Paying a pension is like donating your money to a stranger

85603

By old age Ill be manipulating the clueless youngsters and the govt like uncle junior.

Pension? Your sisters #$%^.

angela1711

Taking aside whether or not having a pension fund is the right thing to do.

Realistically how much money does a typical elderly person needs to have to live on comfortably each week ?

I'd say 500e a week is plenty if you have a house free mortgage and no dependants to support at that stage. Like what are you going to be even spending 500e a week on in your 70s? Let's leave the current inflation and crazy electricy and gas prices aside you will still be left with plenty of money to go on holidays ect

Plenty of people having to raise a family, pay rent, mortgage, childcare fees for less then a 1000 a week.

If you get the fuel allowance that's almost 300 out of the 500 taken care of by the government. The rest you can fund yourself by buying a house and renting it or buying some land and selling it when it comes to retirement.

And most if of all the curreny system in I reland is uterrly crazy. How can someone that never worked a day in their life vs some who worked for 40 years end up with the same money? Most countries value their working people and your final pension will depend on the amount of your worked and the amount of money made over those years.

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119746221#Comment_119746221

I'd go closer to €620 for a minimum if you're active with hobbies and actually want a comfortable active retirement. Being retired isn't about sitting at home doing nothing or cutting back on luxuries. Activities cost money, as does socialising. Then the car needs changing, maybe heating the house more, home maintenance etc. Of course a decent pension will also have the old tax free lump sum to splash out with.

Different for a couple also.

Kurooi

A rare take this, trying to talk people out of pensions.

I doubt there is much overlap over people who are contributing towards their private pension, and who are struggling enough that the contribution makes their life worse.

dublin49

I think we will move to more and more pensioners downsizing their home to get their hands on some equity from their larger than required family home ,a good thing really as an elderly couple or one survivor staying in the family 4 bed home all their life when kids are gone is not a good use of our housing resources.

mickdw

As self employed sole trader, much as I'd like to be putting loads away for a pension, it's just not an option. With boom and bust ecomony, income is an absolute lottery and in my profession, access to funds equal to a year or 2 wages is necessary to even out the dips.

Having a fortune in a pension that cannot be touched while money might be needed immediately is not really a workable prospect.

That said, the plan is to have built up some assets at retirement age that will allow some equity release to top up my contributory pension. At today's rates, 15000 per year on top of contributory pension should be enough to live on as an old person with own home.

Property assets being self managed allows a large element of control and also over a lifetime should enable at least one cycle of sell high, buy low.

Leg End Reject

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119746221#Comment_119746221

It depends on what you want when you retire. Do you want to eek out an existence or do you want to fully enjoy your retirement when your time is finally your own?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119746703#Comment_119746703

For many a family home is more than mere bricks and mortar, it holds precious memories and adult children tend to come visit and stay. Any retired parent that I know loves to have their adult children, their partners and grandchildren come to stay. The idea of shuffling retirees off to one bed accommodation doesn't work here, especially given the standard of so-called downsizer accommodation in Ireland. Poky boxes with no storage or room to swing a cat, yet the expectation that older people should leave a comfortable 3 or 4 bedroom home - why would anyone do that?

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119746703#Comment_119746703

Not a hope in hell. It's our home. We built and paid for it. It's the garden we spent 40 years putting together. It's among the friends and neighbours we've shared all life's ups and downs with for 40 years. It's not just a building, or a pile of bricks, or a source of funds. Those empty rooms see grandchildren on sleepovers or are the hobby room that we always wanted. These buildings are not "our" housing resources they're my home.

Count Dracula

A pension is a worthwhile investment on paper. But there are issues which the industry will never be asked to face. I find the concept mildly insipid and what worries me most is how the rule books have changed dramatically over the years.

Facts - It is the oldest known legalised pyramid scheme on the planet, I defy anyone to offer me a better example?

Fiction - If you don't start one in your 20's or early 30's you are doomed to a life of poverty when you hit retirement.

I haven't the energy to get into it right now, but I have spent enough time talking to **** in the Duke to understand that they haven't a bogs notion what they are doing or an understanding of why they are such useless gang of overpaid chunts. It is a total shambles what has gone on with everyone else's money.

My best advice to anyone under the age of 35 is to try to form a pension club with a group of ten or more people. Get proper investment from a decent independent acccountant/tax advisor and start a reasonable pension. You can easily start one with 5 per cent of your income and it will give you a simple starter investment such as purchasing a commercial property or other tangible investment. I am a member of pension club that owns harbour space on the Isle of Wight, it nets the club 87k every year, we bought a 50 year lease in the late 90's for 2k a year.

While you are accumulating the numbers save up 10 k and spread the word, you might get 8 or 13 interested people, get your agreements down on paper and let the accountant do the rest. I am in 3 different plans, one of which I now own entirely after buying out all other investors who got into the shíts during the crash. They all have the option of buying back in if they wish at their original liquidation value weighted to current MV's.

Pension companies just blow your money on the markets hoping for wins and mopping up all the leakages with their monthly rake from the good decent hardworking worried taxpayers they cannot survive without.

I am confident that this post might raise the hairs on the backs of a few clowns down on Dawson street, but you chunts know who you are and exactly what you have done, if you weren't so well paid to keep your traps shut the world might be a better place? I respect that the annual trip to Zurich and a Champions league match midweek was such a barrel of laughs. But at least when you are sitting in your marque behind the West stand eating half cold roast beef, carrots and over salted spud, washed down with stout and spiced burgandy you could have the dignity to ascertain that you haven't a **** notion what is going on when you approve the weekly transfers to some 9 lettered hedge fund your boss ordered you to pay into by 3 o'clock on Thursday afternoon?

BrianD3

There's a thread in AH about the industries that have the biggest laugh at their customers' expense, the insurance industry gets lots of mentions but no mention of its cousin, the pensions industry. Not too surprising though as anytime a person expresses a cynical opinion about private pensions, the default rebuttal is about tax relief. This and the "pensions timebomb" and "you'll need x millions to ever retire" are designed to draw people in.

There are problems with every industry where the state gets involved either through outsourcing public sevices, grants or tax reliefs. Financial services has plenty of salesmen and middlemen laughing their arses off at how the performance of their products gets a pass because people have been conditioned to think of the tax relief and little else

Even the public service with its unfunded, defined benefit pensions isn't safe from these salesmen. They are invited into PS workplaces to give "talks on pensions" when their purpose is to sell AVCs. They routinely downplay the pensions of public servants with coordinated pensions by "forgetting" to mention the supplementary pension. They have plausible deniability as PS pension calculators don't mention this supplementary either.

At other times, when it suits, we hear screaming about PS pensions. If annuity rates are low, we get media articles about how the average Garda has a pension that would cost x million to purchase on the open market.

How many people in this country invest in the stock market outside of a pension or employer share options. Very, very few. Why not encourage this? If anything, it is discouraged. Pensions and property are the be all and end all of investing in Ireland and this suits various vested interests with the state and media embroiled in it.

dublin49

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119747223#Comment_119747223

I agree with the neighbour sentiment but I feel generations to come will not be as well provided for by defined contribution pensions ,my generation are the last to enjoy defined Benefit pensions and the defined contribution pensions will not be sufficient to support a decent retirement unless theres some serious topping up done from relatively early in your career,When that happens pensioners will conclude that theres no point being poor in a home thats too big for their needs and many will downsize.and I feel a good consequence of this will be a better use of the housing stock in this country.