An extra hubdred for OAPS?

[RaggedRocks]

The government wants us to keep cash at home for emergencies. Many pensioners are struggling to pay their bills and don't have a spare 100 quid.

AIBU to think that they should add an extra hundred onto the WFA in the budget, so oldies can have some spare cash to keep for the coming emergency. Also consider an extra hundred for UC recipients.

We were talking about at a family level though.
You said my generation got handouts such as MIRAS. A quick google shows me £2.50 in 1989 is worth about £8 now. Subsidised childcare is worth much more than that to most families.
This is part of a wider discussion about hardship not being unique to today's families.

@Katypp where have I claimed that younger people don't survive outside the SE?! Are you young?

I just said housing is an issue in most parts of the country because of job availability in those cheaper areas. You can disagree without making up things!

We need to put the limited money into young people to prepare them for success rather than keeping rewarding failure for pensioners who failed to provide for themselves.

@KatyppNo I replied to an another poster who claimed there were no handouts or benefits in the past. That is not true & again why is it controversial to state that? I never said raising a family was easy.

Child benefit in 1989 was £7.25 a week which is about £20 a week today. And remember it was universal then.

Are you against subsidised childcare? The government benefit from the increased tax intake by keeping women in work.

But it isn’t. There’s a world outside the SE. There are deprived areas with high unemployment and there are affluent areas north of Watford. Reading, Bristol, Worthing, Warrington, Oxford, Edinburgh, Aldershot, Exeter, Cambridge, and York have lower unemployment rates than London.

You are basing your comparison on your parents who live in London and said you could not afford to buy there now

You said transport and jobs could be difficult outside Londin.

Not making anything up.

What do you mean by ‘failed to provide for themselves’ ? Not everyone has the same life opportunities.

Or failure on young people who fail to prepare themselves for life!

@KatyppI have bought in London, I just said despite earning more I could not have done that in my 20s and then gave up work to have dc.

Public transport is expensive in the UK, are you disagreeing with this?

I also said areas with cheaper housing don’t tend to have huge job markets & cheap rents.

I didn’t say no young person can survive & thrive outside the SE.

Public transport is now extremely cheap in the UK. No bus fare more than £2 and TFL caps the daily amount spent on tube travel. Trains are comparatively expensive but they always were.

The £10 Christmas bonus is paid to benefit recipients as well as pensioners, including many disabled people living in poverty. Are you proposing to remove it all or is it just pensioners you’re aiming for ?

It’s mostly pensioners who receive it as many of the qualifying benefits are age related. Just get rid of it across the board. The money could be far better targeted.

Yes it is - keep up. It gets given with one hand and given away with the other if total income is over 35k

Yes, and three quarters of those do so in social housing for which rent is, on average, 64% cheaper than private renting, meaning their rent would be less than £6000 pa so easily affordable on a household income of £23520. And keep in mind that these pensioners would quite likely qualify for pension credit too.

Pension credits bring total income up to the level of the new state pension. Nobody already receiving that qualifies for pension credits.

I administer final salary pensions, there are plenty of people in their 40s, 50s with them, so your information is incorrect. They are certainly less common but plenty of age 60+ are in receipt of them.

That's great, so they'll all have an average of £1460 to spend per month after rent. Sounds good to me. Of course, once a spouse/partner dies all these calculations go out of the window and it is their surviving spouse/partner who should be helped more, eg. a 25% discount on Council Tax is paltry.

I also said areas with cheaper housing don’t tend to have huge job markets & cheap rents.

This sort of proves my point really. Most large cities have reasonably-priced housing within a 30-45 min commute.
Your assumption is wrong

All

Indeed. This is always the argument against means testing and why it wasn’t means tested when first introduced.

Bingo?

I thought the idea was that some of the money people would have in their bank account should instead be kept as cash in case of, say, a cyber attack that made it impossible to use electronic payments, not that additional money needed to be put by. By the way, yes, I realise some people have more money than others. Yes, I also realise that all of us over 60 are the cause of every social ill, so no need to come back on that one.

Thats exactly the idea.

But older people are more likely to actually have cash in hand than younger people.

I don't know where the change happens but the 80+ people I know will always have some cash.
The people 55- are more likely to be relying on cards either physically or on watches and phones.

I'm curious about 60 somethings and 70 somethings

I am 59, my DH is 63
The only cash we ever have in the house is our £2 coin jar, which used to add up quickly but now grows by about £10 a year.
My mum is 89 and draws £150-200 every week, paying everything im cash

Thats exactly what i mean.

My mum is 80s and always has some cash. Although also uses card for bigger shops.

Would you say card is typical for your age group?.