Author Topic: Private or occupational pensions....  (Read 2702 times)

Papaumau

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Private or occupational pensions....
« on: Sep 30, 2011, 02:07:27 PM »
I know that in this forum we are mostly concerned with the state pension and it's levels but I am sure that many of the people who read this forum could have contributed to a private workers pension or to a purely private pension so as to try to lift themselves out of the poverty that they will be in if all they have coming in when they are retired is the miserable state pension.

Now you will see, if you read on below, that for  many reasons many people are no longer willing to lay aside a fixed percentage of their incomes for a pie-in-the-sky private pension.

One in three Brits have quit their retirement fund

A survey by insurance giants Prudential has reported that more than a third of working age adults in the UK have stopped making pension contributions.

The research follows a Pensions Trend report from the Office of National Statistics earlier this month which found that 1.2 million people had stopped contributing to personal pensions.

Many, ( one third of the total missing ), said they did so because of redundancy or unemployment and 27% said it was because they simply could not afford to lay that kind of money aside.

Many others just did not want to risk their hard-earned wages on pension schemes that they did not trust to perform safely over the long-term.

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It now seems that this austerity drive by the government is taking so much money out of the pockets of the working people in Britain that their flagship policy of encouraging people to build their own pensions is falling apart.

Anybody ?
Regards....

Papaumau.



Dottie1943

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #1 on: Sep 30, 2011, 03:54:00 PM »
Papa, this trend could be attributed to the fact that some of the people have been reading forums like this one where they see that those of us who have been paying into a private pension scheme have seen our cash taken away from us by the government!

I for one feel bitterly disappointed that after saving for years in my company and private Pension plans now see that I am just a little better off than th ode who hardly paid anything at all, some of which never even blinking worked but are still better off than me. >:( This is not just because of the current government but of all of them, personally I think they have all robbed me and have done a better job than the Sheriff of Nottingham!!!!
Breath in Breath out then repeat only when necessary!

Hugh

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #2 on: Sep 30, 2011, 04:02:50 PM »
Brown certainly didn't help when he taxed the interest on pension funds. The pension funds were not guarded against the firms going out of business. Infact the new labour party under Blair and Brown made a total mess of things. The work force of to day both private and public should get to gether to fight for a good pension for all. No use waiting till they retire because no one cares and they will be just like us moaning.

Papaumau

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #3 on: Oct 01, 2011, 01:19:58 PM »
Yes folks, all that is true, but if we don't moan and do it loudly they won't even know if we are happy or not.

As Dottie says... It is the fact that more and more of us are reading stuff from the internet that is making us forewarned and forearmed and I am sure that the government, ( whatever government ), are aware of this.

Now that we know that our private pensions are invested by speculators in the stock market we are much less liable to chuck our hard-earned readies into the pockets of these speculators.

As this knowledge is stopping a large percentage of the nation from taking out private pensions this means that the Con-Dem need for us to augment our state pensions by taking out private pensions is just not working.

In the next few years, if nothing is done to enhance the basic state pension, we are going to see many millions of ordinary people driven into abject poverty and once again dying from cold and malnutrition.
Regards....

Papaumau.



Dottie1943

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #4 on: Oct 01, 2011, 01:26:22 PM »
Papa,

I fear what you have said may well be correct but I do hope that you are wrong!

Some of our members who are existing at the moment on basic pension alone with not additional help will be the ones who will suffer first, on a daily basis we see the prices in the shops increasing, or the articles themselves decreasing in size, I used to have to lay my bottles of softner down in the utility room cupboard to get them in, now the same brand etc stands up with no problems! >:(
Breath in Breath out then repeat only when necessary!

Papaumau

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #5 on: Oct 01, 2011, 01:52:13 PM »
Yes Dottie, the greedy and selfish predators out there are slowly killing us off by stealth and the government either don't care or they don't know and they are happy to let this happen.

