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.

Yes definately. We've just come back from Spain and it didn't even occur to us to take cash. We use our phones and take a debit and credit card as back up.

@Katyppcan you give me some examples of these large cities with lots of jobs & cheap housing costs?

From what you are saying the advice to have cash really needs to be aimed at working age people.

I remember a few years back a primary teacher was saying kids really struggle to learn to count money because they don't handle it.

Go back a couple of decades, kids had tuck money, lunch money lots of groups were paid with a £1 at the door.
Tuck is no longer a thing and everything else is paid by bank transfer.

I can't decide if pocket money cards are good or bad

I wish we could get over this naive belief that all pensioners have million pound houses due to inflation and massive pension pots. There are many pensioners who have only their state pension or a small occupational pension to live on. People in this group are far less able to supplement their income by a side hustle or extra hours due to health issues.

Our young graduates in the regional offices are all buying homes within a year or so of starting work. Regional offices in Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow etc etc.

London based graduates take longer but do get on the ladder - usually by buying as part of a couple and choosing less popular areas slightly further out and settling for smaller properties/doer-uppers rather than the MN approved 4 bed detached with an ensuite per person.

Oh and the big divide in pensions is not age based - its sector based. Public sector staff off all ages have DB pensions, private sector of all ages lost them decades ago although the oldest private sector pensioners may have some DB from early years.

The average private pension in the UK is less than £5K - after working from age 15/16 in most cases.

Less than 10% of pensioners trouble the 40% tax band but apparently all of their children are on MN whining about their evil bastard parents going on ten cruises a year. But cheer up - yours are the parents whose millennial children are set to be the richest in history.

Thanks. You got there before me

@fieldofdoom do you really think there are no areas with jobs outside London? I thought that sort of thinking had disappeared
It seems i was wrong.
There was a poster here a few months ago who said all her children had bought homes and she was RIPPED APART by posters whose children could not buy as they were on the SE and the whole thread ended up laying into the OP's children for not being ambitious enough to move out of their home area. It was pretty disgusting actually.

We have degree apprentices in three of the regional offices - they get on the property ladder before graduating.

Its just silly to suggest that there are no good jobs outside of London - we have no shortage of people in the London office interested in moving to other offices simply to get more bang for their bucks and quality of life. If I look at our client base their key offices are not always in major cities - plenty are based in medium sized towns or even relatively small areas, attracted by lower costs and sometimes development incentives.

Less than 10% of pensioners trouble the 40% tax band but apparently all of their children are on MN whining about their evil bastard parents going on ten cruises a year. But cheer up - yours are the parents whose millennial children are set to be the richest in history

Yet they are so blinded by bitterness they can't see this.
It's the same as all the whining about social care benefiting boomers when they can't see it is THEM who will benefit from this the most when they inherit estates they would not have done if the money had been used for care.

I suppose there are rich n poor in every generation.
But yes few pensions will be 40% tax

I’m 73 and completely cashless. I haven’t used it for years.

Over 8% (more than a million) of pensioners pay the higher or additional rate of income tax. Hardly "few".

Thats an interesting one, i didn't think that early 70s would also be cashless.

So in our tiny sample its the late 70s + that still use a lot of physical cash.

You don’t think less than 10% is few?

You think 1.09million IS few??!!

Maybe I’ve skewed the result. I think I’m a bit of an outlier.

Well it is as a percentage.

And when quoted as an actual figure it most assuredly is not. If, as the OP suggested, we give each of these £100 then we would be giving £109million to higher rate and additonal rate taxpayers. FUCK THAT!!

Whenever I'm at the post office posting a parcel, there's always a stream of pensioners infront of me withdrawing £400 and £500 at a time, I don't think they need another £100. Even if that is all they've got, the idea behind the government telling you to store cash is incase the banking system fails so you can still buy a few things, pensioners who are already walking around with £500 in their pockets don't need anymore money thrown at them as loads of them still operate using cash anyways.

Exactly as I said its not pensioners who need to be told to keep cash, its working age people.

Pensioners are more likely to work in physical cash.

Its a fraction of the total however and demonstrates the nonsense of "all old people are rich". A much larger fraction of older people live in fuel poverty.

A notably larger percentage of working age are in that tax bracket and fewer of them living in poverty (if you look at generally reputable sources such as ONS or even the Rowntree foundation).

The divide between rich and poor is not age, its income which is largely related to your parents' income. The big divide in pensions is not age but public vs private sector pension quality but even then the average private pension is a few thousand a year, not tens or even ten thousand. In fact the gross private pension going to most pensioners with a private pension won't pay for one cruise let alone the 10 per year enjoyed by the parents of fiction writers on MN.

My mother is 84 and she’s in corfu right now with two friends. One of them has rented a bike (a push bike, not a harley or anything) because it’s ’cheaper than a taxi’ when they go out for dinner. So there’s a saving.

Is your mum cash or card gal?

Really? Every single time? How strange

I hate to see your reaction when you hear we’re giving £200,000,000 to all the households living in Council Tax A to D properties regardless of income. 😂

That's fine, as long as there are no pensioners living in them. But then, according to MN, all pensioners will live in at last Band E houses when they are not cruising around the world