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Damien, have you just woke up ? Government hand outs have always gone to the "duckers & divers" not the hard working, careful, diligent, savers. I challenge you, just compare a retired couple with savings, a small weekly pension (around £70 per week) plus their respective State Pensions and they own their two bed Flat. Yes, compare these to a retired couple that live next door in an identical rented flat with no small private pension and no savings. During this period of their lives, who gets the most government handouts ? ? ? You must include in your calculation nursing home costs & funeral costs ! !
Statistics show that many UK residents "sell up" their UK homes in preparation for a "full-on-benefits" retirement, they stash their cash in an overseas account, which is used to pay directly for stuff like a a/ new car b/ holidays
You seem to ignore the fact that the state pension is a low amount as compared to most comparable countries. If the pension was based on the living wage then that’s a start but the pension amount is way below. A triple lock to increase what is already a low amount is certainly not something that should be attacked as being unfair……give pensioners a reasonable pension in the first place then we can discuss how it should be increased annually. As an aside what pension does an MP get in addition to state pension? ….and remember the part that tax plays as well. A state pension takes up most of the personal allowance….other income then becomes taxable …unless it’s in an ISA…… by not increasing personal allowances you are increasing the tax burden. Whilst it’s called a benefit the state pension has been earned by 35 plus years of contributions…….if it’s difficult to fund state pensions then let’s start an analysis of what out taxes are actually spent on…..and also look at how the really wealthy individual,families, trust funds and corporations do not pay their share of tax.
I don’t know why you’re so surprised they are taking this away ? You can’t rely on the government anymore for support, but at the same time if they are taking this away then the NI should be scrapped in my opinion fairs fair
Shocking!! It’s not a benefit people pay into it for 35 years If you can’t pay state pensions then pay me my contributions back and i will make my own provisions 😢
No chance mate, that's too reasonable a way to think! They will take your pension from you and put you on Universal Credit and they won't care that you're upset. They will bullshit the rest of the working population that we can't afford it, hard choices etc. That they were the party(whatever colour) that faced up to the mess left by the last government and State pensions are no longer a viable option. Mark my words, State Pensions are Going and making the Winter Fuel Allowance means tested is only the first stage in dismantling it. And that will be followed by selling off the NHS!😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮
Genuinely worried about having this stolen. Really feels like if you do 'the right thing' and do moderately well for yourself, you get punished relentlessly.
@@DavidC-fk2wg Oh look we've got a bootlicker here. You receive national insurance qualifying years for with each year of NI contribution. Yes there isn't a big pot of money but you know full well it is owed to the population.
Unfortunately the benefit system in the UK works in reverse, the less you pay in the more you get out. If you work hard and pay a lot of tax expect to get bugger all.
In principle but in practice it's used as a lifestyle choice by many. Additionally it keeps a low wage economy viable (via in work benefits) and supports a landlord class helping to inflate house prices (via the billions subsidising rent). If you work hard, save a little and fall on hard times you'll get no help which is why the benefit system for many is pointless and they'd be better off keeping the tax and self insuring. The state pension will be yet another example of a failed socialist policy that favours the feckless should it become means tested.
@@davidnash4393 The point of benefits is to support people that dont save ? So what would be the point in anybody saving for retirement if they gets punished for it ?
@@stuartregan1627 Get it right😮 The point of benefits is to support the people who CANT save because of poor wages and companies who want to keep the wages bill as low as possible and make huge profits at their workers expense. And Pensions are taking a huge chunk of GDP so expect them to be abolished🤔🤔😢
I didn't want to opt in. I didn't want to pay national insurance. I would have far preferred to sort my own pension. But they took my money. You can't take the money and then turn around and say you won't provide the service it was meant for because you are prioritising spending that money on other things. That's just theft.
The Tories did introduce opting out of SERPS (where you would get a reduced state pension if you took some of the NI and put it into a private one instead). But the last Labour Govt put a stop to that.
@@andymcnish Wrong opting out was scrapped in 2016 by the Tories! what Labour did in 2002 was replace SERPS with a different S2P scheme, if you were already opted out in 2002 made no difference.
I have gone without things to save for my future whilst people around me waste money left, right and centre. If this pension is stolen from me After paying in all my life, I will be utterly fuming
@@nikoc3585 I am putting money into a private pension rather that spending on holidays, cars etc. So, if state pensions are means tested I may lose my state pension because I made sacrifices to also have a private pension.
I’ve spent 3 decades funding current pensioners to have a minimum level of income. I expect the workers behind me to do the same when I reach that stage. If the government rips up the social contract, I expect them to back date and return all I have contributed, including all the growth I have lost that I would have got so I can make up for a significant hole loosing the state pension will create.
You can expect but the reality is that you were part of the many and the ones coming behind are the few. Not enough children being born with the consequence that a shrinking workforce cannot pay for a larger and longer living pensioner population. The pension as we know it was introduced in 1946. Life expectancy has increased a lot since then. Women have moved from 60 to 67 however men being roughly 1/2 the population instead only 2 years extra in all that time. So a shrinking workforce and longer living pensioner population just doesn't work so pension age will have to ramp up and real reform of the workplace pension needed to get rid of qualifying earnings and set the employee and employer contributions much higher but the effects of that will take decades. The bit in between is a real and looming problem which successive governments have failed to tackle because it is so divisive however all the inaction has done is make the problem much more acute and therefore much more painful for all caught in it. It's not the younger workforce that's the problem it's the inaction of government.
@@doyler78 the ambition should be to bring UK pensions inline either equivalent western countries. Which are typically twice that of the UK. UK is locked in a mantra of ‘can’t afford this or can’t afford that’ as the population indoctrinated into is in increasingly grateful for having less than nothing. This isn’t a short term fix, but the whole approach needs radical transformation of a long and sustained period. This is required across all levels and ages society from from child through education to working and retirement, but reaching pension age should not leave people so vulnerable. There are plenty of studies that show how economically it benefits the country by having pensioners with a stable amount of money. The same should be said for the working population. That money is completely spent and recycled through the economy and all the benefits to businesses and the passive tax take that generates. The same goes for working people, moving from desperately poor (and most people in the uk have become poor over the decades even if they don’t label themselves as poor) to a more economically stable position has huge benefits to the economy as almost all their money is spent across the economy. All this is an incredibly efficient way of lifting the economy and stabilising everything. It encourages self-sufficiency and importantly generates huge tax income while reducing all the draw on benefits, credits and other expensive to administer systems. At the same time the government should be investing in assets (people, resources, infrastructure, assets) not shedding them. Building stability, multiple income streams, and ensuring the free market can operate genuinely efficiently rather than weighted to the few. No doubt people will resort to the ‘we cannot afford it’ doctrine and this is true today and to be clear, this isn’t a magic overnight change, but requires a long term vision and determination, changing the hearts on minds over decades. This requires grown up, long term, visionary leadership of the country which sadly we don’t have from any party. Contrary to the rhetoric, our politics are build around short term, reactive presentation politics for personal power and wealth gain of those in power. BTW, I am not a pensioner and I don’t think this should be tackled on its own, I see this as a wider issues across the UK economy and there must be measures lifting full time workers out of poverty into becoming economically active and having the means to save, spend and have a better quality of life. The balance between the very very rich and the rest has become so grotesque that the £ numbers are there if there was political will and genuine long term vision. But it is difficult to see as none of the political parties have the vision or political desire to address these, they are simply emergency reactive when it becomes too late.
@@progressivebusiness4537 while I totally agree with the sentiment...it's a mandatory Ponzi scheme. Boomers are the real benefactors here, our parents are continuing to turn the screw on us!
@@stuartregan1627Yeah good luck with that 🙄 One of the things that spurred me on to work so hard was the memory of how fucking brutal life was growing up in a household on benefits.
It wouldn't do them any good to scrap the state pension unless they also scrap pension credit. All they'd be doing is transferring everyone from a contributions based benefit to a means-tested one and making an enemy of their richest voters. It would also incentivise not saving for a pension at all so they'd suddenly find the bottom falling out of the economy as 2/3 of workers stop investing for retirement.
@@DanielHughesuktaxing the dividends in pension funds also meant a lot of investment was moved out of the value stocks in the FTSE100 and into growth stocks in America. Brown ruined any chance of the UK being prosperous ever again.
Making state pension means tested will mean retirement saving will plummet. For example if the government made it so for every £2 over £18,000 a year your state pension went down by £1 it will mean people think. "I can either save an extra £100 per month for retirement and have the government take £50 away, or I spend that £100 on a nice dinner and have nothing taken away"
It's a uniparty anyway. The suffrage was a distraction because after ww1 they needed to get people onside so they would fight in ww2. If voting meant anything we wouldnt be allowed to do it
@@santasmooth6804 Trouble is, once it has been done, I doubt if successive governments would bring it back as the money would already be reallocated (and likely wasted) elsewhere
Let the Government implement means testing & watch millions go on the sick with stress . If they work & save they get no pension . What a truely nutjob country this is becoming.
Don't work = free everything DO Work = sorry you have too much money though working. No Winter fuel , no cost of living payment . & now no pension. The Government really don't want people working do they ?
