Retirement at 66, not politics

[devonwoody]

Anyone able can still retire at 55 or whatever, you just keep paying your stamp until regulation date.
However you do have to preplan your income to do this.

I think raising the retirement age is also a ploy to get more production/consumption, you are producing more because you work a year longer.

I retired at 54 the best thing in my life I ever did.

 

[Peter T]

That's if the jobs are available!

There are plenty of people who would work way past "Normal" retirement age, given the opportunity, and there are plenty of other people who retire "Early", and there are arguments for and against.

People who retire create jobs for other, perhaps unemployed, people. On the other hand, the loss experienced people can create a skills shortage.

Why not just make it flexible? The level of pension you receive could then be based on how long you worked and how much you paid in.

And, yes, I am close to "Normal" retirement age and desperately trying to think of ways to bring it closer!!

 

[matt]

Generally speaking things all seem to be happening later in life but perhaps not relative to life expectancy these days. Lots of people are having kids much later which I suspect will make it much harder for them to plan to retire early (from a financial point of view).

I also think that the later retirement age will make people less inclined to pay (much) in to a pension until later in life because they'll be wondering if they will actually make it to retirement. I predict that pensions will continue to be a problem area.

 

[RogerM]

There does seem to be a trend towards hammering older people. Those who have retired early and planned to supplement their occupational pensions until the state pension kicks in with income from savings, have seen their investment income cut by about 80% with the complete collapse in interest rates, and have had to dip in to capital. With the proposal to delay state retirement age until 66 these people are going to have to dip further in to capital - at a cost of about £10,000 for a married couple.

Also bear in mind that for women born between 1950 and 1960, they are on a transitional scheme whereby they retire somewhere between 60 and 65, on a sliding scale. Potentially, some women who had expected to retire at 63 may now have to wait 3 years until 66. For a married couple in their late 50s there is the potential here for them to lose out to the tune of £20,000. And remember that for many of these people they have already made the decision to retire early, or have been made redundant in their late 50s and have had early retirement thrust upon them, whether they like it or not, and now they face a major hit!

All we need now is rampant inflation brought about by Quantative easing (aka printing money) coupled with a reluctance to increase interest rates in case it snuffs out the recovery, and the aging population will effectively have been mugged of their life savings.

 

[head clansman]

hi


retirement age should be 65 or lower , and that should mean ever body no exceptions at all, at all levels no matter who even the monarch should be seen to set the standard here,

They only want the aged to continue to work because there no skill left in the work market place anymore who would train the younger generation, if all the aged stuck two finger up to the government and retired they would have a real problem .

Make way for the younger generation, yes we should. I worked 40 yrs all stamped as well retired at the age of 55 yrs through ill health , we get by ,It was the best decision i have ever made was calling it a day.

They don't want the aged to retire, just to drop dead from exhaustion ,
(then no pensions paid to them) and they don't want the younger generation already in the system to become long term unemployed, so how are they going to supply enough jobs for all then :?: when you here these politicians spouting on on about forcing people off of incapacity benefit and on to job seekers, to make a saving , and at the same time on my local radio station Wessex fm, you here, here in weymouth and portland area alone there are over 11,000 people unemployed theirs not even that amount of employed jobs here in this area so how do they intend to find another 11,000 work places ,with immigrates of all nationalities weather legal or not flooding the country beggars believe, just another ploy to try and gain support when it voting time , hot air as usual. :twisted: grr rant over . hc

 

[matt]

They only want the aged to continue to work because there no skill left in the work market place anymore

I thought it was the cost of pensions given the longer life-expectancy these days?

 

[StevieB]

head clansman wrote:
They only want the aged to continue to work because there no skill left in the work market place anymore


I thought it was the cost of pensions given the longer life-expectancy these days?

That is indeed the case - the size of the pension deficit is simply staggering and is the main reason alot of final salary schemes are closing - current members simply are not and cannot afford to pay in enough to meet existing and projected liabilities. Multiply that to the state pension and you see the scale of the problem. You can either raise taxes to put more into the pension pot (and annoy anyone who pays tax) or raise the retirement age (and annoy anyone without a private pension who is close to retirement - a much smaller pool of voters!). The added benefit of raising the retirement age is that for that extra year from age 65 to 66, people are actually contributing in terms of tax and NI, so its a double saving in terms of government spending (or lack of in this case).

A bigger problem, which has not really been addressed, is with low paid workers contributing to high paid public sector final salary pensions. Whichever government tries to tackle that, and one of them is going to have to sooner or later, is due a massive round of strikes, unrest and possibly a 'winter of discontent'. Note the noises coming from high paid public sector workers over the chancellors 'pay freeze' announcement, and then imagine what a raid on their pensions is going to produce. Time to batten down the hatches and take cover me thinks - the next parliament, whatever flavour of political party wins it - is going to be a rough ride.

