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!

My children too, although they are both paying into work pensions and both have that moneybox thing.

No, not just you. Allegedly I’m “psychotic”. This poster handing out diagnoses to strangers they haven’t even met is yet to inform us all of their medical credentials.

That needs some context. 45% of adults are not saving into a pension, but that includes the unemployed and self-employed. I think the figure for auto-enrolled employed people is substantially higher - something like 90%.

I thoght we were going to stop the personal attacks?

Clearly you do if you feel the need to make personal comments accusing me of being “psychotic” rather than engaging with any of the economic data I’ve posted.

I have no idea who you are but you making this weird comment about me and then apparently claiming another poster is mentally unwell as well perhaps indicates a little projection going on given that this isn’t normal behaviour in a conversation about economic policies, but I’m not a medical professional and even if I was I wouldn’t be presuming I could diagnose strangers I’d never met with medical issues.

It all seems rather bizarre behaviour to be honest and has nothing to do with the thread topic.

Yet you continue to post about a SINGLE POST.

We? It’s only been you making personal attacks on people as far as I have seen.

There is nothing good to be said about them.

Not content with out earning their parents and stealing all the council housing for a lower than market price (right to buy), selling council housing to private landlords, preventing new housing being built and buying investment properties for their own greed, they now have forced the government to subsidise them as by far the richest demographic in the country through triple lock (BTW, when the news talks about rising welfare bill, this is the vast majority of it) at the expense of everyone else, most of all young people thru student loan interest another con. I really hope enough young people leave the country to teach them a lesson. For many it will be the only way to avoid poverty. I (35) will never see state pension. Of course young people are to blame as well for not voting. Vicious boomers + apathetic, useless milennials = social collapse.

They're collapsing society thru their greed as nobody affording a house = nobody having children.

It's a shame COVID killed all the old people born before the war, who were miles better; knew the value of duty, sacrifice, and working on behalf of others.

Although from what I hear statistically, the boomers don't take care of their health very well, and are actually dying sooner than the prewar born generations. Maybe once their assets pass thru inheritance that will be many people's retirement plans?

For the record before ppl come at me this is about groups not individuals. My parents are boomers and I love them to bits and I love many boomers in my life... But the collective political behaviour of that group is one of a vicious, selfish, spoiled teenager who's never been told no.

Don't be silly. Of course some young people have money, because the boomers are gifting it down to them. My DC is days away from buying a small 2 up 2 down Victorian house in a Midland town, outright. They have inherited a bit from two grannies, and in view of changes to IHT rules on the treatment of pensions, we've dobbed in the rest, while we can still expect to live seven more years.

There's no boomer fraud here. The boomers are paying for the party.

The amount of money boomers have is impossible to piss away unless deliberately out of spite.

I don't even think boomers are inherently evil like this.

Rather, unlike their parents, they were never faced with catastrophe and possible premature death of dozens of young people they knew, including themselves (WW2), and were never shown the value and dignity of pain, suffering and sacrifice. Everything is always about them as a result.

Their children (millennials) were thus raised to be depressed and apathetic.

So then again, you’re going to cause an enormous divide again - between those whose parents are actually decent human beings and pay forward the inheritance probably like we did in the Victorian times consider the money to be family money that needs to stay in the family
Versus those who don’t
And if you’re in one of those families who feel absolutely no moral obligation to forward the money that our grandparents actually really did work their fingers to the Bone for, then those young people are going to be screwed.

Do you seriously think a healthy society people's finances are based on parental donations not their own work

If this is the case why work at all, live on UC, your parents money will always dwarf yours so why not. And their gifts exceed your salary lost SLC repayment so why not!

You just look worse.

Frankly, I think boomers like it this way because it makes them powerful, and they have sovereignty over their adult children's futures not whoever they're working for

That’s simply not true, unfortunately.
I can think of at least six relatives that are giving it a damn good go - deliberately, they will quite literally die trying to leave nothing.

Oh dear. I’ve been busy swimming with my children this afternoon and return to find that still not one of the posters who has made personal attacks on me has posted any evidence to refute the data I’ve posted, not one has bothered to provide a response the my post stating what actions I’d take to fix the UK economy and posting a better plan they have devised, and instead they’ve been busy getting comments from me deleted which objected to them insulting me and accusing me of being psychotic?!

How utterly pathetic.

This thread exemplifies precisely why UK society and our economy is collapsing.

