people who can't move round as much and need to leave the heating on. I would rather see a sliding scale of entitlement to the perks of PC worked out so that those with occupational pensions are always better off than those without.

Also, wrt high earners (above), they only pay the same rate of NI (8%) as lower earners up to £967 a week, at which point they pay 2%. So proportionately someone on £100k pays less than anyone on less than around £52k. Of course that shouldn't entitle their non-working spouse to get a double pension (or any at all, IMO).

This was the case for both of my grandmothers. They got married and did not work. One ended up being a carer for my grandad from their 40s. The other did get a small part time cleaning job in her 50s. They were homemakers and childrearers.
I am an 80s child so it is not like this was hundreds of years ago.

Also, the poster who mentioned her grandmother upthread said she lived on a farm. If this was in the 40s, there may well have been no transport to a job, many if not most women didn't drive, and few families had more than one car. Many women left school young and didn't have qualifications, so tended to work in service if not in larger towns and cities where there were shops and factories, so there were few opportunities and virtually no nurseries.

It is really not comparing like for like to equate the life of someone currently 90 with that of someone living now.

Some people don't have a little bit to put in the bank for an emergency because there is nothing left.

Some people have an emergency long or even more than one before pension age and it changes the course of their life, including financially.

So you are talking about who would now be 100 year old. There aren't many of them around now.
The generation that are current pensioners, 60-80 something years old approx were able to work and were not sacked once they married.
You are muddling your generations!

No many before that were expected to drop out the work force once married. my mums mum was one. Only went back later in life and very part time. My grandad her husband worked all his life and still got pension credit when he retired.

My other gran stopped working in her 40s to be a full time carer to my grandad.

It wasn’t about pensioners in general though. It was in direct response to the poster who had referenced her 95 year old relative, and another who had said that she’d ‘chosen’ that lifestyle (SAHM).

So with these in mind:

1. Exercise -yes definitely helps. My job requires me to be on my feet my whole shift, had a step counter for a while and was racking up the recommended step in one shift. Try to go swimming when I can and for walks. Don't dispute it helps.
2. Eat well. Ok hand up I admit I struggle with this one, one of my medications massively affects my appetite to the point I often forget to eat and it's only when I start feeling a bit sick or dizzy I remember I've not had food. Also anxiety being in a shared house with an abusive asshole of a house ate has rendered me unable to use the kitchen for the past 8 years. Funnily enough I went to find any food in the cupboards to donate to a co worker going through a rough time and relaxed most of it in there went out of date circa 2016.
3. Sleep is managed (thank ye gods for promezathine) and I do have a routine as I get up at the same time and go to bed at the same time each day.
4. Attend their appointments -i do...when I can actually get them. However considering how high the threshold is for CMHT and the fact it's very much now based on getting you out of the immediate crisis then sending you back to the care of your GP-there.is no long term care that exists anymore. (And yes there used to be-13 years back I was under the care of a psychiatrist, CPN and an OT)
5. Take their medication-100% do that. I mean ignoring this is the I think 10th attempt at anti depressants and I've worked my way though the formulary already (well about 8 different ADs and 2 anti psychotics) not much more I can do on that front
6. Attend their therapy. I have. I have now exhausted the NHS option of CBT available to me and both the last psych I saw and my GP have told me the only way to access further therapy is to go private. Which incidentally I fully intended on doing, I managed to find an affordable place that could give me support for up to 2 years. Unfortunately COVID hit and then the waiting lists closed. When the waiting list reopened I had my application form ready to go, then my pip renewal came through the door and without that I couldn't commit to being able to afford it. And then they rejected me and I now definitely can't afford it.
7. I don't need to attend work placements because actually I'm already employed and have been for the last 12 1/2 years since I signed off ESA (support group). I admit I only work part time but that's not through lack of trying. That's due to everytime my hours have increased to full time it's led to a mental breakdown, me being off sick and me being actively suicidal ....to the point that for the last year Occ Health basically insisted I was only allowed to work part time (thankfully doing slightly better now and trying to up my hours as much as I can).

So what do you suggest? This isn't something new to me. I have been depression since I was 11. I was a child. (And before wanting days i was 11 in 1998 so very much long before the internet and social media were a thing). I was self harming and trying to kill myself by 12 and very nearly succeeded at 21. God knows how I'm still actually alive at 38.

