Scrapping Age Related Benefits

Author
Discussion

Jaguar steve

9,232 posts

209 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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This absolutely will not do.

I started work in the mid 70's doing 60 hours a week in the school holidays washing up and clearing tables and cooking fish and chips in a seaside cafe for 25p an hour. Since then I've been continuously working and paying tax and national insurance and contributing to UK PLC through spending and paying VAT and excise duty and rates and council tax.

Approaching retirement it's now payback time for all the countless hours and hundreds of thousands of pounds I've contributed and the Grubberment fkucks with the deal that I've grafted to keep my side of the bargain for the last forty years at their peril. They've already knobbed me for about £15k by delaying my stare pension start date by eighteen months from 65 to 67 and a half and that's a step too far without being screwed for anything else I've worked for all those years as well.

Forking Cunch of two faced Bunts punch.

Nickgnome

8,277 posts

88 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Sheepshanks said:
Your first house was very cheap - our first, in mid 1979, was £20K. That was seen as mad, but your average 3 bed semi in the NW was £15K

A lot of the increase you've seen, at least in £ terms rather than %, is surely due to being in the SE? My two immediate colleagues who earn the same as me but are SE based and haven't moved for many years, are both in houses now nudging £1M. Mine would be £300K on a good day.
That is my point. Not everyone has huge equity in their house. My very good friend is in the same place as you, so not much equity release possible.

I was lucky as moved to the M25 area and moved quite a few times. Financially it has done us very well. Albeit we did the Grand Designs thing living in caravans whilst undertaking a self build. I wouldn’t recommend 100 hours a week for 2 years though.

Nickgnome

8,277 posts

88 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
quotequote all
Jaguar steve said:
This absolutely will not do.

I started work in the mid 70's doing 60 hours a week in the school holidays washing up and clearing tables and cooking fish and chips in a seaside cafe for 25p an hour. Since then I've been continuously working and paying tax and national insurance and contributing to UK PLC through spending and paying VAT and excise duty and rates and council tax.

Approaching retirement it's now payback time for all the countless hours and hundreds of thousands of pounds I've contributed and the Grubberment fkucks with the deal that I've grafted to keep my side of the bargain for the last forty years at their peril. They've already knobbed me for about £15k by delaying my stare pension start date by eighteen months from 65 to 67 and a half and that's a step too far without being screwed for anything else I've worked for all those years as well.

Forking Cunch of two faced Bunts punch.
Sounds like you are a very similar age to me. How much NHI have you paid in. They will send you a statement. It’s a pretty piffling amount.

Your work cv at that age is very little different to mine. Supermarket, chip shop, petrol station and car parts factory and night shift working. It’s just what we did. I do not expect special treatment because of it.

I have a completely different attitude and do not believe I should be supported by the state. Our free health care is more than reasonable.



Evanivitch

19,805 posts

121 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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anonymous said:
[redacted]
Given that nurses almost entirely work for the NHS, and they do so even during their studies as part of work-placements required to pass their degree, and they have to pay tuition fees, I highly doubt we'll see that!

Edited by Evanivitch on Thursday 25th April 20:40

Croutons

9,807 posts

165 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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To be fair, free childcare, Child Trust Funds, and all sorts of other bribes are given to voters at the lower end of the scale.

What we need to do is stop voting for this type of behaviour. But we won’t.

Take the winter fuel allowance. What a fking joke. Pensioners in Spain being given £200. Brought in by Gordon Brown in 1997, as nothing but a bribe, and now no politician dare take it away.

There is never long term political planning in the UK. There’s rarely short term planning. So we’ll get the idiots we vote for...

johnxjsc1985

15,948 posts

163 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Evanivitch said:
Given that nurses almost entirely work for the NHS, and they do so even during their studies as part of work-placements required to pass their degree, and they have to pay tuition fees, I highly doubt we'll see that!
I never understood how Nurses got lumbered with this. We need so many more Nurses why not give them loyalty bonuses to clear off any debt after 5 or 10 years service. What happened to the Nursing Schools attached to teaching Hospitals ?

Evanivitch

19,805 posts

121 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
quotequote all
johnxjsc1985 said:
Evanivitch said:
Given that nurses almost entirely work for the NHS, and they do so even during their studies as part of work-placements required to pass their degree, and they have to pay tuition fees, I highly doubt we'll see that!
I never understood how Nurses got lumbered with this. We need so many more Nurses why not give them loyalty bonuses to clear off any debt after 5 or 10 years service. What happened to the Nursing Schools attached to teaching Hospitals ?
Even as an engineering student I was in awe of the shift patterns nursing students were expected to put in, whilst also writing essays and earning in part time jobs. Absolute travesty they got tuition fees on top.

BoRED S2upid

19,643 posts

239 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Jaguar steve said:
This absolutely will not do.

I started work in the mid 70's doing 60 hours a week in the school holidays washing up and clearing tables and cooking fish and chips in a seaside cafe for 25p an hour. Since then I've been continuously working and paying tax and national insurance and contributing to UK PLC through spending and paying VAT and excise duty and rates and council tax.

