£610 a week pension demand is insane

[Thisismyfinesthour]

Just read that there is an online petition doing the rounds for a £610 a WEEK pension demand to the government.
WTAF? Is the heat melting some peoples brains? It seems over 5000 have signed it.
Where do they think the money is coming from?

And 27% of pensioner have a higher INCOME than average earning workers!! That's 3.3 million of them. A lot of pensioners are doing very well at the moment in terms of their finances. Not to say some are struggling, but we need to stop spunking money at ALL pensioners and start to be more selective with who we gave benefits to. A good start would be means testing ALL benefits including state pensions at a relatively high level, so as not to impact on the one struggling.

That's absolutely ridiculous, speaking as a Pensioner.

I get just under 1k pm in State Pension but I also have just over 1k pm from my Occupational Pension.

Only 1 gets spent, the other saved. I donated the WFA to a charity. I've never been so well-off.

When I was young I assumed the State Pension would have gone or at least be means tested.

It's bonkers and unsustainable

My grandad was like this, not much in the food cupboard, lived on bread and milk .He was still living in wartime mentality and left me £2k in cash in a jacket pocket. Had I know back then I would have done more to help, but he refused so much and would become upset if I even bought a small bag of groceries and the essentials.

As a pp said, these people starting the petition have probably not worked a day in their lives - so probably don’t even know that 48 hr weeks are not the norm.

"These types"? There's another thread going on where someone thinks £200pw is too much as older people get frail and don't need/can't spend much money. I'm not thin skinned but ageism is the only allowed ism on Mumsnet. BTW of course the petition is ridiculous.

Hi, please allow me to introduce myself, while not exactly poor i do not lead the life of privilage and luxury that is assumed that all retired people enjoy. I live in a tiny house which is worth about £120k the absolute bottom end of the market,so can't downsize to free up cash. The damp proof course is shot but there is no way I can afford a new one, I have single glazing, need a new front door, all out of my budget. My income is the state pension and a small NHS pension, it covers my bills and the odd lunch out. Worked all my adult life but due to being a single parent who got no chiid support it was only much later in life that i could afford to pay into a pension. Never go on holiday, can't afford it, but such is life, I think i am fortunate compared to others and I think that petition is madness

It's too simplistic to way that pensioners are the wealthiest demographic as there is deep inequality among pensioners - while some may be classed as wealthy this is largely because of wealth tied up in housing. The vast majority are not wealthy and those in rented accommodation and women pensioners (especially single parents or those with disabiliites) are much more likely to be in poverty.

As with all threads, it's also not the position that if you give money to pensions, working age people go without. Shouldn't you be fighting to remove inequalities and poverty for all age groups?

Well, some pensioners are very rich, some are reasonably affluent, some live comfortably, some struggle, some live in abject poverty. Just like every other section of society! 👍

You only get pension credit if you haven't contributed enough NI to qualify for the full state pension.

The asset will be their house, that they live in. If not , it's the sector of the population who have high earning jobs from a young age, not your office worker who has just retired.

No but it means the pensioners who are referred to as personally known by posters are less likely to be the impoverished ones. I wasn’t replying to any particular poster with my initial comment.

Not gonna lie when I saw pensioners get paid more than my maternity allowance and knowing full well I don't get my pension until I'm 70 (if at all). That was the beginning of my villain arc. Fuck them.

5000 have signed it? Not that many then!

Obviously an unrealistic amount though. This will never go ahead, so don't panic.

Do you have a link to this petition? Be interesting to see how many have signed it now.

Hopefully with auto-enrolment and more women working there will be an improvement in the pension situation. The comparisons with state pension in the UK and those paid out in other European countries tend to be skewed by payments in those countries often including pension contributions from employers due to the way the system works there whereas in the UK the pension from employment is a different income stream/payment.

The median wealth for over 65s is £500k. £500k plus various sources of guaranteed lifetime income is pretty wealthy in my book.

No, I don't strive for equality. I believe hard work, risk taking and ingenuity should be rewarded,

That's an insane amount.

At our company a standard week is 38 hours. Even if you factor in 40 hours it is bonkers.

I think much of this nonsense comes from troll farms trying to create division in our society. No one whe is at or approaching retirement has been under any illision that the state pension will meet all their needs. It's always been very low, especially when today's pensioners were funding it as workers with a far better ratio of payers to recipents than there is now.

We have all known that if we want a comfortable retirement we have to save for it.

It’s ridiculous. Young people working now will probably never have a pension and yet are paying for current pensioners now. People should be grateful there is a safety net and stop being greedy ( and I’m saying that as someone who’s nearly a pensioner and feels very fortunate to have a pension in my mear future when so many young people can’t afford to buy a home).

Of course it is. There is only one cake and the pensioners already have a bigger slice of it than anyone else. If they have more you’ll either have to remove it from younger working people or take more in tax which also affects younger workers disproportionately.

People on benefits including pension credits should have a living wage but it also has to be proportionate to the country’s income and not bankrupt young working families. I am much more concerned about young people who can’t get jobs than pensioners many of whom are siting on massive assets with triple lock incomes.

That’s up to the company you work for but be careful if the government decide to “help”you by doing this..

You could end up out of a job instead

Statistically, the demographic that should be richest would be pensioners because they’ve worked fifty odd years and so had more chances to save than anyone younger. And sure enough, that’s what you see in the poverty statistics.

However, in about five years it won’t be boomers reaching retirement age and we can already see there is going to be a wave of pensioners in poverty from the generation after the boomers who did not benefit from final salary pensions like they did, who bought houses right before the crash, those high paid enough to put into a private pension watched their pension pots halve during the crash (there were other market corrections that knocked off 25-30% as well for example the dot.com bust). We see warning signs of this in the fact that the fastest growing demographic of renters are the over 45s. They either got on the housing ladder and then lost during the crash with job loss, or they never managed to save enough because this was the time between final salary pensions and the newer laws requiring employers to offer, then auto-enroll and match employee contributions.

So the petition isn’t likely to be for today’s pensioners, but for the ones almost there in the next decade who are still stuck renting, who have only been able to save into a workplace pension since 2012, and are facing huge housing costs.

Why do people think that pensioners who have worked should live in poverty. I don't understand the anger about this issue. Surely if pensioners are adequately provided for either from their private or state pensions that is a sign of a successful society.

Or pensioners working, alondgside their pensions to try and eke out a living

I don't think anyone's saying that. But why do they need more money than someone working full time who has young children, a mortgage, etc?

We don’t. But there are other benefits that are subject to far more modest increases. The state pension has risen c37.7% over the last 7 yrs, whereas statutory benefits (like maternity) have risen by just 28.5% across the same period. Meanwhile, the personal allowance has increased by less than 1% across that period. A lot of working people see the state pension rising at a disproportionate rate, relative to everything else. I suppose depending on which group you fall into will impact your views towards that.