I retired at age 53, so I am in my early 60s. Many of them resisted me because they couldn't understand the idea of not working if it wasn't necessary. I considered the phases of my life. I worked very hard to achieve what I have now, but in my last years, I owe it to myself to "stop and smell the roses." In my instance, I departed the nation after retiring and currently reside in Latin America. It made it possible for me to appreciate my new surroundings while escaping all the bad things that were going on in America. Nobody that I know of regrets retiring has done so.
A pleasant way to wind down. In my opinion, those who are retired and find it difficult to support themselves are the ones who were unable to save enough money when they were working. Numerous factors are determined by retirement decisions. My spouse and I both worked in the civil service for the same amount of years; I saved through my 401(k) and she through a wealth manager. Even when we retired, we were both still earning.
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Think we should stop child benefit first. People don’t choose to grow old but they do choose to have children, why should this be funded by the state? £12.5billion encouraging people to have something they can’t afford.
Yes there needs to be a limit (as there currently is)but actually we all need other people’s children- to be our healthcare workers, cleaners, refuse collectors, supermarket workers, farmers etc. you name it, we need a constant stream of new people to perform those tasks for us and if they’re not home grown we will have to import them from abroad.
The state pension age will rise to 70 minimum because we won't have enough working age people paying tax to cover the pensions. At some point if we can't get enough workers, pension will also be means tested. As people get older, health costs rise too. All this has to be covered by workers. There will also be more workers out of the workforce as they will be caring for the elderly. This demographic time bomb affects every developed country.
Actually the system needs to encourage/support those who have kids as too few people do. We are suffering a demographic time bomb (or more mass immigration) unless we get the birth rate up. Kids are so expensive to bring up and look after (often long after 18 these days) that many working people just can't afford them. The people who really don't need help are professional couples without kids.
Started listening to this guy on his podcast, I have no idea about money matters in the main because I suffer from dyscalculia - but I have started talking to a financial advisor about an ISA, he has helped me get my pension in line and well i feel a lot better about stuff... so huge thank you
@@iamrocketray I sympathise for you, but reality check; if you're on median income and pay rent, you're not left with much more than that haha (And you still have to somehow save for a home). If you're on minimum wage, you are left with much, much, much less than that. Ofcourse, if you have 11k and no home equity either then it is more difficult still.
I live in an area in the UK with a predominantly older population - This theoretical resentment from those who save vs people who don't is already being felt. Not via pensions, but through elderly care. The system effectively punishes those who save, as they have to liquidate all of their assets to pay for care services (many of which are both inadequate & extremely expensive). The same care is free for those under a certain savings threshold. It's a great situation for the care providers who can employ cheap under-qualified labour. Then invoice the state with over-inflated costs. Fingers crossed we can get it right for state pensions, but I wont be holding my breath.
The French wouldn't accept their pensions getting taken away. They would bring the country to a standstill. This affects everyone not just the ones nearing retirement. If they plan to remove pensions for the young they need to come up with a plan, and supplement their private pensions with additional contributions,
You can't have it both ways. The tax burden in this country may be higher than it has been for many years but it's still far below France, Italy etc. particularly for the wealthy. The countries with better pension provision. So its a choice of higher taxes or poorer services and lower benefits.
We have been doing alot of rioting lately , imagine the carnage of this Nutjob plan . Taking pensions of people because they have worked TOO MUCH . Starmer & Reeves = Dumb & Dumber for even considering such a bonkers idea .
@@David-bi6lfthose countries don't promote private pensions and savings in the same way. Here the pension payout is lower but you get tax relief to incentivise you to save for your own retirement. That's with private pensions and ISAs
I’m in my early sixties now and have made my retirement plans based on getting the SP at 67. I’ve already paid 42 years contributions so I would be mightily annoyed if they means tested it and removed it because I have a private pension (also paid in for 42 years) - income is already taxed so the government will recoup money from people with private pensions. Despite what governments say, there is still massive waste in spending and they really should look at priorities and I’m certain they can find literally billions. Stealing from pensioners isn’t the way forward and Labour will come to regret it.
@@CandyMan2001 I'll think about the holidays I didn't go on, the mobile phones and paid tv subscriptions I never had, the 2nd job I took to save for a deposit. I bought when avg house price was 3x average salaries. It's now 8.5x. But I started off paying 8% mortgage, paid 12% for a number of years and 15% briefly. I drove a 2nd hand Citroen 2CV6 that I paid £800 for, not a new car on lease. Could the younger generation cut their lifestyle and afford a house (I have 2 kids in there early 20's) ? It would help, probably wouldn't bridge the gap in all areas of the country, but it would in some. But back to that affordability point, supply needs to increase, successive governments need to stop inflating the demand side through incentive schemes and people need to spend less money on tat.
"Could the younger generation cut their lifestyle and afford a house" - not really no. TLDR: Home buying for the generations below us is fucked. Median Annual Salary Age 22-29, 2024 - £30,316 (Forbes) / £2064 per month after tax and auto-enrollment Median House Price as of Jan 2024 - £282,000 (gov.uk) Minimum deposit on Median House - 5% or £14,100 Average Rental Cost per month - £1,223 (Zoopla) Leaving £841 left from salary. Minus council tax, groceries, energy, internet, insurance there's not much is left to save for the deposit. But let's say they slog it and get together the deposit and house prices, somehow, haven't risen in the years it's taken, now comes the mortgage. Affordability criteria. The median salary doesn't pay for the median house. Rule of thumb - 4.5x salary = £136,442 (a delta of £145,58 so even a couple on the median won't afford the median home). But somehow they find a provider for their mortgage despite that, repayments on the median home at 5% deposit, 30 years, 5.25% interest is a monthly mortgage payment of £1,479.35. Leaving just £584 per month for the essentials.
You had cheap housing, jobs with minimal competition and lucrative pension schemes, both private and public, so why is your retirement dictated by the state pension.
Hey Damo! You mentioned in the excellent podcast the other day that you live in Southport. After seeing the news, I hope you and your loved ones are safe amidst the madness 🙏🏽❤️
Pensions are paid from current taxation so although it feels like you’re ‘paying in’ you’re really not. The main barrier to fixing it is that pension policy is super long term and super popular, yet governments only have 5 years before the next election. Touching pensions becomes toxic however unsustainable the path we are on.
Means testing in practice will be hideous, imagine a 90 year old widow who lives alone suddenly having to complete extra paperwork to beg for the state pension, we can’t accept this. It should kept universal, but funding issues addressed via higher wealth targeted taxation so rich people get the state pension but pay higher tax
rich people? those wont be a thing soon, theres only a 50% difference in earnings between the top 10% of pensioners and bottom 10% pensioners. every generation has less assets as they are spread among more people and inflation has stripped away the value of bank accounts. Agreed on the means testing, but for people in 20's and 30's its pretty evident that we wont get a retirement. the state pay will be too low, we are unlikely to afford the hospice care and rents and will have to spend our lives doing shop checkout jobs, non physical non intellectual jobs, to make ends meet. the system is going to break and i hope the oldies have families that can take them in. Family > government for care in old age.
Agree with pretty much everything you say, the economic situation with younger millennials and gen z is a paradigm shift in society, we are sleeping walking into the unknown There are always going to be rich people, the problem is the middle classes are getting wiped out and the rich are getting insanely wealthy, which is why I advocate for higher wealth targeted taxation and be willing to pay more myself if meant the country worked better (at all)
The simple way would be to TAX pensions according to how wealthy they are, so a £millionaire would be taxed 100% and old joe who has no other income would be zero taxed, the rest taxed accordingly!
@@user-ug6ex5ug7s Which is why they are using things like pension credits for eligibility for Winter fuel payments. The paperwork/bureaucracy has been done already. Its also another reason they want to bring in digital ID/Passports so they can bring in ALL information about you to one place and build it up year by year. Fortunately for us all, that will also be expensive to implement and is probably the reason we don't have it already, BUT it will come eventually.
MPs pensions are untouchable. And the citizens of this country are under review and under threat. Why is that ? Answer: it’s them against all of us. Has it been any other way. Answer no.
At 53 If I get shafted after working from 16 at times 24 hours in a day and 7 day weeks and months without a day off and 36 years so far of NI contributions hell have no fury I will be absolutely livid! Building up a decent pension pot and should pay the mortgage off a big house by retirement so should be ok downsizing and enjoying it. If things change simple pack work in early spunk the money and join the rest of the country 😂
Come on guys! I'm slightly younger than yourselves but even I know the regime doesn't give two shiny shites about your work, life or who you are. They'll pay off the boomers before they leave this mortal coil, then have their fun making up numerous excuses as to why they can't pay Gen X and Millennials their pensions. And what's more, they'll happily clamp down on you with a giant boot.
The triple lock was designed to allow the uk state pension to catch up with average European pension levels -once its caught up then it should be reconsidered
State pension is not generous currently £200 a week. Look at cost of living pensioners struggling with heat or eat that's not a pension to be shouting about
People get confused by the state pension. It's not a pot,never was. Its todays taxpayers pay pensions. Why do some not understand that when they get old that the then taxpayers will be paying for their pension. Under no circumstance should the government cancel the pension.
