Robert Dyson

Paul is more right than wrong. Countries have been built on the concept of ever-expanding economies, which means people coming in at the bottom to do the shitty jobs to get on the ladder. Your Mexicans propping up the southern United States, your Germany's allowing in a million Syrians because they had a deficit of a million immigrants to do the bottom level jobs at low wages. What happens when those jobs start disappearing and companies realise they cannot rely on a 7% profit every year to pay to shareholders as dividends...all the efficiencies will be technology-based with fewer top level workers required to provide the creativity but less of the grunt? So Governments get lumbered with a growing number of people with nothing useful to do and nowhere to earn, as we currently understand being "useful". Maybe there will be a need for Governments to provide jobs at universal income levels to look after society, while society looks after itself. The climate change and sustainability requirements are going to drive a lot of this. Donut economics is a good place to start...Amsterdam are looking at basing their post-covid economic model around this.

you are right in so far as that is the information available and that is what people have been led to believe. In reality State Pensions have always been made up of NI contributions and "other contributions" from general taxation, but they have never produced the figures For a pensioner to obtain their state pension, the amount you get is based on contributory years to NI. It doesn't mean that your pension is entirely comprised of just what's in the NI pot. With wage suppression and lower NI contributions, plus historically low interest rates...the Government's own investment of the NI fund is coming up short. So they either need to raise NI, raise taxes, pay you less, or pay you later.

Exactly. Also with defined benefit schemes in the UK where you co-contribute with the employer...you know what you're entitled to upon retirement and your scheme owes you that benefit.. The trouble is, during the 90's where staff continued to pay in their 6% or whatever, employers took secret "payment holidays" from their own contributions because they calculated that with high interest rates, any shortfall they made on employer contributions would be more than replaced by compound interest over the years. It was working really well until interest rates hit the floor...the pots are now not big enough to cover the outgoings, and the employer has spent the contributions long ago and cannot make up the shortfall....so where are they going to look for more money? It is another reason for having externally managed superannuation schemes where your employer is obliged by law to pay money into a fund for you. They cannot shirk, and they cannot grab the money back.

We did our financial review this week and afterwards the bloke emailed and said he forgot to ask if we wanted to look at bringing retirement forward, given what's gone on. I said no, but get us some figures anyway just to have a look. Obviously can't touch super until 60 anyway and UK pension comes 7 years after that.

you actually said they don't "give a shit where it evolves from", but you then completely ignored the important posts detailing that the UK has the worst state pensions in the developed world. Have you ever considered that the two may be related and perhaps promoting a more thoughtful input might encourage people to improve their outcomes ?

It's an interesting conundrum. Does society need to force old people out to make room at the bottom for younger people to enter the workforce? Young workers are the lifeblood of the tax system to keep paying in to fund services, including pensions and healthcare. If they don't get on the career path are they ever going to reach the level required to earn high wages and provide higher tax receipts? Do aged workers need to have special dispensation and priority for part-time jobs to make them leave full-time work? Do we need to create an economy of jobs for the elderly? An example of buggering that up is China and the inexplicably slow realisation that the 1 child policy has created a gigantic problem in that there are simply not enough workers to provide the tax receipts to cover the aged welfare system. After 35 years of a 1 child policy, it became a 2 child policy in 2015, and now there is a 3 child policy to desperately try and fill this looming gap in the workforce required to keep funduing the state. A required baby boom and trebling of the workforce. Their pension, the biggest in the world, is projected to run out in 2035 and runs over a 100 billlion dollar deficit today, and how big will it grow ever single day as oldies keep hitting pension age and there is less and less money coming in to fund it? The other thing is that in a technology driven world, some countries (like China, Korea etc) have a pretty consistent policy of not hiring people over 35 for tech jobs, because anybody older is not going to be educated enough to have kept up with the rapid rate of change. On the other hand, they may need to keep older people working longer? So what do they do? They may be forced into making people work until they die because they will have no pension to give them, or start cutting healthcare funds and accepting that people will die earlier.

It does show how tricky it is to get into the right mindset before you're too old for it to make a difference. As i've admitted before, I had precious little knowledge in the UK except for my defined contribution statement every year with a rough estimate of what would happen at 65...40 years in the future....nothing else useful. Just a simple Google search for Superannuation Australia compared to Superannuation UK, or Pension UK shows the vast difference in available information.

35% do, over 18million people.