In a society, ( remember that our Maggie once infamously said that "there is no such thing as society" ), where the poor continue to get poorer and the super-rich continue to get even richer, this society will eventually finish up being ripped right down the middle with the poor and the weak and the sick and the old lying and dying at one end and the others - at the other end - living in luxury and refusing to even look down into that dark and bitter place below.
Regards....

Papaumau.



Dottie1943

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #6 on: Oct 01, 2011, 02:24:20 PM »
Papa

Maggie did do a lot of good as well we must not forget that :)
Breath in Breath out then repeat only when necessary!

Papaumau

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #7 on: Oct 02, 2011, 01:47:52 PM »
I have had many heated arguments with a person called Ivanhoe over exactly that subject on my own forum set and I have found that the damage that our Maggie did to Britain while she was trying to do the little good that she did do has been left as a heritage for the modern Britons' that is hard to get over or around.

The greatest thing that our Maggie did for Britain and the Britons was to introduce the "right-to-buy-scheme" as once the local authorities were forced to sell the rented homes to the sitting tenants at a massive discount this should have created a very large owner-occupier sector amongst the working classes in Britain.

All she in fact managed to do by this radical act was to generate a sub-class that could not service a mortgage whereby this created many thousands of homes that had to be re-possessed for defaulted payments which went right onto the other class of the buy-to-rent mob that are now ripping off many of the people that once owned these properties.  ( This also went to help to grow the sub-prime and toxic mortgage schemes that brought down the banks in America and Britain and the rest of the world ).

It would be very cynical of me to think that she knew exactly what she was doing by her right-to-buy-scheme but as I do not actually think this then the result was something that was probably just fated to happen to these people.

One thing that I am sure DID happen as a direct result of her right-to-buy- scheme was that a large percentage of the best quality rentable housing stock was lost to the renting generation whereby the poor stock that was left was all that went into the housing associations that also arose out of this abortive programme.

Now we see very few "affordable" and rentable homes being built to replace the houses that were lost and that has created an evergrowing rise in the numbers of people that are homeless.

This is all part and parcel of the misery that the poorer folk of Britain are deeply ensconsed within and this adds to the general feeling of unhappiness and the lack of "feelgood effect" and that pervades right through Britain at the moment.
Regards....

Papaumau.



Dottie1943

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #8 on: Oct 02, 2011, 02:52:19 PM »
Papa

Thats one of the reasons I liked Maggie, I took up the option of right to buy and bought a really lovely house which needed a lot of work done to it to bring it up to a good living standard.  We worked hard at doing just this and finally moved into our wonderful home about 3 months later.

I never defaulted on my mortgage, infact I paid it off early and by becoming a home owner it made me more responsible for my actions.  I was always aware that I should save from an early age because my parents were not able to, so when I got a good job my parents drummed it in to me how important savings were.

I was happy living in my council flat with my family prior to buying and would never be ashamed of the fact that I did once live in a council flat, but when we bought our first house it gave us the opportunity that we would never have had without her help, and the flat I lived in...... well at least 10 families that I know have lived in it since.
Breath in Breath out then repeat only when necessary!

Hugh

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #9 on: Oct 02, 2011, 04:37:13 PM »
One thing they should have done was to ensure the money raised from the sale of council houses, should have been spent on building more. This would have also created more employment. Allowing a steady flow of new home owners.

Papaumau

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #10 on: Oct 03, 2011, 02:32:08 PM »
Dottie....

While that is an excellent illustration of how the right-to-buy scheme should have worked I am afraid that in many many cases it did not go like that.

I hate using the term "sub-prime" but that WAS the correct name for many of the mortgages that were taken out at the time. Thatcher encouraged many poorer folk to take on debts that they simply could not service via the R-T-B-S and this had a massive effect right across the world when other countries tried something similar.

The main sub-prime mortgages that were offered with no deposit and for 110% - or more - of the value of the home trapped many millions of people into toxic debts that encouraged them to take on  responsibilities that they were just not up to.