I had the horrible misfortune of having to kick my 86 year old nan out her flat. Told her she’s lucky to have a pension and free bus pass….and to go live on a bus…thanks for your support Damien 👍
I was planning on retiring in about 20 months, at 58. Now I'm watching and waiting. My plans depended on a state pension kicking in at 67. If that goes, I'll need to work on.
You don't need to worry. It's people under 40 who need to be worried, especially those under 30. They're not changing anything for anyone past 50, it's rising to 68 for those under 47ish though.
I have always considered that it won’t be there for me. I’m an 85 baby and everything I saw my elders get is usually shut down or removed by the time I am old enough to have it. On your day so Damo - I set up a SIPP and I just pay into that and have other plans for paying off the mortgage etc.
@@pierrelarouge Not our fault Mate! the government of the day in 1948 promised that they would take care of us cradle to the grave! and they charged us accordingly. We just are holding them to their promise!!!!!! If they want to change the rules they have to wait until we are DEAD!
Your channel came up as a recommendation. A really good video. I am a Waspi woman who has had her SPA increased twice. The John Cridland Report recommended that for each year of pension age increase, there should be 10 years' notice. This would have been much fairer, as the ages did need to be equalised. There is so much scaremongering going on at the moment.
You will own nothing and you will be happy. You will pay off a mortgage half your life, only to slowly give the equity back to the banks so that you've got something miniscule to live off.
Pensioners tend to spend locally and you never touched on the effect the spending of the pensioners pound has on the local economy. Also consider some of this money is gifted to grandkids who in turn soend locally. If this money disappears it will devastate local shops incomes.
@@mightymike2192effed by decades of increasing national debt. it was never sustainable, but successive governments keep kicking the can down the road. at least Labour are trying to deal with issues
I would be more worried about how Hunt was saying wanted to abolish National Insurance. Well as eligibility for State Pension was based on having National Insurance Stamps then surely that is a remove the state pension. 20-30 years ago mother worked at a pensions place and her boss was saying whilst won’t disappear it will become a smaller proportion of people’s income.
Great video mate, the IFS usually get it right. As for Labour, if they try to means test the state pension they would never get into number ten ever again Also after all life time of contributions to end up getting robbed would cause major problems going forward. BIG MISTAKE!!
@@m4son5ee Yes, I understand that but Labour will ultimately pay the price . The CON servitives , have loaded the gun so to speak but it’s Labour who look like are going to fire it. You can’t get convicted for loading a gun but you can if you fire it, if you get my drift. Years and years of woeful Government have ruined our fine Country and now they want to rob people who have worked so very hard all their lives to put in place a nest egg for some sort of security in their old age. As I stated BIG MISTAKE!!
They could get away with abolishing the triple lock. But any party that starts to mean-tests the state pension will never get anywhere near power again.
@@arp_909 About 38% of the entire population is currently over 50. 21% are under 18. That leaves 41% who are 18-50. In the future, there will be more older voters not less. So the people most worried about pensions are almost half the people with the right to vote and are by far the most reliable voters, so are already majority in terms of actual voters. Reasonable changes to the state pension might get through - making it means tested won't.
Really? You think “no state pension for anyone with pension income over £250k/year or assets over £15m” would be an unpopular policy with the vast majority people? What I see is people love the idea of “others” / “the rich” paying more tax. Means testing could start out only impacting a few hundred people… then they will gradually bring the thresholds down, so only small number of voters get hit each time. They are crafty like that, but I’m still worried. IFS might be against it, but I can see it being done. They already started means testing the £400 winter fuel allowance. That’s effectively just an additional state pension, and now it’s means tested.
@@andymcnish These percentages are why the state pension will get increasingly less sustainable. A smaller population of workers paying more and more for a larger population of pensioners, it just doesn't work. Means testing need not impact the majority, but I do see the point that we have some pensioners with sufficient savings to pay for themselves, sitting in houses worth 7-figures that cost 5-figures when they bought them, getting supported by young people today (through tax) who earn a pittance and have no hope of ever dreaming of living in one of those same houses. It just doesn't seem right.
I’ve been told since I was about 12 that I’ll probably never get a state pension, might of been slightly tongue in cheek but I always just assumed I’d never get it
Been paying NI for 30 years and plan to work for 15 more. I want my state pension when I retire! Even 3rd world countries have pensions for their people.
I should be given the option to not pay NI and therefore withdraw from state pension and NHS. I'd much prefer to put that money towards private health care whilst relying on my private pensions.
Hope you're earning some serious money when you hit retirement then given that's where 50% of the NHS budget goes. Guess you'll enjoy forking out 15000 for a new hip?
That’s how tax work though, your money goes onto things that you don’t use Take education for example, why should I pay for it if I don’t have kids myself? Well I should because I’d rather live in a country where people are educated than somewhere full of ignorant people
@JoeHardacre By the way my father is 72. He's worked since the age of 16. He's needed a new knee for the last 3 years and still no sign of an operation and he's in some real pain so yes, fuck the NHS in my retirement.
@Michael-wn3rn you would need to make it proportional to working population size to make it sustainable. Contributions to it should be made proportional to projected working population for your retirement age.
@@Jon-ov4nc I'd agree with this. As pensioners make up more of the population they get less each, and to get more they'd have to cut the NIMBY shit and let the country build and grow. GDP grows -> their pension grows.
Because the world has changed. It ain't changing back. Our parents grew up in a world where Western nations, even after the second WW, were light-years ahead of the rest of the world technologically whilst also benefitting from a post-war demographic pyramid that was hugely advantageous to the boomer generation. This resulted in huge economic and productivity gains, coupled with technological and medical advancements. They also benefitted from a much larger share of world GDP relative to population. The equation has completely changed over the last 30 - 40 years.
wow 1200 people watched this in 3 hours. way to go Damo :) Must be something about your content that draws us in lol. Nice one dude keep up the good work.
These people that insist on means testing are laughable - no doubt most of them sitting on their backsides for the last 40 years taking state benefits, not contributing NI and just expect a handout as usual. For those of us that have worked hard, been successful and contributed get nothing - the price of working hard and being successful.
They thought they could poll tax every house hold too. But thr people soon put a stop to that. The aging population has paid into their pension accounts. End of story.
Australia's system does make means testing more viable, but some differences to the UK need to be noted. In Australia you dont pay National Insurance, and when you access your private pension ( super) above the age of 60, it is tax free. In Australia though you dont get tax relief on any pension contributions that you make. For many that I know the big appeal of the Australian system is that income is tax free when you drawdown on your account.
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Tying it to median earnings introduces an interesting motivation. To get more out of the state pension, you want median earnings to go up. Earnings has lagged behind inflation for quite a while, but is, for most people, a big part of what a healthy economy is, so this should make life better for working people too. I like the sound of this.
@@leematthews6812 That isn’t why. We didn’t complain because looking after our elderly is a benchmark of a civil society. It’s still one of the lowest in Europe and we can still find money for Ukraine, for overseas aid, for overseas climate, for a 25% pay rise for junior doctors, for hotels and benefits for people who have never lived here or paid in. We should increase NHS payments rather than reduce them, it’s only a few pounds overall but billions as a collective fund.
Excellent explanation Damien, something you didn’t mention though was what happens if/when life expectancy falls (as I believe is the case currently in the UK). By any logic the SPA should fall in line with it…….but we know that’s not going to happen
I believe the recent fall is mostly link to Covid and that next batch of data will show it rising again. With new treatments for obesity, ones that actually work, I expect we will see over the next 20 years a real rise in life expectancy.
The scheme was set up when life expectancy was ~70. retirement at 65 so they got 5 years of pension on average (women didn't work so 10 years of pension per person to be paid.) Now people retirement starts at 68 but life expectancy is 80. (thus 12 years of pension). the costs to NHS for the 10 years 70-80 is astronomical compared to 60-70. The average length on pension has increased, the costs of old age health has increased, the number of children to fund the pension has decreased. the maths doesn't stack.
@DavidUKesb And laws are made and unmade by Governments who will have no qualms about changing the law to enable them to get rid of the State Pension. 🤔
Bacause of the Auto enrolment of Pensions by 2050 Pension benefits will be dramatically reduced as most pensions will have a work place pension that will top up their pension to over the minimum needed to live. I also think withing the next 10 years the Tripple lock will be replaced by a Double lock, & will be 2.5% or inflation not wages grouth.
That was a very good presentation Damien. I’ve watched several analyses of the UK State Pension problem, and yours is the clearest and most sensible. Bravo.
The problem with asking people of working age to fund retired people is it only works while there's some level of parity between those two groups. Currently there are more retired people than this country has ever had before and at the same time fewer working age people than ever before. This means the burden on each working age person is higher than ever
@@stuartregan1627 they are unaffordable, which is why they've gone through significant overhauls multiple times in the past decades. The NHS pension has changed 3 times since 1995 and the current scheme isn't even half what the old one used to be. Private pensions from that time are also incredibly generous - when I worked at Zurich every week someone was retiring on a full salary pension at 60, after about 20 years service. Safe to say my scheme wasn't close to that.
