45% of working age people not saving toward a pension at all

[FernFaery]

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/may/19/britons-not-saving-enough-retire-pensions-commission

Another looming crisis!

This is key. Educate young people on personal finance - saving, compound interest etc. My teenage daughters are very much the exception amongst their friends. They have managed their own money since age 12 - small amount each month rather than giving money as needed. Saving a small amount here and there from their part time jobs. Talking about money at home is key and helping them understand why they need to save and not spend 100% of their money

She saved the tax payer thousands of pounds . It costs 2k plus a week to keep someone in care , even more if they have one on one carers 24/7 . Why shouldn’t she stay at home to look after her disabled daughter until she couldn’t ?. The people you should begrudge are the ones who are physically and mentally able who can work but choose not to or lie about illness and disabilities and tax dodgers and Billionaire company owners who don’t look after their staff and pay them a pittance.

The 25% figure is the economic inactivity rate, not the unemployment rate. It includes students, carers, long‑term sick and early retirees - not just people who are out of work. The actual unemployment rate is much lower. So saying “25% aren’t employed” is technically true but very misleading.

The actual unemployment rate is a lot lower than it was in the 80's.

Do you know how much carers get? It is about £85pw, and it is deducted from any UC they already get.

Would you work in a 24/7 carer job for £85pw?

The sad thing is the Gov would like us all to press that button at 75. Even earlier, as soon as we stopped paying tax. Including the people paying into pensions who could have put their pension contributions into the economy instead.
Maybe we should all press it at 60 really to create employement for the young coming out of uni and imagine the savings in healthcare.
Maybe anyone under 60 should press it when their first grandchild is born so we can free up our houses and get out of the housing crisis.

Where do we stop?

We could just cap personal wealth to £100,000,000 take the rest in tax and that would pretty much pay for everything, decent pensions, decent infrastructure and transport, universal living wage. I mean, how much more than a hundred million does an individual need to have an absolutley amazing lifestyle and have pretty much everything they could ever want for their entire family (apart from maybe the power to outright buy off governments and own media platforms) you can't earn £100,000,000 otherwise that would be the wage of paediatric brain surgeons and astrophysicists.

Billionaires should not exist in a country that is the fifth richest in the world but children need food banks to survive. Once our society is fed, housed and has a properly functioning NHS again then we can consider having billionaires.

Lots of people are really unwell and waiting for treatment or on inadequate treatment or they could and want to work but cannot get hired. Its really difficult for able bodied healthy people to find work and work that pays well enough to pay for life and to save for retirement. Disabled people and people with health issues are in tough spot and really not to blame for not being able to save into a private pension.

You are woefully misinformed, have no understanding of how many pensioners have to chose between food and heating? You have a real shock coming your way. Single pensioners cannot live on £1000pm

The irony here is that if my pensioner DM gave up her job (she has a cleaning company), it would actually cause about 20 younger people to lose theirs.

Do you know how much carers get? It is about £85pw, and it is deducted from any UC they already get

It was £60 ish a week when I was claiming it. No other benefits at all. I don't think UC existed then.

Maybe anyone under 60 should press it when their first grandchild is born so we can free up our houses and get out of the housing crisis

Nah. Who'd do the childcare?

Huh? What do you mean by public pensions? There's no such thing. Do you mean public sector pension? State pension is completely seperate from a public sector pension, neither deducted nor included.

Healthy life expectancy in the UK is dropping and I, for one, will be making sure I have a 'do not resuscitate' statement in place as soon as I feel my quality of life is rubbish.

So I'm kind of hoping I'll be gone before the small pension I've saved runs out.

If a lot more people do the same we may not find ourselves in such a huge financial mess in a few years time after all.

Did you mean to say that you were grateful to live in a society where the state was able to step in when you were no longer able to meet your child's care needs?

youre a very silly woman. you will soon likely be unemployed, like so many other - what is it you do for work that makes you so impervious? It's always unexpected and there's always a change of tune when it happens to you. If you have managed to get this far without having to stress about paying into a pension then you should be thanking your lucky stars not sitting on your high horse judging those who are caught drowning in the current. `And no, it isnt so easy just to get a job with a pension if youre self employed. and no, you are not superior to those who havent just because you have.

Paid workers who pay taxes of course. Part of the merrygoround.......until they reach their fifties, have served their purpose of tax contributions. The future of the country is to be populated by under sixty year olds only apparently.

I'm in the same position. Though my son is 10 so younger.

I won't be able to work for many years to come.

Do you realise that once the child became an adult, she became the state's responsibility. Do you realise the OP looked after this other adult and saved the state hundreds of thousands of pounds.

I want to share a vital life lesson I learnt too late.

I left school and went into the civil service. The wage wasn't good but at that age I did not take into account the fantastic pension I got and to me it was too far off in the future and I wanted the money NOW.

I left the civil service after 5 years for a better paying job, well I got more pay at the end of the month but what I didn't consider at the time was that in real terms I was on less as the new pension was crap. Had I stayed in the civil service I would have been looking at a decent pension now, but I'm not.

In later life I moved to the NHS, again not as good a rate as I would get in private industry but when you look at the pension, its really makes a competitive wage, but again its a deferred income and I needed the money now to cope with rising household bills.

I just wish I had decided to stay on the lower wage and play the long game. I never looked at it in this way when I was younger, When I was a teenager, youth unemployment was 20-25% as opposed to 12% now so swopping jobs was not easy but I apparently made a concerted efforted to sabotage my retirement by not considering the value of pension contributions when looking at my wage.

There is a gratitude gap we are just not going to be able to agree on.

Not sure what that has to do with parental responsibility or expressing gratitude for living in a society where support is available. It was not a one way street.

I plan on working until I’m dead. Retirement sounds very boring.

So you base your whole life around work? That is sad.

Did you mean to say that you were grateful to live in a society where the state was able to step in when you were no longer able to meet your child's care needs?

My 35 year old child? Of course I am grateful for her situation now. It doesn't alter the fact that my actions in not accepting a placement offered when she was 16 has saved a huge amount of taxpayer money that would have been spent on her care. That's just fact.

Historically, I believe many people started work at 18, worked until 65, had a generous pension and died early 70s

Now, so many people expecting to study until 22, retire mid 50s and live until 80s. For the vast majority, it's unrealistic and nit sustainable