Just two comments on the bold. Super Funds have been compulsory for Australian workers since 1992 with minimum contributions payable by an employer + salary sacrifice, so obviously people are less interested in state pensions over here because everybody has an alternative. You said that as long as old UK people can get a cup of tea and a cake from M&S they were happy, which was pretty flippant for a place where 35% rely on the state pension and are uneducated about the need for anyhting else, so disinterested and disempowered is a fair description. Super funds rose around 20-25% last year, the highest rise in many decades which has produced trillions of dollars for super funds around the world. The last few months have been static, but growth is always going to slow down for a perhaps considerable period now that Government's will switch off covid stimulus funding and start grabbing it back.

As Marisa says, some pay in a lot more and can quantify it, so the people can check their return and work out the best deal. The Dutch pay in around 18% to the state pension, and they can hold a private defined contribution fund as well, AND hold a compulsory defined benefit scheme through some employer types a bit like Australia has. They have the choice and options freely available to mix and match to get the best deal. Best pensions in the world.

This answer is nearly identical to your previous post and adds no new information, but is another perfect illustration of the problem. You refer to people with intriguing minds as "anoraks" and seem to infer that they are the exception to the norm, when there are more and more pensioners being forced into poverty. It is a very careless attitude that needs to change. https://www.npcuk.org/post/pensions-crisis-looming-for-millenials-if-the-uk-state-pension-is-not-reformed-and-improved

Exactly, you're describing a disinterested, disempowered population who just want money handing to them. If they don't know where it's coming from, they don't have the information to know if they're getting shortchanged, so they just blame the government for everything.

Because in the UK we don't any questions where they actually got their money from, including theft of state assets. Even a 33% reduction is better than getting put in the Gulag or Putin making you an offer you cannot refuse. https://www.cityam.com/top-official-warns-of-disturbing-amount-of-russian-money-laundering-in-uk/ https://www.transparency.org.uk/russia report money laundering professional enablers national security

Self-managed super isn't for amateurs, the ones i know don't actually manage the investments themselves but they use it to leverage better returns....they still pay an adviser to do the paperwork and advise them. They have the choice to take risks and include whatever vehicles they want inside their funds. Personally I would not do it either, but it gives people choice of their own futures. I think the problems with the UK are that they cannot tell you how much they have in the "pension pot", because they do not have one. They have a series of "owings" and supplement it from time to time with changes and grabbing money from Peter to pay Paul. You have a mixture of funded (council) and unfunded (police, politicians) public and private sector schemes, on top of the state pension. The last reforms have changed the value of future state pensions and the years have gone from 30 to 35 to get the "full pension", plus they have obviously raised the age from 65 to 67 with future changes to come, affecting mostly women who were traditionally disadvantaged from having lower paid jobs and from taking breaks to have children, and were less likely to have private pensions anyway. The value of what used to be classed "a year's contributions" based on weekly input payments now equates into a years payments of something like 93% of what you used to get before they changed the rules, so you need them to tell you how much more you need to pay to get the full pension, and it takes months and months for a response, and months and months for a contribution to show up. It's archaic. What could be simplier than a personal bank-type account that collects your employer and personal contributions in one place, shows you clearly the tax incentives of savings, gives you predictions and scenarios illustrated with living standards, allows you to take complete control over what you're getting, allows you to move your money to a better performing fund at the click of a mouse, and tells you what your actual account balance is each day? Some UK unfunded schemes need 6 months to tell you what the value of your personal scheme actually is if you wanted to cash out, and another 6 months to actually action the transfer. They don't like doing that because if everybody had the choice and was educated enough to know the difference between a 6% and an 8% return over 25 years.....some of these funds would collapse overnight as they would be emptied. I have to say, i knew next to nothing about pensions before i came here, most of my mates in England have no idea what they're going to do in retirement because they never think about it, and there's precious little information or publicity to encourage them to do differently. This in turn leads to the attitude where people put the blame on the Government if they don't think they have enough money to retire on. You just don't hear that over here because everyone has a boatload of information at their fingertips so have nobody else to complain about.