@@JoeHardacre Defined benefits pensions dont happen in any other industry. Do Public pensions retirees still get 3 x salary at retirement along with a index linked gold plated pension ?
I'm happy to not pay a chunk of NI, like you said i'd stick it in my portfolio, compound it and make far far more than what I'd get from the government 3 decades from now. The problem is I'm 34 and there's alot of elderly people that rely on my wages for their retirement, so we can't just scrap it right here right now.
Some of working in public services have seen no wage rises for about 15 years. No money left for saving or additional pension. I will end up with bugger all due to austerity policies... I am not the only one.
I have said for at least 15 years that you need to understand that pensions of ANY type will never pay out enough when you get to pension age. The math just does not work, save/buy into other things.
Likelihood is that the UK state pension age will rise to 70 or 71 by 2050 to ensure its sustainability. Given how the fuel duty freeze has become politically untouchable the triple lock UK state pension is likely here for the foreseeable future with the affordability of the system achieved by increasing the retirement age.
@DamienTalksMoney You need to understand the full history of the triple lock. Go and do some research on how Thatcher killed indexation, how many pensioners fell into poverty, and how the falling state pension needed to be fixed. The triple-lock was only ever intended to be a temporary scheme where it would bring the state pension back to a livable income over a number of years. Once it was there, it should be abolished. The problem is the lack of a debate on what that level should be. The IFS proposal addresses this, but we cannot have a debate about the triple-lock in absence of the history or it will cause outrage. Never **** off the pensioners - they will vote you out.
Why do you think Labour want 16 year olds to have the vote. There’s some research on the number of Labour voters that say Labour voters once they’ve won the lottery. It’s something like 100% stop voting Labour.
It's been going for nearly 80 years, 25 of which I've been paying in to cover other peoples payment. I don't care if it wasn't "costed" if they rug pull this away from us there will be riots.
Really enjoying your pension and retirement videos atm. Some good info there. Please could you do some videos on the Australian superannuation and Canadian Pension plan, and if we could incorporate any of those systems into our pension schemes? Canada pension fund is essentially a nationwide defined benefit scheme funded with taxation and they invest directly in companies like Octopus energy and national lottery. Having a system like this would definitely unlock more investment in the UK and stop private equity from buying all our companies.
It's just like the tax bands.. do well, pay more, then those people just over the threshold gets unfairly treated. And this is why I stay away from a SIPP, they just keep moving the goal post. I'll decide when I want to retire, not gov.
Labour are the party of those on benefits and the ultra rich. Middle class are getting gaslit that we’re the undeserved wealthy… while we’re the salaried workers putting in the graft and bankrolling all the tax. (And yes, Tories were pretty much as bad).
@@philipcrossley1279 Maybe, but the higher echelons of society carry enough influence and resource to avoid taxes and the poorest have nothing to give. It's a fact that the middle classes pay more tax as a percentage.
@@travellingtom6091 Yes, so tax avoidance by the rich has to be dealt with. Thousands of people in the civil service are hired to claw back tiny overpayments, mistakes, and those few committing fraud, very few are hired to look into those avoiding millions.
Great video. You’re doing a real service, going through a big report and breaking it down. Really clear and in more detail than I’d read in the FT or the Economist.
Because if you don't have defence then everything becomes inconsequential. You know it will be more expensive in the long run if Ukraine falls? You do know that right?
@@graham1706foreign company owns the club. Taxes not paid here. Or they take out a huge loan on the UK company, that loan goes abroad into their coffers and the UK company never makes a profit.
![[UNCUT] The Loyal Pin ปิ่นภักดิ์ EP.6 (2/4)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GgeGQOP10RQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I have linked the full report in the description if you want a read and here is the link to check out Manual and get 55% off your first order using my code DTM55. bit.ly/4a13ZVi
Damien, have you just woke up ? Government hand outs have always gone to the "duckers & divers" not the hard working, careful, diligent, savers. I challenge you, just compare a retired couple with savings, a small weekly pension (around £70 per week) plus their respective State Pensions and they own their two bed Flat. Yes, compare these to a retired couple that live next door in an identical rented flat with no small private pension and no savings. During this period of their lives, who gets the most government handouts ? ? ? You must include in your calculation nursing home costs & funeral costs ! !
Statistics show that many UK residents "sell up" their UK homes in preparation for a "full-on-benefits" retirement, they stash their cash in an overseas account, which is used to pay directly for stuff like a a/ new car b/ holidays
You seem to ignore the fact that the state pension is a low amount as compared to most comparable countries. If the pension was based on the living wage then that’s a start but the pension amount is way below.
A triple lock to increase what is already a low amount is certainly not something that should be attacked as being unfair……give pensioners a reasonable pension in the first place then we can discuss how it should be increased annually.
As an aside what pension does an MP get in addition to state pension?
….and remember the part that tax plays as well. A state pension takes up most of the personal allowance….other income then becomes taxable …unless it’s in an ISA…… by not increasing personal allowances you are increasing the tax burden.
Whilst it’s called a benefit the state pension has been earned by 35 plus years of contributions…….if it’s difficult to fund state pensions then let’s start an analysis of what out taxes are actually spent on…..and also look at how the really wealthy individual,families, trust funds and corporations do not pay their share of tax.
I don’t know why you’re so surprised they are taking this away ? You can’t rely on the government anymore for support, but at the same time if they are taking this away then the NI should be scrapped in my opinion fairs fair
Shocking!! It’s not a benefit people pay into it for 35 years
If you can’t pay state pensions then pay me my contributions back and i will make my own provisions
😢
No chance mate, that's too reasonable a way to think! They will take your pension from you and put you on Universal Credit and they won't care that you're upset. They will bullshit the rest of the working population that we can't afford it, hard choices etc. That they were the party(whatever colour) that faced up to the mess left by the last government and State pensions are no longer a viable option. Mark my words, State Pensions are Going and making the Winter Fuel Allowance means tested is only the first stage in dismantling it. And that will be followed by selling off the NHS!😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮
This is what should happen if they decide to means test it
Damien, our UK state pension is one of the lowest in western Europe.
It's anything but generous, triple lock, or no triple lock.
Genuinely worried about having this stolen. Really feels like if you do 'the right thing' and do moderately well for yourself, you get punished relentlessly.
It's a virtual guarantee it will be gone in 20 years.
Definitely. The system doesn't want the average Joe to succeed.
You can’t have it stolen. It isn’t yours.
“Stolen” 😂😂
@@DavidC-fk2wg Oh look we've got a bootlicker here. You receive national insurance qualifying years for with each year of NI contribution. Yes there isn't a big pot of money but you know full well it is owed to the population.
Unfortunately the benefit system in the UK works in reverse, the less you pay in the more you get out. If you work hard and pay a lot of tax expect to get bugger all.
Yip be a doormat get walked over
That's the point of benefits though. To provide a safety net for those with less. If you can afford to contribute you don't need the safety net.
In principle but in practice it's used as a lifestyle choice by many. Additionally it keeps a low wage economy viable (via in work benefits) and supports a landlord class helping to inflate house prices (via the billions subsidising rent). If you work hard, save a little and fall on hard times you'll get no help which is why the benefit system for many is pointless and they'd be better off keeping the tax and self insuring. The state pension will be yet another example of a failed socialist policy that favours the feckless should it become means tested.
@@davidnash4393 The point of benefits is to support people that dont save ? So what would be the point in anybody saving for retirement if they gets punished for it ?
@@stuartregan1627 Get it right😮 The point of benefits is to support the people who CANT save because of poor wages and companies who want to keep the wages bill as low as possible and make huge profits at their workers expense. And Pensions are taking a huge chunk of GDP so expect them to be abolished🤔🤔😢
I didn't want to opt in. I didn't want to pay national insurance. I would have far preferred to sort my own pension. But they took my money. You can't take the money and then turn around and say you won't provide the service it was meant for because you are prioritising spending that money on other things. That's just theft.
Do you honestly think the regime actually give two shiny shites? They will do as they like, just as they always have.
The Tories did introduce opting out of SERPS (where you would get a reduced state pension if you took some of the NI and put it into a private one instead). But the last Labour Govt put a stop to that.
Tax is essentially theft. Sometimes we get some of it back but it never feels like a fair deal.
I opted out of SERPS but then the last labour government scrapped it.
@@andymcnish Wrong opting out was scrapped in 2016 by the Tories! what Labour did in 2002 was replace SERPS with a different S2P scheme, if you were already opted out in 2002 made no difference.
I have gone without things to save for my future whilst people around me waste money left, right and centre. If this pension is stolen from me After paying in all my life, I will be utterly fuming
It comes straight out of your salary right? How are you "going without things?
@@nikoc3585by means of SIPP, or just increasing employee contribution!
That's not the state pension. That's a private pension.
@@nikoc3585 I am putting money into a private pension rather that spending on holidays, cars etc. So, if state pensions are means tested I may lose my state pension because I made sacrifices to also have a private pension.
