Pension grumble

I'm going to have a Google later and try to see how it affects me, already in receipt of full government pension plus earnings related etc.
At 65+ I wonder how the new changes will work.

I'm feeling fed up to think that I will not be able to retire until I am 67 at the very least. By the time I reach that age no doubt it will have gone up to 70 or beyond !

I don't feel confident that if you paid into the Pension top up you would actually get it, after all I paid in for many many years, expecting to retire at 60 only to find it had been pushed out to 64 and 3 months. So 4 years of pension lost! I am just so cross (in case you couldn't tell)...

I send heartfelt commiserations to all of you who are caught in this trap. No private pension scheme would be allowed to get away with taking your subs under false pretenses.

I was lucky to get my pension at 60. I am now 67 and if the pension age had been higher I would have spent the last few years battling with the benefits system as I would not have been well enough to work any longer and would have needed to be in some sort of sick pay.

This is going to be a problem for a lot of people around my age Luckygirl I have worked full time from being 16. I did not have the luxury of taking time off to enjoy being a full time mother. At 53 I am quite frankly fed up and cannot visualise working for another 15 or more years ahead.

I am amazed that more people are not going to work with Zimmer frames. I think it is disgraceful the way that the age has been moved from 60 to just under 65. That is a long time at our age.

I saw today on the news that to get an extra £25 a week pension I would have to pay in around £22,000+. Maybe slightly less as I am in my early 70's but how many people have that amount of money to give to the Government and it is sod's law that I would die within a year thus losing the lot. Rant over.

I know the feeling I am one of the many who eventually get their pension at 62 and 11 months in January- I suppose I should be grateful The idea of giving the government another £22,500 to give me £25 per week doesn't look very attractive - rather spend it on something nice.

I had assumed I would get my pension at 60, but then it was put back to 62 years and 8 months and then put back AGAIN to 64 years and 11 months.
I am in a group of women born in 1953 who had their dates changed TWICE!
This is the ultimate p***take!

I am in that group too granoftwins. I can't help feeling that no other company/department could get away with withholding £24,000 that you are entitled to! I was also amazed to see that someone born two months earlier than me gets their pension a whole year earlier! It seems this was done in a rush and not thought through properly at all.
I too would be hard pressed to find another job due to ill health.

We can't even go for this if born after April 1953, as it's assumed we'll get the full Universal Pension of £150 odd that comes in next year. Most of us won't - if we opted out at any time, as we were encouraged to do, none of those years will count, as we paid slightly less national insurance then. I had one of my schemes embezzled by the trustees, so will receive nothing at all for the years I paid into that. And now I feel that the powers that be have embezzled another 6 years, seeing as I am now nearly 61, with 41 years contributions, but won't get my state pension, or even my goddamn bus pass, till I'm 66.

Charley the age has risen again to 66 - I know as I get mine a month before my 66th birthday!

The Women Against State Pension Inequality group are fighting our corner, and getting a lot of media attention.

m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=877054125688402&_rdr

Y'all power to their elbow, I say.

Y'all?? Where did that come from?

Riverwalk my apologies, I must have blinked, not noticing that the age has risen yet again. One would not mind if you were aged maybe 30 years and this was foisted on you- at least you would have the years ahead to try and work something out but my heart goes out to you having to work until you are almost 66.

Whoever thought this shambles through (or not) has never worked and will be able to rely on daddy leaving enough money for him to retire at maybe 40 years of age.

Who has a spare £22.000 to increase their state pension? Those who will retire or have retired on a huge fat company pension . Once again it's all for the rich to get richer and the less well off to get poorer .Anyway who knows I'm sure that if I did have spare money I would drop dead the moment I've done it ! So noGeorge you are not having any of my well earned cash .

When the new state pension comes in next April, those receiving it will receive a much higher basic rate than those already in receipt of it - something like £150 per week compared to about £115 approximately.

Presumably this is to compensate those who have had to wait longer and pay more NI before getting their pensions.

So asking existing retirees to pay more to top up their pensions to the new level seems fair to me, because they got their pensions at an earlier age. There will still be the minimum income guarantee for people whose income is below the new basic state pension.

I am not sure how much I paid in the old 'Graduated Pension' contributions over the years (it seemed like an awful lot at the time) but I now get an extra £2.39 per week on my State Pension, which is not the full amount as I only paid in 34 years not 39 years.