Approaching retirement it's now payback time for all the countless hours and hundreds of thousands of pounds I've contributed and the Grubberment fkucks with the deal that I've grafted to keep my side of the bargain for the last forty years at their peril. They've already knobbed me for about £15k by delaying my stare pension start date by eighteen months from 65 to 67 and a half and that's a step too far without being screwed for anything else I've worked for all those years as well.

Forking Cunch of two faced Bunts punch.
Count yourself lucky you will be getting a state pension even at 67. I’m not banking on it being around when I get that old our retirement planning doesn’t take it into account they will have moved it to 77 by then!

Nickgnome

8,277 posts

88 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
quotequote all
BoRED S2upid said:
Count yourself lucky you will be getting a state pension even at 67. I’m not banking on it being around when I get that old our retirement planning doesn’t take it into account they will have moved it to 77 by then!
Why not plan for no state pension. Why should the state provide for you?

Sheepshanks

32,533 posts

118 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Nickgnome said:
anonymous said:
[redacted]
I would add that public workers payed for their pensions. I think 6% in my Dad’s case. I accept the employer contributed too, much like the private sector.

Wages were also under private sector equivalents.

I think the civil service was not a contributory set up.
My dad was a fireman and he moaned a lot about paying 11% and I think it's about 15% now. My missus was in the civil service - she paid 3%. She's retired and her gold plated public sector pension is £3K/yr.

Vipers

32,799 posts

227 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Nickgnome said:
BoRED S2upid said:
Count yourself lucky you will be getting a state pension even at 67. I’m not banking on it being around when I get that old our retirement planning doesn’t take it into account they will have moved it to 77 by then!
Why not plan for no state pension. Why should the state provide for you?
If you pay NI all your working life, you expect something back. All jobs don't provide enough to save for a private pension.

Derek Smith

45,514 posts

247 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Sheepshanks said:
Are you saying £2000 was more than your take home pay for 2yrs? What year was this?

I'm not retired and not even thinking about it. We did sell my car - a Ford Capri smile I'd bought new - to go towards the deposit on our first house but otherwise don't recall any hardship. My wife packed up work when the kids came along and we had a couple of years of UK holidays when they were small but soon resumed foreign trips. In the mid-80's I got a job with a company car but I always changed my wife's car for a new one every few years.
That was August 1968 to around May 1970. Our 50th anniversary next year.

Perhaps take-home was a bit of a stretch. I was a printer; a compositor. I worked in London and had to go via train and then underground to work. Once all stoppages (tax, NI, work stoppages) and 'essentials', such as travel, were removed I had a bit under £1000 pa. My wife, a PA to a publisher, was a bit better off but her travel costs were higher than mine. Despite her higher outgoings she still cleared 1k. Her money went straight to a building society and I split mine straight down the middle, 45:55.

I was in a job that had higher than average pay for factory work but still struggled, despite overtime. I remember going into work on a Saturday morning on overtime at time and a half and it got me less than ten bob (50p) THP. It took me about 2.5 hours in travelling time.

Mind you, I was worse off when I joined the police some 8 years later. I'd saved a fair bit of money but after 9 months I was called in to see my bank manager and told that I was headed for disaster. He arranged a cheap (nowhere near as cheap as nowadays of course) loan and I did some extra work, including bouncer at ABA fights in London. If I was working long days during cold weather, my wife, if she walked the couple of miles into town for shopping, would spend a few hours in the library or the 'centre' so that she did not have to put on the heating for the kids.

The staged increase in pay that labour put in for the police during the late 80s saved me having to sell my house and rent instead. I paid off my debts and we had gas-fired central heating installed. We didn't have it on all day of course, but it looked good on the wall.

It would be easy for me to post an ironic 'The good old days' but expectations were lower then. On my days off I would walk into town with my wife and kids, using footpaths away from the road, and across the fields. It would take us all day and it was idyllic. Looking back, I wouldn't have had it any other way. A little bit of pain never hurt anyone.

I think one of the reasons we've been happily married for nearly 50 years is the pulling together that was needed in the early days. Mind you, having to go to bed early as the heating went off at 8pm was, if anything, rather a bonus. Much better than Game of Thrones.

But I'm glad none of my kids have had to struggle like we did.


Condi

17,089 posts

170 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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What the current policy does (triple lock/free bus pass/free tv licence/winter fuel allowance etc) is divide the young and the old. What it has also done is increased pensioners spending power at a much greater rate than those who are paying for it.

As a 'young person' most pensioners I know are pretty well off - own their own house etc, and many of those who are coming up to retirement have larger pensions than we can ever hope for, as well as the state pension which is unlikely to be there in 20 years time.

I have no issues with helping those in need, but it does need to be means tested.