I really hope you do get your pension and your right to save because of uncertainty please have a good life along the way🌈
I’ve spent 3 decades funding current pensioners to have a minimum level of income. I expect the workers behind me to do the same when I reach that stage. If the government rips up the social contract, I expect them to back date and return all I have contributed, including all the growth I have lost that I would have got so I can make up for a significant hole loosing the state pension will create.
Agreed. I have 35+ years and would expect a partial refund at the very least.
You can expect but the reality is that you were part of the many and the ones coming behind are the few. Not enough children being born with the consequence that a shrinking workforce cannot pay for a larger and longer living pensioner population. The pension as we know it was introduced in 1946. Life expectancy has increased a lot since then. Women have moved from 60 to 67 however men being roughly 1/2 the population instead only 2 years extra in all that time. So a shrinking workforce and longer living pensioner population just doesn't work so pension age will have to ramp up and real reform of the workplace pension needed to get rid of qualifying earnings and set the employee and employer contributions much higher but the effects of that will take decades. The bit in between is a real and looming problem which successive governments have failed to tackle because it is so divisive however all the inaction has done is make the problem much more acute and therefore much more painful for all caught in it. It's not the younger workforce that's the problem it's the inaction of government.
@@doyler78 the ambition should be to bring UK pensions inline either equivalent western countries. Which are typically twice that of the UK. UK is locked in a mantra of ‘can’t afford this or can’t afford that’ as the population indoctrinated into is in increasingly grateful for having less than nothing. This isn’t a short term fix, but the whole approach needs radical transformation of a long and sustained period. This is required across all levels and ages society from from child through education to working and retirement, but reaching pension age should not leave people so vulnerable. There are plenty of studies that show how economically it benefits the country by having pensioners with a stable amount of money. The same should be said for the working population. That money is completely spent and recycled through the economy and all the benefits to businesses and the passive tax take that generates. The same goes for working people, moving from desperately poor (and most people in the uk have become poor over the decades even if they don’t label themselves as poor) to a more economically stable position has huge benefits to the economy as almost all their money is spent across the economy. All this is an incredibly efficient way of lifting the economy and stabilising everything. It encourages self-sufficiency and importantly generates huge tax income while reducing all the draw on benefits, credits and other expensive to administer systems. At the same time the government should be investing in assets (people, resources, infrastructure, assets) not shedding them. Building stability, multiple income streams, and ensuring the free market can operate genuinely efficiently rather than weighted to the few. No doubt people will resort to the ‘we cannot afford it’ doctrine and this is true today and to be clear, this isn’t a magic overnight change, but requires a long term vision and determination, changing the hearts on minds over decades. This requires grown up, long term, visionary leadership of the country which sadly we don’t have from any party. Contrary to the rhetoric, our politics are build around short term, reactive presentation politics for personal power and wealth gain of those in power.
BTW, I am not a pensioner and I don’t think this should be tackled on its own, I see this as a wider issues across the UK economy and there must be measures lifting full time workers out of poverty into becoming economically active and having the means to save, spend and have a better quality of life. The balance between the very very rich and the rest has become so grotesque that the £ numbers are there if there was political will and genuine long term vision. But it is difficult to see as none of the political parties have the vision or political desire to address these, they are simply emergency reactive when it becomes too late.
@Lookup2Wakeup yes and then they fall into much more expensive benefits and state support while having a very poor quality of life.
@Lookup2Wakeup or the future dead
If I can’t be expected to get the state pension, I can’t be expected to contribute to it
Look at all the other things we contribute to and don’t get.
Yeah time to live on benefits & get everything for free.
@@progressivebusiness4537 while I totally agree with the sentiment...it's a mandatory Ponzi scheme. Boomers are the real benefactors here, our parents are continuing to turn the screw on us!
@@stuartregan1627Yeah good luck with that 🙄
One of the things that spurred me on to work so hard was the memory of how fucking brutal life was growing up in a household on benefits.
@@Kj16Vexactly, I love how people think benefits = life of luxury and relaxing 😂
If a government got rid of the state pension, I feel they wouldn’t be in power for much longer at then next election…
Or ever again
It wouldn't do them any good to scrap the state pension unless they also scrap pension credit. All they'd be doing is transferring everyone from a contributions based benefit to a means-tested one and making an enemy of their richest voters. It would also incentivise not saving for a pension at all so they'd suddenly find the bottom falling out of the economy as 2/3 of workers stop investing for retirement.
Err Gordon brown: gold sell off, abolishment of final salary pensions?
@@DanielHughesuktaxing the dividends in pension funds also meant a lot of investment was moved out of the value stocks in the FTSE100 and into growth stocks in America. Brown ruined any chance of the UK being prosperous ever again.
but i bet the incoming government of what ever colour wouldn't be in a rush to re-instate it in its current form tho
Jokes on them, I was planning on working until I die.
you appear everywhere
@@edfdfdf6483 He is putting in that work
Good luck with that.
Good luck and, more importantly, good health.
👹
Making state pension means tested will mean retirement saving will plummet.
For example if the government made it so for every £2 over £18,000 a year your state pension went down by £1 it will mean people think. "I can either save an extra £100 per month for retirement and have the government take £50 away, or I spend that £100 on a nice dinner and have nothing taken away"
Just don't vote for any government that pulls a stunt like this. Job done
It's a uniparty anyway. The suffrage was a distraction because after ww1 they needed to get people onside so they would fight in ww2. If voting meant anything we wouldnt be allowed to do it
No one is touching the pension 😂
They wouldn't tell you beforehand
@@santasmooth6804 Trouble is, once it has been done, I doubt if successive governments would bring it back as the money would already be reallocated (and likely wasted) elsewhere
The Conservatives would have done the same. It was inevitable.
The only way to get everything from the government is to not work a single day in your life.
SO true . If the Government means it nobody will work & save as there's no point.
Or arrive on a small boat with no pasport
Let the Government implement means testing & watch millions go on the sick with stress . If they work & save they get no pension . What a truely nutjob country this is becoming.
Are you lot AI? 😅 or can you think for yourselves at all?
Don't work = free everything DO Work = sorry you have too much money though working. No Winter fuel , no cost of living payment . & now no pension. The Government really don't want people working do they ?
I retired at age 53, so I am in my early 60s. Many of them resisted me because they couldn't understand the idea of not working if it wasn't necessary. I considered the phases of my life. I worked very hard to achieve what I have now, but in my last years, I owe it to myself to "stop and smell the roses." In my instance, I departed the nation after retiring and currently reside in Latin America. It made it possible for me to appreciate my new surroundings while escaping all the bad things that were going on in America. Nobody that I know of regrets retiring has done so.
A pleasant way to wind down. In my opinion, those who are retired and find it difficult to support themselves are the ones who were unable to save enough money when they were working. Numerous factors are determined by retirement decisions. My spouse and I both worked in the civil service for the same amount of years; I saved through my 401(k) and she through a wealth manager. Even when we retired, we were both still earning.
Unfortunately, not everyone has access to this kind of information. Really, I don't blame panicked folks. A major obstacle may be a lack of knowledge. All I have to do is invest through an advisor and I've been making over $800k without putting in much labor. Even in an unfavorable economic environment, savvy asset managers will always generate returns.
I've been putting off doing this for a while, even though I think I should. Since you appear to have everything figured out with the firm you work with, I wouldn't mind a recommendation, but I'm not really sure which firm to deal with because I think they're all the same.
I definitely share your sentiment about these firms. Finding financial advisors like *Layan Talia Chokr* who can assist you on things like investing, insurance, making sure retirement is well funded, going over tax benefits, ways to have a volatility buffer for investment risk would be a very creative option. There will be difficult times ahead, and prudent personal money management will be essential to navigating them.
Layan gives off the impression of being a very powerful person in her field. I sought her up online and discovered her website, which I browsed and studied to find out more about her career history, qualifications, and educational background. She owes it to me to look out for my best interests. Thank you for sharing; I arranged a session with her and sent her an email stating my goals.
As a blackpool man I probably won't get to that age anyway. Hope you are safe over there accross the sands.
Think we should stop child benefit first. People don’t choose to grow old but they do choose to have children, why should this be funded by the state? £12.5billion encouraging people to have something they can’t afford.
Yes there needs to be a limit (as there currently is)but actually we all need other people’s children- to be our healthcare workers, cleaners, refuse collectors, supermarket workers, farmers etc. you name it, we need a constant stream of new people to perform those tasks for us and if they’re not home grown we will have to import them from abroad.
The state pension age will rise to 70 minimum because we won't have enough working age people paying tax to cover the pensions. At some point if we can't get enough workers, pension will also be means tested.
As people get older, health costs rise too. All this has to be covered by workers. There will also be more workers out of the workforce as they will be caring for the elderly.
This demographic time bomb affects every developed country.
Actually the system needs to encourage/support those who have kids as too few people do. We are suffering a demographic time bomb (or more mass immigration) unless we get the birth rate up. Kids are so expensive to bring up and look after (often long after 18 these days) that many working people just can't afford them. The people who really don't need help are professional couples without kids.
Started listening to this guy on his podcast, I have no idea about money matters in the main because I suffer from dyscalculia - but I have started talking to a financial advisor about an ISA, he has helped me get my pension in line and well i feel a lot better about stuff... so huge thank you
What about the millions over the years that never lived to claim their pension. ? We’re did that go
i have had enough of this country
Then go somewhere else.