The building Societies in Britain like Northern Rock, for example, were destroyed by these toxic debts and the rest of the taxpayers in Britain and across the developed world were asked to bail out these greedy and reckless bankers.

Hugh....

While you are right that the cash that was generated by the sale of this
quality previously-rented-stock SHOULD have gone towards the building of more quality rentable stock, it did nothing of the kind as the local authorites that were making this money were not allowed to spend it on this purpose and in fact the treasury grabbed it and it was lost into the central government coffers.
Regards....

Papaumau.



Hugh

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #11 on: Oct 03, 2011, 03:44:48 PM »
Well the labour party  created the problem, it was them and not the conservative party that allowed the 110% loans, and it was them that grab the cash. Yes it was Margaret that gave us the right to buy and good on her. The loan I got I paid no more than I was paying in rent, and within a short time paying a lot less.

Was the 100% loans wrong, I don't think so, many would be house buyers are paying far more in rent than they would have if they had 100% loan. More likely now to be evicted through not paying their rent which keeps going up.

If the 100% loan was intrduce again this would bring the first time buyers onto the market and building of houses would start again. The £600 in rent could be paying off a loan. Paying rent and trying to save is out of the question for many of the working class.  

Never mind the people with money are quite happy buying all the cheap propertise and letting the renters pay off the loan.

Papaumau

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #12 on: Oct 04, 2011, 12:18:56 PM »
Yes, I do see what you are getting at Hugh but I reiterate that it was during the days of Thatcher that this sub-prime mortgage scandal was triggered in Britain.

I agree that the New-Labour government that came afterwards did nothing to try to bring the banks to heel or to fix the loosening of the lending restrictions that Thatcher and Reagan brought about after a head-to-head meeting in America.

One of the qualities that the less than hundred-percent mortgages had was that the people who wanted such mortgages had to show that they were sensible enough to save for the deposit before they were allowed such massive mortgages to run over thirty-five years or more.

( This reasonable rule has been brought back again ).

The fact that anybody and his dog could get a mortgage on both sides of the atlantic just for the asking at that time meant that many of the mortgages that were given so easily resulted in literally millions of people generating such toxic debts by defaulting on the loans, that the situation had to eventually bring the banks to destruction.

NOW...it appears that this government and the rescued banks are being much more careful as to who gets mortages and once again sanity reigns whereby only the people who can REALLY afford to take out a home-loans are the ones that are getting them.

There is nobody more aware of this syndrome than David Cameron is and that is why he is so hard down on the people of Britain as he attempts to bring reason to government and individual borrowing habits.

As someone who DOES NOT normally support David Cameron, I think that as far as this is concerned he has got it right.
Regards....

Papaumau.



Hugh

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #13 on: Oct 04, 2011, 01:51:02 PM »
At the moment saving for a deposit at the the moment is not as hard as it use to be. House prises are dropping or at least not rising by much. If it hadn't been for the 100% loan I would not be an house owner now, I would still be trying to catch up on the ever increasing 20% down payment. As things stand at the moment many will be doomed to renting for life.
Paying £550 in rent out of a pension cannot be much fun.

covcol

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Re: Private or occupational pensions....
« Reply #14 on: Oct 05, 2011, 06:13:42 PM »
i dont know if this has been discussed before ,as i,ve only just joined,but i see it as totally unfair that only 30 years n.i. contributions are now required to gain a full state pension,with no regard for all of us from the postwar baby boom,who have contributed[in my case 49 years worth].surely this should entitle us to either a refund of excess contibutions,or an enhanced pension.neither is the case[surprise,surprise].with regard to taking out private pensions[mostly worthless now,what a con].all that has been achieved is the inability to get any state help,as fairly small private pensions take most of us above the "massive"amount of £137,which is deemed to be adequate!!.i,m so disolusioned with politics,i shall never vote again.roll on the lottery win!!