Well, murder, serial killing and crime in general reached an epidemic in the 70s when the boomers reached young adulthood and started declining in the 90s when boomers started to become too old to commit violent crimes easily. Take from that what you will about that generation.

Ok. I was born at the end of November 1963. Just after President Kennedy was murdered. Am I a boomer? I have ALWAYS been against right to buy. It probably is one of the biggest causes of the housing crisis we face today.

I have two adult children and worry about their futures, however, thankfully they are both working and paying into LA pensions like me and their dad did.

My parents were actual boomers. They have both passed away. BUT, I agree they were luckier than me and my husband. But what can you do? We can't unmake it.

Quite seriously, I haven't inherited anything life changing. Enough to commission a sturdy garden table from one grandparent and a holiday in 2004 from another. DH and I earned the rest. We are 70 now, and as we were old parents to a single child, the choices we are making are to send our (substantial) assets down to our kid. Who will pay IHT on the money we leave.

I’m a boomer. Distinctly remember the bombed out buildings that were everywhere for a very very long time after the end of WW2. They were a constant reminder, as were the frequent historical TV documentaries of the time. Conscription didn’t end until the mid 1960s and those who had served could, and frequently were, called up to other conflicts.

It’s only on MN I’ve ever encountered the opinion that we were all self centred shitbags who had everything we could possibly want handed to us on a plate. Everything is relative. Housing costs were a lot lower, so was the cost of living. But then so were wages. And it’s often forgotten that the changes in the law leading to things like maternity leave and pay, workplace pension provision for women, better childcare provision etc, were pioneered by my generation. Most of us, like myself were just trying to do the best we could in the economic climate of the day.

I think that’s untrue. There’s a nice little graph in the link.

www.murdermap.co.uk/statistics/homicide-england-wales-statistics-historical/

I think that's unemployed people though, i.e. claiming unemployment benefits.

There are 9.1 million "economically inactive" people, being 20% of the workforce.

Most of history people have been more fortunate than their parents. When they have been less fortunate, it has been to a long term change in living conditions (e.g. early industrialisation in the 1810s which actually worsened conditions for the working class in the short term, before improving them in the long term by the late 1800s), and so the people before them also did not do better than their parents. The boomers are the ONLY group to do vastly better than both their parents and kids.

BTW, by saying your parents were boomers, you are saying they were born after WW2, correct? That would mean you are a teenage pregnancy baby, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but a lot of people misuse the word to just mean, "old", when it doesn't, in fact the people born during and before the war are some of the best to ever live, and gave us all the social benefits and reforms of the 20th century. Especially those born before the war.

Also BTW fwiw '63 barely counts as boomer. Although a lot of people born around them still behave in that obnoxious way. It depends. And in my experience most of boomers entitled behaviour comes from being children of WW2 vets who gave them everything due to being traumatised wanted them to have lives they didn't have, so wouldn't apply to you if your parents genuinely are boomers.

Complete nonsense.
The pension is going to disappear in 20 years or so? Engage brain.
You are right - young people have no money. They never have any money. There is nothing unique about today's young families having no money. It was ever thus.
So who is going to bail your generation out then?
Because on one hand there is baying for pensioners to be punished for relying on the state pension, yet on the other you are excusing younger people for not making any of their own arrangements.

Problem with self employed is that they'd have to pay at least twice as much to get the same kind of pension as an employee, as the employee gets an employer's contribution paid into their pension scheme on top of the employee's own contribution. There's no such equivalent for self employed, so they'd have to pay the equivalent of employer AND employee contribution to match.

Many don't bother at all because they can't put enough aside to make it worthwhile, especially when their business is just starting out (i.e. when they're young) so get less impact from compound interest too.

When I talk to clients, it's always a very hard sell to get them to start putting money into pensions, when they have so many other demands on their limited funds, i.e. growing their business produces better returns from marketing, buying better equipment, etc., and many, especially after covid, are barely surviving and don't have spare money for anything, neither business development nor pensions.

It's normal for 20% to be economically inactive. Housewives, early pensioners (below state pension but early enough to claim), some self employed are essentially considered this if not doing so well, students. Also lots of boomers who make money off property speculation, no need for them to work is there.

Is the age bracket 16+ or 18+? Because if 16+ vast majority of 16-17 will be economically inactive for tax purposes. The vast majority of 16-17 who work on top of school aren't taxed and rightfully so, they only make a few thousand and work weekends on top of school.