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.

Your looking to focus on the Final Salary dream but forget the reality, it was open to the few, those who did have it were often under paid as companies knew they had them tied in.

Very much like civil servants, they were under paid but the carrot was the good pension at the end.

Councils can apply for special permission to increase above 5%. And I think some have e.g. Trafford

Oh dear. Perhaps take your own advice about checking facts.

Regulation 50 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013 explicitly covers deprivation of capital for the purpose of obtaining or increasing benefit entitlement.

The DWP can treat deliberately disposed-of assets as notional capital when assessing entitlement.

Deprivation of assets in relation to care fees is a separate application of a similar principle, not the only one.

And while disposing of assets a decade earlier doesn’t automatically constitute deprivation, the passage of time doesn’t establish that the rules are inapplicable either. The circumstances and intention matter.

So yes, the rules absolutely do apply to means-tested benefits.

You might want to check the legislation before confidently correcting someone else on it.

I'm not disagreeing... my response to the pp was sarcasm.

Probably, but isn’t that a trap many of us fall into generally?

I’ve experienced something similar myself. For years I received excellent performance reviews and corresponding pay rises, but as minimum wage kept increasing and I approached the top of my pay band, those increases became smaller. Moving elsewhere would have meant giving up my length of service and the security of a potentially substantial redundancy package. Thankfully, I was promoted out of that situation, but plenty of people I know are still in it.

There are downsides to most employment arrangements. Assuming you’re right that people with final salary pensions were being paid below market rates (and I don’t know that they were), they were still receiving an extremely valuable benefit in return. And it’s not as though leaving meant forfeiting everything. In a typical final salary scheme, you’d already accrued pension benefits based on your pensionable service, which generally remained yours even if you changed employers.

Ultimately, it’s about the overall remuneration package, not just the salary. Someone accepting a lower salary in exchange for a guaranteed pension hasn’t necessarily been disadvantaged; they’ve simply received part of their remuneration in a different form. Final salary pensions offered a level of guaranteed retirement income and security that most private-sector workers today can only dream of. The investment and longevity risks largely sat with the employer rather than the employee. There’s a reason employers moved away from them: they were enormously expensive to provide.

I also think there’s a tendency in these discussions to confuse acknowledging that previous generations enjoyed certain financial advantages with suggesting that every pensioner lived a charmed life. Nobody is claiming that.

Of course not everyone had a final salary pension, and of course some people were poorly paid. But the fact that a benefit wasn’t universally available doesn’t diminish its value to those who received it.
The same applies to housing. Many of today’s pensioners were able to purchase homes at considerably lower multiples of their earnings than younger people face today, and have subsequently benefited from decades of property appreciation. That doesn’t mean buying those homes was effortless or that they didn’t make sacrifices.
We can acknowledge that some pensioners are genuinely struggling without pretending that the economic opportunities available to different generations have been identical.

Ultimately, having to work hard or make sacrifices to obtain something doesn’t mean it wasn’t an advantage. And acknowledging those advantages doesn’t diminish anyone’s hard work.

Being fortunate in some respects doesn’t mean having been fortunate in every respect.

Tour post makes.loterally NO sense. Ans yes. Pensions are a benefit.

They means test child benefit now. I wish they'd mean test the pension too but they'd all be up in arms.

Until the day she died my mil was convinced she was impoverished. She only took the bus, refused to turn on the heating and stalked the supermarket aisles for yellow sticker food. Truth was she owned a house outright and had hundreds of thousands in the bank. There's loads like that

I think part of the problem is that many pensioners continue to think about their finances in terms of income rather than accumulated wealth. They see their savings or pension pots reducing and interpret that as becoming poorer, when actually that’s precisely what those savings are there for.

You spend your working life building up wealth so that you can use it to support yourself in retirement. For most people, that means gradually drawing down those assets over the remainder of their lives. Of course your wealth is going to reduce if you’re no longer earning and are living off what you’ve accumulated. That’s not a sign of financial hardship; it’s retirement working exactly as intended.

I think some people struggle to make that psychological shift from accumulating wealth to actually spending it. So then they insist they’re poor when they arent cause they’ve convinced themselves that they are

You need to check your own facts @blossomtoes. Deprivation of assets absolutely does apply to benefits. If UC deem that you have deliberately spent savings to get under the threshold they will deny benefit, in the same way that local councils will treat you as though you still have the money you gave away when they assess care needs.

That makes a lot or sense.
I definitely think it takes a lot to go from being very frugal to becoming a spender.
Many will also want to leave some to their kids

The government have no money. They have only access to the money of hard working folks who replenish the resources of the state instead of draining them. So the question is should the government steal another £100 from these hard working folks and give it to someone else? The answer is no.

Tbf the majority of pensioners will be getting £100 so the op was closer than most, despite the early scoffing on the thread.

I agree on it being taxpayer money anyway, not the gov giving their own away. It mostly comes from workers.

Is there any evidence for that?

oh dear. You realise this was funded by a windfall tax on banks right? Nobody has had tax increases to pay for this…it hasn’t been stolen from anyone.