@@TheReferrer72 why we didn't ruin it
@@TheReferrer72why won’t you eat cake when there’s no bread😂😂😂
you are free to leave if you want tho
It’s easy to leave. It’s right to stand up and demand improvement.
State pension make up 50% or more of peoples retirement. Im saving hard but without it im screwed tbh 😢
My state Pension is my only source of income, so you try living on £11K
@@iamrocketray I sympathise for you, but reality check; if you're on median income and pay rent, you're not left with much more than that haha (And you still have to somehow save for a home). If you're on minimum wage, you are left with much, much, much less than that. Ofcourse, if you have 11k and no home equity either then it is more difficult still.
@@iamrocketray You should be eligible for pension credit - talk to the CAB and check www.gov.uk/check-benefits-financial-support
I live in an area in the UK with a predominantly older population - This theoretical resentment from those who save vs people who don't is already being felt. Not via pensions, but through elderly care. The system effectively punishes those who save, as they have to liquidate all of their assets to pay for care services (many of which are both inadequate & extremely expensive). The same care is free for those under a certain savings threshold.
It's a great situation for the care providers who can employ cheap under-qualified labour. Then invoice the state with over-inflated costs.
Fingers crossed we can get it right for state pensions, but I wont be holding my breath.
You talk about the system like its not broken by design. Damien its a big club and neither you or I are in it.
This
Fundamentally it's a demographic problem I can't see what any government can do
I am in it.
The French wouldn't accept their pensions getting taken away. They would bring the country to a standstill. This affects everyone not just the ones nearing retirement. If they plan to remove pensions for the young they need to come up with a plan, and supplement their private pensions with additional contributions,
The French live in the delusions that there country isn't slowly going bankrupt.
You can't have it both ways. The tax burden in this country may be higher than it has been for many years but it's still far below France, Italy etc. particularly for the wealthy. The countries with better pension provision. So its a choice of higher taxes or poorer services and lower benefits.
@@David-bi6lf not far lower and they get better pensions.
We have been doing alot of rioting lately , imagine the carnage of this Nutjob plan . Taking pensions of people because they have worked TOO MUCH . Starmer & Reeves = Dumb & Dumber for even considering such a bonkers idea .
@@David-bi6lfthose countries don't promote private pensions and savings in the same way. Here the pension payout is lower but you get tax relief to incentivise you to save for your own retirement. That's with private pensions and ISAs
I’m in my early sixties now and have made my retirement plans based on getting the SP at 67. I’ve already paid 42 years contributions so I would be mightily annoyed if they means tested it and removed it because I have a private pension (also paid in for 42 years) - income is already taxed so the government will recoup money from people with private pensions. Despite what governments say, there is still massive waste in spending and they really should look at priorities and I’m certain they can find literally billions.
Stealing from pensioners isn’t the way forward and Labour will come to regret it.
Labour will not exist if they start robbing/taxing or axing state pensions.
@@CandyMan2001 I'll think about the holidays I didn't go on, the mobile phones and paid tv subscriptions I never had, the 2nd job I took to save for a deposit. I bought when avg house price was 3x average salaries. It's now 8.5x. But I started off paying 8% mortgage, paid 12% for a number of years and 15% briefly. I drove a 2nd hand Citroen 2CV6 that I paid £800 for, not a new car on lease. Could the younger generation cut their lifestyle and afford a house (I have 2 kids in there early 20's) ? It would help, probably wouldn't bridge the gap in all areas of the country, but it would in some. But back to that affordability point, supply needs to increase, successive governments need to stop inflating the demand side through incentive schemes and people need to spend less money on tat.
"Could the younger generation cut their lifestyle and afford a house" - not really no.
TLDR: Home buying for the generations below us is fucked.
Median Annual Salary Age 22-29, 2024 - £30,316 (Forbes) / £2064 per month after tax and auto-enrollment
Median House Price as of Jan 2024 - £282,000 (gov.uk)
Minimum deposit on Median House - 5% or £14,100
Average Rental Cost per month - £1,223 (Zoopla)
Leaving £841 left from salary. Minus council tax, groceries, energy, internet, insurance there's not much is left to save for the deposit.
But let's say they slog it and get together the deposit and house prices, somehow, haven't risen in the years it's taken, now comes the mortgage.
Affordability criteria. The median salary doesn't pay for the median house.
Rule of thumb - 4.5x salary = £136,442 (a delta of £145,58 so even a couple on the median won't afford the median home).
But somehow they find a provider for their mortgage despite that, repayments on the median home at 5% deposit, 30 years, 5.25% interest is a monthly mortgage payment of £1,479.35. Leaving just £584 per month for the essentials.
You had cheap housing, jobs with minimal competition and lucrative pension schemes, both private and public, so why is your retirement dictated by the state pension.
@@A_View_From_The_Shire said it’s part of the planning calculations. I’m sure that’s not so complicated to understand.
Hey Damo! You mentioned in the excellent podcast the other day that you live in Southport. After seeing the news, I hope you and your loved ones are safe amidst the madness 🙏🏽❤️
No government should be able to make big decisions like this without a referendum
Pensions are paid from current taxation so although it feels like you’re ‘paying in’ you’re really not. The main barrier to fixing it is that pension policy is super long term and super popular, yet governments only have 5 years before the next election. Touching pensions becomes toxic however unsustainable the path we are on.
Well, you can see how many NI years you have banked on your government portal.
Another thing to thank boomers for! They seem to have had life on easy mode lol
@@CandyKoRn Grow up!
@@mrmeldrew693 you sure can but that money was used to pay other people's pensions
Correct
The aim seems to be to remove National Insurance. The obvious next stage is to make the state pension means tested.
Means testing in practice will be hideous, imagine a 90 year old widow who lives alone suddenly having to complete extra paperwork to beg for the state pension, we can’t accept this.
It should kept universal, but funding issues addressed via higher wealth targeted taxation so rich people get the state pension but pay higher tax
rich people? those wont be a thing soon, theres only a 50% difference in earnings between the top 10% of pensioners and bottom 10% pensioners. every generation has less assets as they are spread among more people and inflation has stripped away the value of bank accounts.
Agreed on the means testing, but for people in 20's and 30's its pretty evident that we wont get a retirement. the state pay will be too low, we are unlikely to afford the hospice care and rents and will have to spend our lives doing shop checkout jobs, non physical non intellectual jobs, to make ends meet. the system is going to break and i hope the oldies have families that can take them in.
Family > government for care in old age.
Agree with pretty much everything you say, the economic situation with younger millennials and gen z is a paradigm shift in society, we are sleeping walking into the unknown
There are always going to be rich people, the problem is the middle classes are getting wiped out and the rich are getting insanely wealthy, which is why I advocate for higher wealth targeted taxation and be willing to pay more myself if meant the country worked better (at all)
The simple way would be to TAX pensions according to how wealthy they are, so a £millionaire would be taxed 100% and old joe who has no other income would be zero taxed, the rest taxed accordingly!
@@iamrocketray The bureaucracy of means testing would eat up most of the savings!
@@user-ug6ex5ug7s Which is why they are using things like pension credits for eligibility for Winter fuel payments. The paperwork/bureaucracy has been done already. Its also another reason they want to bring in digital ID/Passports so they can bring in ALL information about you to one place and build it up year by year. Fortunately for us all, that will also be expensive to implement and is probably the reason we don't have it already, BUT it will come eventually.
MPs pensions are untouchable. And the citizens of this country are under review and under threat. Why is that ? Answer: it’s them against all of us. Has it been any other way. Answer no.
At 53 If I get shafted after working from 16 at times 24 hours in a day and 7 day weeks and months without a day off and 36 years so far of NI contributions hell have no fury I will be absolutely livid! Building up a decent pension pot and should pay the mortgage off a big house by retirement so should be ok downsizing and enjoying it. If things change simple pack work in early spunk the money and join the rest of the country 😂
You’re not building a pension pot you’re paying for retired people now. It’s a Ponzi scheme
Me too. I've just paid nearly £2k to fill gaps in my NI record.
I can't see it happening any government means testing the OAP would be toast there would literally be civil disorder !
Come on guys! I'm slightly younger than yourselves but even I know the regime doesn't give two shiny shites about your work, life or who you are. They'll pay off the boomers before they leave this mortal coil, then have their fun making up numerous excuses as to why they can't pay Gen X and Millennials their pensions. And what's more, they'll happily clamp down on you with a giant boot.
Yeah now imagine being 23, don’t have a house, never will have a house, will rent and will always rent and will literally work until death.
I genuinely believe if they cant do anything then give it back and so i can sort something out myself
The triple lock was designed to allow the uk state pension to catch up with average European pension levels -once its caught up then it should be reconsidered
An excellent point.
A lot of of pensioners are paying tax on their pensions it’s criminal
State pension is not generous currently £200 a week. Look at cost of living pensioners struggling with heat or eat that's not a pension to be shouting about
People get confused by the state pension.