I can sympathise with those caught in this.

I'm another who expected my pension at 60 then it was raised to 64 and now it is at almost 66. It makes me sick to think of all the thousands I am missing out on. My husband retired two years ago but as I am only 61, I still have to wait another 4+ years. We had thought we would retire together.

I am not really defending this because I think women have been treated particularly badly; not because the age did not have to go up but because they knew this was going to happen for such a long time and could have smoothed it out a lot more but ...

If you had paid into a private pension - unless you were in a defined benefit one - things would work in much the same way. As the actuaries saw the life expectation going up the pension offered in one year would go down from previous years offers even though the pot of money was the same. Because the state pension needs to pay enough for those whose only pension it is to live on (just) they did not have the choice of reducing it so they started it later making the savings from the years not paid to pay out as lives go on for longer. Not brilliant but no different to private pensions other than it protects a minimum amount.

I think what would have been fairer would have been to give people a choice - work for longer and get a higher pension, or retire early and take a lower pension. It could have been incentivised so people chose to work for longer. The women affected had no choice.

This was in fact the case under the existing system - we had the choice of taking the State Pension at the pension age, or deferring it and getting a bigger pension in return.

Yes, that would have been a good idea janea

We think we are paying in for our pensions into a pension pot, but it is paid out of present taxation.
And apparently many of us are living longer.

Hi-just thought id share my thoughts for this thread. I was born in may 1954 so my pension age is now 66.5.
I first learnt that my pension age would change some years ago. My new retirement age was to be 62. I wasn't happy as I had hoped to retire at 60 as many of my peers were. My understanding of the situation was that this was an EU directive to begin to harmonise retirement age across Europe and between men and women. I lived with this for some time and became resigned to it. Then came another body blow. The new coalition government decided to escalate the harmonisation. My new retirement age became 66.5. I estimated I had lost somewhere in the region of £37 thousand pounds in lost pension payments. Not only that, the various perks of being in receipt of a state pension are also denied-a prime example is the free bus pass, winter fuel allowance etc
Again, I resigned myself to waiting even longer. But then came the really cruel blow. After asking for a forecast, and having far more qualifying years than actually needed, I found that my basic state pension was not the promised £150 or so. In fact, it would be just under £60 based on the new rules. Because of the transitional arrangements, I was quoted two amounts. The one based on the new rules and one based on the old. On the old rules, I will get £119. This is because I was contracted out for most of my working life. I had no choice about being contracted out. When I first started work , I worked for what was the DHSS. Then I went into nursing. There was no discussion on contracting out and what this may mean. This was what happened.
Had I been paying into a private scheme and so badly informed and treated, I could make a complaint. But there is no one to complain to when it's the state pension. My own MP voted for the changes, many mp's just shrug their shoulders and many younger people are unsympathetic as they have their own issues. But I do feel that the particular cohort of women I am part of have been harshly treated. The changes were to quick, poorly advertised and unduly harsh. And how many (not just women) understand how being contracted out could affect your state pension? How many people are blindly expecting to get the flat rate? I do believe that when the ones about to retire on the flat rate pension realise that they may not get the flat rate there will be an uproar.
Again, I have become resigned to what it to be. I can't change it. No one asked me what I thought about it. Public opinion is not sympathetic-I'm just another moaning woman whinging about being treated equally with a man for a change. The government are definitely not sympathetic. Decisions have been made and there no going back.
so hey, I'm done. just wanted to get that off my chest.

No, janea, we won't all get £150, as joolz above highlights and I said earlier. A lot of people think they will, but really need to get pension forecasts, or could be in for a nasty shock. Apparently fewer than half the population will get the full amount of the "universal" pension.

Like joolz, I more than qualify for a full pension under the old rules - £116 - with 41 years of NI contributions (you only need 30 for a full pension). But under the new rules, any contracted out years just don't count because we paid NI at a slightly lower rate during that time (this doesn't apply under the old scheme, so how were we to know it would now?). Under the new system, my forecast is for just over £90. So no, there is no compensation for missing out on 6 years of pension. And the fact that I've paid contributions for 6 years more than the 35 required matters not one jot. Some people will have paid in for much longer than me and will get even less.

But when you say Decisions have been made and there is no going back, joolz, there is a faint glimmer of hope in that the French and German governments have partially back-tracked on their pension age reforms.