Steve.

 

[Ironballs]

HC it's never that simple though is it and what you're proposing is yet another sledgehammer to crack a nut. There needs to be flexibility in the rules to cater for different needs, I'm a long way off from retirement yet and god knows what state things will be in by then (could be good or bad). I don't know what I'll want to do at that point but I'd like to have the choice, I'd like to be able to retire early but then I may need to carry on till 65/66/70 by then god forbid.

If you force everyone to retire from paid employment at 66 then what about the people that want and need to keep on working, the people for whom it is their life's work, those that would wither and die without work to keep them interested in life. Would you have wanted people like Sam Maloof or Les Paul to have retired at 66? I wouldn't. Should Bruce Forsyth be forced off our screens - well that's a whole other debate :wink:

 

[wobblycogs]

I'm a long way from retirement age but I can't help feeling the future will be very bleak indeed. The problem as I see it is that the state pension scheme is not strictly speaking a fund based scheme like a private pension. It relies on the current working generation earning enough to pay the pension of the retired generation. Whether through design or total incompetence this essentially means the scheme will only work if the countries population keeps growing.

Assuming contribution as a percentage of income remains the same even a static population would cause it to slip into the red because there is some wastage due to management of the system. What we have at the moment is negative population growth - at least amongst the "natives" - which is being hidden by huge amounts of immigration.

This problem is going to get much much worse for two reasons: firstly the UK economy isn't doing terribly well, unlike most other countries we are struggling to recover from the financial crisis and this is actually causing some migrant workers to return home and secondly the baby boomer children are now approaching retirement age expecting to get their state pension because "they have paid into it".

I don't know what the solution is but I suspect it will boil down to scrapping the state pension as we have it now. Probably what they will do is freeze it at the current level and let inflation kill it. In the mean time they will bring in a means tested "top up" to stop the poorest old people from freezing to death. Sucks if you are currently a long way from retirement because you will be paying your NI for the baby boomers and probably won't be able to get the same reward yourself. Personally I'm piling cash into a private pension but it remains to be seen if even that will be worth anything by the time I get to draw it.

 

[Ironballs]

Wobblycogs - just a quick correction about population growth, we're actually almost unique amongst European countries at the minute as we're currently experiencing a bit of a boom in birth rate, therefore leaving aside any immigration (and emigration) our population is increasing through breeding

 

[Argee]

"Not politics"? What do you think it is, then?

If, in future, you start yet another thread with a so-called disclaimer in the title, please think more than once before pressing "Submit."

This ill-disguised "innocent" rule-breaking is just not on.

RG

 

[Grinding One]

They only want the aged to continue to work because there no skill left in the work market place anymore

I thought it was the cost of pensions given the longer life-expectancy these days?

If the Queen and court did not get all of their salary,how many people would reap the reward?
I think everyone should work and waving isn`t work.....Darn politicians over here just gave themselves another raise,and told the retired there wasn`t any more money for them.(Retired people) so no cost of living on their Social Security payments.Want to take away their medical insurance too,but give it to those who are illegal immigrants....what the heck these old people paid all of their life into this fund.Now its time to reap the rewards of their labor only to find out the politicians have spent it.

 

[Ironballs]

Once again, a correction to mis-information. I'm no royalist but the British Royal Family do play a very useful part of our governance structure, if they weren't doing the openings, the meet and greets, the diplomatic event stuff, the presentation of gongs etc etc, then it would have to be an army of paid civil servants and politicians. So in reality we do get quite good value from them.

Lastly as Ray says, this really has strayed into politics with inflammatory statements so I thinks perhaps a mod should lock this thread

 

[wobblycogs]

Whatever the cause of the current population growth it doesn't appear to be down to us having more children. The total fertility rate for the UK in 2008 was 1.97 according to government statistics http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=951 and 1.82 according to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate. Since the replacement rate is typically held to be 2.1 http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html for a well developed nation we have a native population that is shrinking.

Any growth in the total population must, therefore, be down to imigration http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6729953.stm. As I understand it the 2008 blip in population has been put down to a combination of high imigration and low emigration. I wouldn't be surprised to see the 2009 figures showing a return to roughly the past trend due mainly to some of the migrant workers returning home.

Oh, and I agree with you about the royal family. They aren't cheap but I think they more than pay for themselves - just look at how many Americans come over here to gawk at them and buy trinkets.

 

[Philly]

Thread Locked - The "P" word!
Philly