The UK system is incredibly confusing and nonsensical. It's not a welfare benefit because it's not means tested and is allegedly paid for by contributions, and will continue until you die whether you need the pension or not. It IS also an insurance scheme paid out of NI contributions, because you can make additional NI contributions today and watch your future entitlements rise accordingly (It's also supplemented by input from taxation). The main trouble with the confusion from citizens as Marisawright says, is that it leads to many different opinions and entitlement beliefs....right up to the point where if people do not enjoy the standard of living they think they're entitled to, they blame it on the Government? This is mainly to do with the lack of available information in the UK system for people to take control of their own finances and work out for themselves using solid background information. The UK system is light years behind Australia and the first step would be for the UK Government to produce masses of honest information to really encourage the people to learn from a very early age how their lives are likely to pan out if they don't pay attention. They promised reforms years ago but they move at a glacial speed. The reforms can only affect people going forward and shouldn't be retrospective, so the longer they leave it the longer the ignorance will continue.

Just been a big story about it on 7.30. Sounds like another mess

our friends did something similar...the parents went to the GC first (from Little Bay in Sydney which was astronomically expensive) and left their daughter and partner renting down there. The parents rented in GC and sussed the place out, decided they were staying and purchased a house under construction just inland in a new suburb. The daughter came to visit and signed up for a house and land package in the next street....then they all moved into house 1 while waiting for house 2 to be built. The 4 bed townhouse they were initially renting in Little Bay was priced at about $2.9 million, they ended up with two brand new 4 bed houses with pools for less than 1.3mill. The daughter has two kids now, so she and her partner work and the grandparents babysit and work part time, which was never going to be possible in Sydney

Apparently they're priceless, because you can't find any.

I guess in the 1960's there was not much red tape anywhere and far less travel anyway, but a continent recovering from war was very different to the technology-driven society of today. ....it is vastly superior for every single demographic, but far more complex and organised. There is less red tape providing you buy into the systems that prevent the red tape. The UK is still part of Europe even if it isn't in the EU, but the people need to pay for their own personal rights and deal with elongated permission systems some of which will be based on personal assessment and judgement, rather than those rights being applied naturally as a citizen of an EU member state.

True. That's the worry about moving to a coastal town and especially a new estate..unless you pay top dollar to get in the middle you might be further away from the social life and still a car trip away from the beach. I went to a mate's house in Sawtell, just south of Coffs. Beautiful, new estate, very scenic and quiet...but it's not even in Sawtell, let alone Coffs. I reckon i'd last 6 months before going stir crazy. I saw something on here about Redcliffe/Margate/Scarborough the other day, on the coast 1 hour out from Brisbane and on a trainline, seems laidback but busy enough not to feel cut off from life, you can live there and avoid all that M1 commuter traffic going up and down, but still jump on a flight in 45 mins.

I've never understood why there are so many channels, surely living in an outdoor country and viewer competition ought to have killed some off? Some of the programmes are so bad it's almost as they're setup just to show the adverts.....like that one with all the drink drivers undergoing breath tests, they must have 7 advert breaks in 30 minutes. I've always liked the idea of who named Channel 7TWO however. They must have thought "that is a really crap name, we must do better with the next channel. How about 7MATE. Yeah, that's perfect.

I think in Australia the housing market has been ridiculous and given people the opportunity to cash in, maybe knock a few years off their working life. In ACT houses have been earning more per day than the people who live in them, rising something like 40% in 18 months. I don't think it can possibly last, so maybe it's a chance to get out at the top before it falls back.

It is dreadful stuff. You want to watch some of these Channel 7 game shows they put on, we've treated them as comedy shows and howled through them. We watched something earlier in the year called Ultimate Tag...basically a game of tig but they gave people costumes and names like Arrow, and Dominator.... A pandemic audience of about 100 people, and canned cheering being played over the top even though you see the audience was bored stiff. It was so funny, but disappeared after a few shows never to be seen again. The UK-imported drama shows are very good, but you can probably get them a lot earlier elsewhere. To be honest, I watch Sky News UK over Youtube more than anything, Sky News Australia is absolute garbage and full of dross

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-24/the-great-resignation-post-pandemic-work-life-balance/100478866 Interesting effect that may be on the horizon. Will create enormous churn in the job market worldwide, and changes in employment, potentially letting a lot of younger and more junior staff into jobs that wouldn't have been available previously. There still appears to be enormous uncertainty over the future..long leases on buildings that some companies no longer want, but a political desire to see people back in a centralised workplace because Governments have just spent 50 years building city centre economies with hundreds of thousands of supply chain jobs, hotels, restaurants, shopping and entertainment utterly dependent on servicing a daily workforce who may not be there in future, and definitely wouldn't be there if they weren't forced to work there.

you could do some time in a cheap country with cheap rentals and living costs like Thailand or the UK on tourist visas, then less in Canada and Australia. Just keep going round the world following the weather.