To be annoyed pensioners effectively now get a bigger personal allowance

[FlightBeforeXmas]

So because of the fiscal drag from not increasing personal allowances the chancellor has announced basic state pension will not be taxable.
So if you earn this amount you pay tax on it despite having the extra costs of working.
Pensioners are also much more like to own their homes.
How on earth does this make any sense?

Thank you. I just get annoyed when I hear so many older people (of which i am one i guess) pretending things were so much harder in the 70s and 80s. That really wasn't my reality and we were NOT wealthy. Its SO MUCH harder for the youngsters today. I really worry about my kids generation.

Sorry but could you explain / expand on this with a computation as I don’t understand what you mean

@Saz12
Your post seems a bit muddled to me?

Typical boomer comment
My kids have worked since 14 alongside their studies and my daughter worked 30 hours a week while at university to help fund her studies as it’s not free now. Everyone she went to uni with worked.
My other child has also worked since 14 washing dishes

1989 I remember mortgage interest rate was 14.7%

The population is likely way more than estimated.

The population explosion put housing up.

Once the population drops, through the lack of babies being born and suspected next government, (there will be probably 20 million leaving the country over a few years as we see in the USA), house prices are going to collapse and will never grow like they did for you again.

If I knew I was going to be in the 20 million getting deported I would sell at the top of the market.

They really aren't the largest demographic of voters

My area, along with othres, suffered a lot from industrial action. Also high inflation at the time and growing unemployment made for hard times for some.

I'm not going to claim the 70s were harder than nowadays, because I suspect that 2025 is going to look horrid for everyone in retrospect. But everyone claiming the boomer generation were featherbedded is deluding themselves. In the late 1980s people bought property to live in (not investments) in 1990 and by 1992, found it was worth 25% less than they had paid, and when they were made redundant in 1993, they had negative equity. A friend owed £47k on a one bed flat in Harlesden that was valued at £34k two years after. Seriously, it was not the fairytale boomer dream some people are imagining.

The only thing on that list that didn’t exist was the mobile phone. We didn’t even have a landline. Everything else on that list was a crap version of what was available. There were colour tvs, automatic washing machines, new cars, but we couldn’t afford them!

oh, and I’m not retired yet, so still paying my taxes.

state pension counts towards your taxable income. I.e. SP 12000 Private pension 8000 total income 20,000 less tax free personal allowance 12570 = 7430 taxable at 20% =tax due £1486

Back in the day HMRC would issue a direct assessment to you and ask you to pay up … they still have that option.

Actually that won’t be happening as the OP doesn’t understand it either😂

Pensioners used to get age allowance which was slightly higher than personal allowance that’s all thsts happening. So if it’s their only income it’s not worth the hassle to tax it

"The age-related personal allowance was phased out starting from the 2013/14 tax year.

The Coalition Government announced in the 2012 Budget that the age allowances would be frozen at their 2012/13 levels until the main, basic personal allowance for all taxpayers caught up. The aim was to simplify the tax system and create a single personal allowance regardless of age.

The age allowances ceased to be in force from the 2016/17 tax year onwards, as the standard personal allowance had increased sufficiently to match and then exceed the frozen age-related rates.

Currently:

• Everyone, regardless of age, receives the same standard Personal Allowance, which is currently £12,570 (for the 2024/25 and 2025/26 tax years).

• Your State Pension, private pensions, and any other income all count towards this single personal allowance.

One remaining age-related tax benefit is the Married Couple's Allowance (MCA), which can still be claimed if you or your spouse/civil partner were born before 6 April 1935."

The basic state pension is around 12k. That is similar to the tax threshold. I can’t see the problem.

So on 38 hours x 52 weeks that totals £1,976 gross.

I’m an older boomer, DH is the end of the Silent Generation. I agree, we bought a house from a family whose business failed in the 80s due to so many customers being on strike, then out of work. I think things improved as our 70s born children became adults. Unlike us, they had opportunities for higher or further education, which set them up for professional careers. I also know that wasn’t the case for everyone.

We became parents at a much younger age, they got established first. They have friends of a similar age who have far surpassed their parents in terms of earnings, lifestyle etc. I accept it’s going to be tougher for the DGC, but as we die off inheritances will help, and as boomers are the biggest cohort of owner occupiers large numbers of families will benefit.

Only for those who qualified in 2016. The OLD basic pension for pre 2016 retirees is £9614 from next April, or £184 a week. Nowhere near the threshhold for us oldies!

I’m always surprised that so many people think there is only one rate.

Most pensioners have also worked for huge parts of their adult life.

The vicious ageism on this site is the most ignorant and dimwitted bigotry imaginable, as if we are lucky we will all be old some day.

And no, I am not old, nor a pensioner, I just haven't allowed the government to groom me into venomous hatred for anyone else that seems to be doing a bit better or have a bit more than me.

The UK has been being groomed for a long, long time into spiteful hatred for anyone perceived as having more or having done well. They have been sold the lie that anyone wealthy - or even just owns their own home - is just lucky and not hard working.

Now the government has all but destroyed the ability to buy a home for younger people, has given the young no hope and has massively increased taxes to a huge burden while paying out benefits nobody can afford, the people are turning on one another. That was always the plan.

In the UK, you must now be absolutely blindingly wealthy or utterly destitute to live without fear and constant struggle. It's not a glitch, it's by design.

Me too - many of my friends had to go out to work as well in the 70’s. My mum apologised to me for refusing to let me go to uni when I was in my 50’s.

38 X 20p = £7.60
£7.60 x 52 = 395.2

Not quite 1.976 gross unless I have completely misunderstood.

That's what I said.

It’s worth pondering this requirement for a degree to get even a foot on a career ladder.
As they said there, nowadays a far higher proportion of pupils go on to further education, meaning far more degrees are floating around, and the entry level minimum floated up accordingly.

The great ‘level playing field’ programme/scam of the Thatcher years, with its bogus foundation of eliminating class privilege (🤣🤣) gave you the right to buy your council house (thereby kicking off the insanity with house prices, not to mention committed the mortal sin of flogging off housing stock required by those who could not buy), and its related (and trickster) promise of a college education for all grossly distorted the remaining labour market, just like the housing one, for those towards the more precarious end things.

Dunno why I am replying really, but the great ripples from that grotesque con trick played on society forty years ago caused a very deep fissure to appear, and certainly split us into ‘before’ and ‘after’ communities, in such a way that comparing the life of a modern 18-year old with the likes of meself in the late 1970s, and certainly me now with their parents, is really not comparing like with like at all.

I mean, these comparisons aren't as nifty as they might appear, since the generations involved operate on unimaginably different foundations. A heavy cultural and social alteration took place; a cursed revolution.
Thus my generation may well be hardwired with concerns and preferences which make bugger all sense to a younger person now, who naturally reads the scene from her own point of view, and judges accordingly. And vice versa, of course

It’s not mere age difference that is the issue, is my point (finally! 😅), it’s that we are each looking at entirely different movies, so to speak.

It’s not a matter of being “harder.”

It’s a matter of young people now having lifestyle expectations that are off the charts compared to how people led their daily lives 40-50 years ago.

30-somethings today think it’s their right to live like established 60-somethings who have 45+ years in the workforce.