It's not a pot,never was. Its todays taxpayers pay pensions. Why do some not understand that when they get old that the then taxpayers will be paying for their pension.
Under no circumstance should the government cancel the pension.
I had the horrible misfortune of having to kick my 86 year old nan out her flat. Told her she’s lucky to have a pension and free bus pass….and to go live on a bus…thanks for your support Damien 👍
LOL
@@michaelhutchinson2854 you did the right thing
I was planning on retiring in about 20 months, at 58. Now I'm watching and waiting. My plans depended on a state pension kicking in at 67. If that goes, I'll need to work on.
I seriously doubt it will just disappear (certainly not for someone your age) but the rate at which it increases each year might change
You don't need to worry. It's people under 40 who need to be worried, especially those under 30. They're not changing anything for anyone past 50, it's rising to 68 for those under 47ish though.
I have always considered that it won’t be there for me. I’m an 85 baby and everything I saw my elders get is usually shut down or removed by the time I am old enough to have it.
On your day so Damo - I set up a SIPP and I just pay into that and have other plans for paying off the mortgage etc.
@@pierrelarouge Not our fault Mate! the government of the day in 1948 promised that they would take care of us cradle to the grave! and they charged us accordingly. We just are holding them to their promise!!!!!! If they want to change the rules they have to wait until we are DEAD!
It's exactly the same for us 70s babies. 60s babies probably still upset they lost their lovely mortgage tax relief in the 90s.
Your channel came up as a recommendation. A really good video.
I am a Waspi woman who has had her SPA increased twice.
The John Cridland Report recommended that for each year of pension age increase, there should be 10 years' notice. This would have been much fairer, as the ages did need to be equalised.
There is so much scaremongering going on at the moment.
There is no limit to how shameful the government can be. It's like they pride themselves in how low they can sink.
They just want your money, no offence
You will own nothing and you will be happy. You will pay off a mortgage half your life, only to slowly give the equity back to the banks so that you've got something miniscule to live off.
Did you even watch the video?
@@petershaw6727 I did. Did u?
@@mrlover4310 so how are they sinking so low?
Really good content! As a 50s man, i found your delivery superb! Thanks
Thank you!
Pensioners tend to spend locally and you never touched on the effect the spending of the pensioners pound has on the local economy. Also consider some of this money is gifted to grandkids who in turn soend locally. If this money disappears it will devastate local shops incomes.
There's a massive difference between state pension amounts and average wages!
My generation have been fearing this for over 25 years (I am a 1975 vintage, for context).
Might as well face it. We've been effed.
@@mightymike2192effed by decades of increasing national debt. it was never sustainable, but successive governments keep kicking the can down the road. at least Labour are trying to deal with issues
@glennthompson1971 don't give them too much credit..they could have sorted it last time. If not, why didn't they? I'm politically agnostic.
I would be more worried about how Hunt was saying wanted to abolish National Insurance. Well as eligibility for State Pension was based on having National Insurance Stamps then surely that is a remove the state pension.
20-30 years ago mother worked at a pensions place and her boss was saying whilst won’t disappear it will become a smaller proportion of people’s income.
Great video mate, the IFS usually get it right.
As for Labour, if they try to means test the state pension they would
never get into number ten ever again
Also after all life time of contributions to end up getting robbed would cause
major problems going forward.
BIG MISTAKE!!
I always get confused between the IFS and IEA who are right wing shills
This has nothing to do with the current government.
Mainly from the crippling of the previous…
@@m4son5ee Yes, I understand that but Labour will ultimately pay the price .
The CON servitives , have loaded the gun so to speak but it’s Labour who look like are going to
fire it.
You can’t get convicted for loading a gun but you can if you fire it, if you get my drift.
Years and years of woeful Government have ruined our fine Country and now they want to rob people
who have worked so very hard all their lives to put in place a nest egg for some sort of security in their old age.
As I stated BIG MISTAKE!!
That would be theft
They could get away with abolishing the triple lock. But any party that starts to mean-tests the state pension will never get anywhere near power again.
Definitely. Time to swap the older voters for younger ones
@@arp_909 About 38% of the entire population is currently over 50. 21% are under 18. That leaves 41% who are 18-50. In the future, there will be more older voters not less. So the people most worried about pensions are almost half the people with the right to vote and are by far the most reliable voters, so are already majority in terms of actual voters. Reasonable changes to the state pension might get through - making it means tested won't.
Really? You think “no state pension for anyone with pension income over £250k/year or assets over £15m” would be an unpopular policy with the vast majority people? What I see is people love the idea of “others” / “the rich” paying more tax. Means testing could start out only impacting a few hundred people… then they will gradually bring the thresholds down, so only small number of voters get hit each time. They are crafty like that, but I’m still worried. IFS might be against it, but I can see it being done. They already started means testing the £400 winter fuel allowance. That’s effectively just an additional state pension, and now it’s means tested.
@@andymcnish These percentages are why the state pension will get increasingly less sustainable. A smaller population of workers paying more and more for a larger population of pensioners, it just doesn't work. Means testing need not impact the majority, but I do see the point that we have some pensioners with sufficient savings to pay for themselves, sitting in houses worth 7-figures that cost 5-figures when they bought them, getting supported by young people today (through tax) who earn a pittance and have no hope of ever dreaming of living in one of those same houses. It just doesn't seem right.
You can't live off your house you may have a house but not much income.
I’ve been told since I was about 12 that I’ll probably never get a state pension, might of been slightly tongue in cheek but I always just assumed I’d never get it
The triple lock has to go. The IFS proposal sounds much more sustainable
Yes I would prefer that that taking if off people.
I would be in favour of that IF our state Pension was set at minimum wage, but its not, at present its approx £11K, Could you live on that?
@@iamrocketray people earning minimum wage have to pay council tax and rent. Pensioners get credit and housing benefit for these.
@@AgileSnowWeasel Only those on Pension Credits or those who have been means tested and found to be below a certain threshold!
Been paying NI for 30 years and plan to work for 15 more. I want my state pension when I retire! Even 3rd world countries have pensions for their people.
taxed on the way in taxed on the way out brings a hole new meaning to death and taxes
Private pension contributions are not taxed, state pension is someone else's money.
@@JevansUK yes thats the problem poor remain poor when paying into ns when others are not and benefitting from the payer
Invest in a SIPP and get tax relief. Easy.
It's true what they say, there's only two certainties in life, DEATH AND TAXES.
You can guarantee that politicians won't be cutting their pensions
The prob with the uk is state pension is not invested but paid out, so when we get more old than young, not enough is paid in.
I should be given the option to not pay NI and therefore withdraw from state pension and NHS.
I'd much prefer to put that money towards private health care whilst relying on my private pensions.
This was my take on it 40 years ago lol.
And still is.
Not up to us though unfortunately.
Hope you're earning some serious money when you hit retirement then given that's where 50% of the NHS budget goes. Guess you'll enjoy forking out 15000 for a new hip?
@FlyingFun.
Unfortunately not.
That’s how tax work though, your money goes onto things that you don’t use
Take education for example, why should I pay for it if I don’t have kids myself? Well I should because I’d rather live in a country where people are educated than somewhere full of ignorant people
@JoeHardacre
By the way my father is 72.
He's worked since the age of 16.
He's needed a new knee for the last 3 years and still no sign of an operation and he's in some real pain so yes, fuck the NHS in my retirement.
IMO means testing wouldn't work because people would just spend their personal pension until it got below the means testing threshold.
Renewed triple lock, take the 3 indicators, but instead of picking the highest, pick the average of the 3. dead simple
Why bother? Tie it to wage growth and be done with it, get everyone on the same page -> wage growth benefits all.
@Michael-wn3rn you would need to make it proportional to working population size to make it sustainable.
Contributions to it should be made proportional to projected working population for your retirement age.
I'd tie it to inflation. You need the money to buy things. If wage earners do better then good for them but it doesn't stop you buying what you need.
@@Michael-wn3rnfixed percentage of GDP in the budget, whether or not that is up or down. Any other way is unsustainable
@@Jon-ov4nc I'd agree with this. As pensioners make up more of the population they get less each, and to get more they'd have to cut the NIMBY shit and let the country build and grow. GDP grows -> their pension grows.
I’m 51 with a current “retirement” age of 67. I came to terms several years ago that I won’t get any state pension!!
We wil never have the same prosperity that our parents enjoyed. The drawbridges are being lifted, one by one.
Because the world has changed. It ain't changing back. Our parents grew up in a world where Western nations, even after the second WW, were light-years ahead of the rest of the world technologically whilst also benefitting from a post-war demographic pyramid that was hugely advantageous to the boomer generation. This resulted in huge economic and productivity gains, coupled with technological and medical advancements. They also benefitted from a much larger share of world GDP relative to population. The equation has completely changed over the last 30 - 40 years.
Love the push to top up NI contributions only to have the state pension means tested- genius
wow 1200 people watched this in 3 hours. way to go Damo :) Must be something about your content that draws us in lol. Nice one dude keep up the good work.
We have the highest G.D.P. in Europe, the highest retirement age and the lowest state pension in Europe. Now labour are planning to scrap it.