And as this has gone completely off topic to bring it back to pension credit, honestly I don't think that far ahead. A)because I imagine I will be long dead before pension age and b)there is zero guarantee of there even being a pension. I do pay into my work one and hopefully if I arrive another 30+ years it might help, but I'm not holding my breath. I didn't think I'd live to see 16 so honestly I've never really thought about the future in any kind of concrete terms.

Our private scheme (which I just got into joining 4 months before they closed it to private entrants) wasn’t as good as the public sector offering at the time but is exceptional now as it’s just kept going if you were in it where quite a lot of defined benefit schemes cut off and you retained what you’d already earned but couldn’t accrue more years of service. It’s over 20 years since it closed to new entrants and obviously over time the amount of people in it is falling off a lot. Being the youngest ones in it we do wonder if we might be heavily encouraged to retire early in 10-15 years to get rid of the last members and save a set of admin fees for a relatively small number of people.

ETA - it isn’t as good as public sector ones were at the time as it capped rises and calculates your total pension due then deducts a portion of your state pension and pays the difference. It ends up being significantly more beneficial for someone who advances significantly through their working life vs someone who works in a more junior role throughout

Reduce NI contributions by 2% at all bands and increase tax by 2% to counter it so it hits unearned as well as earned income?

Massively reduce inheritance tax threshold so vast majority of estates pay it and ring fence gains to go to NHS and social care to cover increasing cost to service needs of the elderly?

There are options that don’t push as much of the burden onto a reducing population of workers but spread them more evenly & that target wealth more than income. People just don’t like the idea (particularly of inheritance tax, which I find a bit odd as what better time to pay a lot of tax than when you are dead)

Whilst I agree that it was way harder for a woman to have a career - low paid was easily available. Dh’s grandma would be 105 if still alive. She worked part time from the time she had babies in various shops. My nan worked in an office until she had to retire on ill health grounds. That was the late 70’s. As a child we had female dinner ladies, teachers and cleaners at our school. All married. My own mother worked her whole life even though she had loads of kids. At school all my friends had mothers who worked. This was the 80’s. Those women are now in their late 70’s

My Late MIL had pension credit. Her exDH did not. I’m incredibly grateful that MIL received it and even then she counted every single penny. Was unable to do the things she loved without sacrificing other things. (Theatre and holidays). In fact the latter were unachievable for her while she still could have holidayed.

She had worked around bringing up 2 children all her life and even worked past state pension age in 2 quite demanding NHS jobs.

Parenting, living in an expensive area, living through economic challenges in the 90s and separation all left her needing pension credit and I’m so relieved she did get it.

I started paying into a private work pension in the early 1990s. This was in the private sector. My employer also paid in some contributions into the pension too & free life insurance.
Therefore work place pensions have been available for some time. I started paying in a small amount per month & increased it over time, due to pay rises.

However some older females that I have met (age 66+) informed me that work place pensions were not available to women, because they were expected to share their husbands money. How times have changed.

I had my DC in 1980s and it was rare to work as there was little if any childcare available. Most were only able to take on part time work once their children started school. This was also against a backdrop of poor maternity rights and pay in the early 80s, but improved somewhat later in the decade. The late 70s and early 80s were a time of high unemployment. So the odds of being meaningfully employed was somewhat challenging and an occupational or private pension was out of reach.

Home responsibility protection was introduced in 1978 which at least gave credits for those claiming child benefit until the child turned 16, which was a massive help towards the state pension for those born circa late 1950s. Those born before hand were extremely likely to have a patchy NI record, so less likely to have a full state pension, made worse by paying married woman’s stamp and for most little, if any access to a an occupational pension.

The rights around maternity, employment and access to occupational pensions and access to information about private pensions that women have nowadays was unheard of not that long ago.

Well I know for a fact having three disabled DC in my family I will need help in my dotage. I haven't worked full time in years. I am classed as a carer.

OP be thankful you have never had difficulties in your life to have prevented you from drawing a big pension later on.

Its 'only' 50 years ago that women could get a mortgage or a credit card without a signature of a man. Which was the same year mat leave came in. So those 75, 80 or 90 year olds were young adults in different time and culture doest change over night.

I think examples of people that did have a good job and did have access to a scheme are missing the point. I would be assuming that those people are the group that did make pension provision, and those that didnt were on the whole the ones who didnt have access to anything as there is a hige amount if evidence of schemes not being open to women, not being open to low earners and so on, right up to the 2000s.