FiF

43,964 posts

250 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Nickgnome said:
Strange isn’t it. I took out my first mortgage in 1978 age 24. No queue, no list. Second house bought in Hemel Hempstead, house price 3.8 times my earnings. Manager of Halifax met me and offered the mortgage. We met every 6 months after that until I sold my house and rented for a while. Yes I had saved from the age of 16 in the society a small amount each month.
Yet the rules about the queue and waiting list was as applied by guess who, the Halifax, two years later. No idea why the difference.

Jaguar steve

9,232 posts

209 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
quotequote all
Nickgnome said:
BoRED S2upid said:
Count yourself lucky you will be getting a state pension even at 67. I’m not banking on it being around when I get that old our retirement planning doesn’t take it into account they will have moved it to 77 by then!
Why not plan for no state pension. Why should the state provide for you?
The state should provide for you in your old age after you've provided for the state for decades. It's a two way thing and like it or not that's that's the deal we're all forced to contribute too.

If the state hadn't taken from you all your working life then you'd have no right to expect anything in return as you get older. But it has and so you should.

Kermit power

28,635 posts

212 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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PRTVR said:
amusingduck said:
PRTVR said:
That sounds logical but have not your parents paid into a system all their life for what reason?
To pay for the society they live in? For their bins to be emptied, for healthcare and education and police, and pensioners too.

It's not an investment which is returned when they retire. Their money has been spent, and today's taxpayer contributes to them, just as they contributed towards non-taxpayers during their life.
But is that not the point, they paid for other, people to have benefits and now others are paying for them.
I think the point is that for my parents' and grandparents' generations (and pretty much anyone born between about 1910 to 1960) the calculations were all wrong, and as a result, they only paid in a tiny fraction of what they're taking out.

Had I been in either of their generations, I would've been looking forward to a gold-plated pension on probably something like half my final salary. As it is, I'll be doing well to get 25% of my final salary. My State pension won't be anything like as good as theirs, and I'll only see a small fraction of the property equity growth they saw.

I'm not complaining that things are gradually starting to be balanced up in terms of affordability, upping of pension ages and the like, as I want my kids to have a chance of a decent life without shelling out a fortune in taxes for me, and I also know that I'll probably get a pretty decent inheritance, but the notion that the previous couple of generations are only taking out what they paid in is completely wrong.

PF62

3,575 posts

172 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
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Roofless Toothless said:
I think they will bite off more than they can chew if they mess with bus passes. These are very fondly received by pensioners, many of whom have passed their driving years, or who can no longer afford a car. Shops are so centralised nowadays that using a bus for daily shopping trips is an essential, and buses are bloody expensive. Also, without pensioners using buses during the day, many routes would be threatened .
The payments to bus companies for bus passes don't work in the way many people think.

Bus companies only get paid if someone using a bus pass would have paid to travel if they didn't have a pass. If they are only travelling because they have a bus pass and can travel free then the bus company gets nothing - if they did it would be state aid and could be illegal

So you end up with a very complicated formula to work out how much money the bus company gets (including money for those who would have paid to travel but can't because the bus is full of people travelling free on bus passes).

However at the end of the day the calculation means the bus company should end up with exactly the same amount as if bus passes didn't exist.

Obviously some councils subsidise some loss making bus services, but this is completely separate to bus pass funding.

InitialDave

11,856 posts

118 months

Thursday 25th April 2019
quotequote all
Jaguar steve said:
Nickgnome said:
Why not plan for no state pension. Why should the state provide for you?
The state should provide for you in your old age after you've provided for the state for decades. It's a two way thing and like it or not that's that's the deal we're all forced to contribute too.
I don't think the two are exclusive.

I believe it is right that we have this overall social setup to give people a state pension, in exchange for contributing to the funding of the welfare state.

I also believe it is a good idea to assume the government will completely balls it up, and you're going to need your own separate funds if you want to be able to eat.

PorkRind

3,053 posts

204 months

Friday 26th April 2019
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Gecko1978 said:
you pay into the system today and in return are looked after later. While costs go up so have wages an thus tax paid. OP's dad is entitled to it and has contributed to society and now society is looking after him. The 17 year old lad on the bus route is able to work and travel (he will find it costly like we all did at the start).

So no lets stop messing about with pensions
The most sensible post yet.

Kermit power

28,635 posts

212 months

Friday 26th April 2019
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PorkRind said:
Gecko1978 said:
you pay into the system today and in return are looked after later. While costs go up so have wages an thus tax paid. OP's dad is entitled to it and has contributed to society and now society is looking after him. The 17 year old lad on the bus route is able to work and travel (he will find it costly like we all did at the start).

So no lets stop messing about with pensions
The most sensible post yet.
No, it really isn't, as it takes no account of whether the OP's father paid in enough.

All the original calculations around payment towards state benefits in old age were based on people living around 5 years in retirement. It's now close to 20, but contributions haven't gone up by even a fraction of that.

Go and ask a Ferrari dealer if you can pay £100 per month for the next 20 years, then rock up and collect your shiny new car "because you've paid for it".