These people that insist on means testing are laughable - no doubt most of them sitting on their backsides for the last 40 years taking state benefits, not contributing NI and just expect a handout as usual. For those of us that have worked hard, been successful and contributed get nothing - the price of working hard and being successful.
If they did this, people would hit the streets like the poll tax!
Balanced, well researched and reasoned content. Thanks so much, Damien. This is really reassuring.
They thought they could poll tax every house hold too. But thr people soon put a stop to that. The aging population has paid into their pension accounts. End of story.
Yeah . People will just stop working if you get screwed over for doing so.
Looking good mate. Glad to see you're recovering well 👍
Great video, but some means testing still may be possible at a very high level of pension earnings, where people would not think why should I bother.
Here's hoping more people stumble across your insightful videos, the regular scaremongering from the mainstream news channels helps no one!
Australia's system does make means testing more viable, but some differences to the UK need to be noted. In Australia you dont pay National Insurance, and when you access your private pension ( super) above the age of 60, it is tax free. In Australia though you dont get tax relief on any pension contributions that you make. For many that I know the big appeal of the Australian system is that income is tax free when you drawdown on your account.
Superannuation contributions are taxed at 15%. Most people sit in the 30%ish bracket so you save immediately
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Tying it to median earnings introduces an interesting motivation. To get more out of the state pension, you want median earnings to go up. Earnings has lagged behind inflation for quite a while, but is, for most people, a big part of what a healthy economy is, so this should make life better for working people too. I like the sound of this.
We never complained when our taxes were used to pay for our grandparents and our parents state pensions.
That's because there were fewer of them, therefore more affordable. Just look at Japan to get an idea of where the UK is headed.
@@leematthews6812
That isn’t why. We didn’t complain because looking after our elderly is a benchmark of a civil society. It’s still one of the lowest in Europe and we can still find money for Ukraine, for overseas aid, for overseas climate, for a 25% pay rise for junior doctors, for hotels and benefits for people who have never lived here or paid in.
We should increase NHS payments rather than reduce them, it’s only a few pounds overall but billions as a collective fund.
Excellent explanation Damien, something you didn’t mention though was what happens if/when life expectancy falls (as I believe is the case currently in the UK). By any logic the SPA should fall in line with it…….but we know that’s not going to happen
I believe the recent fall is mostly link to Covid and that next batch of data will show it rising again.
With new treatments for obesity, ones that actually work, I expect we will see over the next 20 years a real rise in life expectancy.
Life expectancy needs to fall, desparately
The scheme was set up when life expectancy was ~70. retirement at 65 so they got 5 years of pension on average (women didn't work so 10 years of pension per person to be paid.)
Now people retirement starts at 68 but life expectancy is 80. (thus 12 years of pension). the costs to NHS for the 10 years 70-80 is astronomical compared to 60-70.
The average length on pension has increased, the costs of old age health has increased, the number of children to fund the pension has decreased. the maths doesn't stack.
All contracts are enforceable in Law and the State Pension is clearly a contract.
@DavidUKesb And laws are made and unmade by Governments who will have no qualms about changing the law to enable them to get rid of the State Pension. 🤔
Bacause of the Auto enrolment of Pensions by 2050 Pension benefits will be dramatically reduced as most pensions will have a work place pension that will top up their pension to over the minimum needed to live. I also think withing the next 10 years the Tripple lock will be replaced by a Double lock, & will be 2.5% or inflation not wages grouth.
That was a very good presentation Damien. I’ve watched several analyses of the UK State Pension problem, and yours is the clearest and most sensible. Bravo.
The problem with asking people of working age to fund retired people is it only works while there's some level of parity between those two groups.
Currently there are more retired people than this country has ever had before and at the same time fewer working age people than ever before. This means the burden on each working age person is higher than ever
Funny how the State pension is unaffordable but never a mention of the Gold plated Civil service pensions. Funny that Eh .
@@stuartregan1627 they are unaffordable, which is why they've gone through significant overhauls multiple times in the past decades. The NHS pension has changed 3 times since 1995 and the current scheme isn't even half what the old one used to be.
Private pensions from that time are also incredibly generous - when I worked at Zurich every week someone was retiring on a full salary pension at 60, after about 20 years service. Safe to say my scheme wasn't close to that.
Has anyone ever spotted an MP queueing outside a foodbank or soup kitchen!
@@JoeHardacre Defined benefits pensions dont happen in any other industry. Do Public pensions retirees still get 3 x salary at retirement along with a index linked gold plated pension ?
@@stuartregan1627 NHS workers certainly don't, no idea about others as I don't work in those areas
I'm happy to not pay a chunk of NI, like you said i'd stick it in my portfolio, compound it and make far far more than what I'd get from the government 3 decades from now. The problem is I'm 34 and there's alot of elderly people that rely on my wages for their retirement, so we can't just scrap it right here right now.
Some of working in public services have seen no wage rises for about 15 years. No money left for saving or additional pension. I will end up with bugger all due to austerity policies... I am not the only one.
I have said for at least 15 years that you need to understand that pensions of ANY type will never pay out enough when you get to pension age. The math just does not work, save/buy into other things.
British pensioners are some of the poorest in Europe. Triple lock is not too generous.
Likelihood is that the UK state pension age will rise to 70 or 71 by 2050 to ensure its sustainability. Given how the fuel duty freeze has become politically untouchable the triple lock UK state pension is likely here for the foreseeable future with the affordability of the system achieved by increasing the retirement age.
@DamienTalksMoney You need to understand the full history of the triple lock. Go and do some research on how Thatcher killed indexation, how many pensioners fell into poverty, and how the falling state pension needed to be fixed. The triple-lock was only ever intended to be a temporary scheme where it would bring the state pension back to a livable income over a number of years. Once it was there, it should be abolished. The problem is the lack of a debate on what that level should be. The IFS proposal addresses this, but we cannot have a debate about the triple-lock in absence of the history or it will cause outrage. Never **** off the pensioners - they will vote you out.
Why do you think Labour want 16 year olds to have the vote.
There’s some research on the number of Labour voters that say Labour voters once they’ve won the lottery. It’s something like 100% stop voting Labour.
Don't most lottery winners eventually go broke tho?
The idea of the state pension was something extremely unique in human history - it was never really costed to work on a long term basis like this
It's been going for nearly 80 years, 25 of which I've been paying in to cover other peoples payment.
I don't care if it wasn't "costed" if they rug pull this away from us there will be riots.
Really enjoying your pension and retirement videos atm. Some good info there. Please could you do some videos on the Australian superannuation and Canadian Pension plan, and if we could incorporate any of those systems into our pension schemes? Canada pension fund is essentially a nationwide defined benefit scheme funded with taxation and they invest directly in companies like Octopus energy and national lottery. Having a system like this would definitely unlock more investment in the UK and stop private equity from buying all our companies.
Maybe don't give the public sector 20% pay rises which are accompanied by larger pensions
I'm 31 and have always just assumed I wouldn't get a state pension.
20 years older than you and always thought the same. generation above me were last to really get pensions
I like and understand the IFS solution but also Damien's SIPP from birth idea also makes brilliant sense.
It's just like the tax bands.. do well, pay more, then those people just over the threshold gets unfairly treated. And this is why I stay away from a SIPP, they just keep moving the goal post. I'll decide when I want to retire, not gov.
Also it is means tested today - if you have a private pension you pay tax on it when you get it - that’s the same effect as means testing
Labour are the party of those on benefits and the ultra rich.
Middle class are getting gaslit that we’re the undeserved wealthy… while we’re the salaried workers putting in the graft and bankrolling all the tax.
(And yes, Tories were pretty much as bad).
This.
Two cheeks of the same arse. Same corporations backing them, same old corrupt scum pulling their strings. When will people ever learn?
@@philipcrossley1279 Maybe, but the higher echelons of society carry enough influence and resource to avoid taxes and the poorest have nothing to give. It's a fact that the middle classes pay more tax as a percentage.
@@travellingtom6091 Yes, so tax avoidance by the rich has to be dealt with. Thousands of people in the civil service are hired to claw back tiny overpayments, mistakes, and those few committing fraud, very few are hired to look into those avoiding millions.
Great video. You’re doing a real service, going through a big report and breaking it down. Really clear and in more detail than I’d read in the FT or the Economist.
Thank you so much! Lovely feedback and great to be compared to such big organisations
why do we need all the money for weapons and war but its always the pension gets cut!
Because if you don't have defence then everything becomes inconsequential.
You know it will be more expensive in the long run if Ukraine falls? You do know that right?
You know why . Billions of pounds to be made out of arms sales .
Charles Ponzi would be jealous of the UK state pension
Tax the super rich rather than robbing normal people of their pensions
And they move abroad 👏
Good luck with that they would just up sticks.
Cant move your assets abroad, like house, warehouses football clubs where they get there income from 🙈
@@LonglongMan-pp7uq But if they are not paying their share of tax..bye!
@@graham1706foreign company owns the club. Taxes not paid here. Or they take out a huge loan on the UK company, that loan goes abroad into their coffers and the UK company never makes a profit.
A pension where the rules are constantly changing to shaft you is not a good scheme.