WTF - uttered with a forced husky Brummie accent - and no intention to offend those of you who feel it is noble to work for most of your life on earth, but I'm listening to Money Box on BBC Radio, and they are talking about how the government has once more, so that's twice this year, raised the retirement age by another year so that it's now at 67.
Another huskied WTF.
What disturbed me though, apart from the fact that my Chinese neighbors are always playing computer games, was how the deliverer of such tragic or joyous news, depending on which camp you're in, brushed it off as if it were merely a case of having to wait for your computer to reboot after it freezes, and even had the audacity to say that it was really nice of the govt. to announce it now because it gives those people under the age of 52 a decade or so to 'get used to this new retirement age'.
Like wtf.
Anyway, not one to just listen - ha ha ha - or read stuff merely from the rags - ha ha ha - I decided to dig deeper on this pension stuff, you know, look into it at the historical level, and it turns out that the first ever state pension was paid in 1684, when a senior Port of London official had to quit his job due to ill-health, (copy and paste time, fck typing it all out) and his successor was appointed on a salary of £80pa on condition that £40pa of this was paid to his predecessor. And so began the first 50% pension, paid out of the salary of a younger employee.
Rah rah rah, eventually 60 was decided upon as the age at which folks could retire, with 65 being set as the default age where you absolutely had to get off the treadmill, or else.
Right, I'm gonna use the State Pension Calculator http://www.pensionsadvisoryservice.org.uk/state-pensions/state-pension-age-calculatorto see when I can officially retire.
I hope it says '2012'. Let's see.
Tum tum tum tum tum.
WTF. Fcking kants.
I can officially retire on Saturday - so it's a weekend, yiphee - May 6th 2034.
Reading that makes me feel sick inside.
It really does.
Hang on though, what will I get if I put in another - hmm, how many years, 2034 minus 2011 equals .....shit, I need a pen..hang on.....okay, that's in 23 years time.
If I put in another 23 years of work - and imagine that I'm in the F.UK and have been paying into a pension scheme for years already - I will get, upon retirement on Saturday May 6th 2034, 90 pounds a week.
90 pounds a week.
If, that is, there's money in the state coffers in 23 years time.
90 quid.
For 40 plus years of work.
90 friggin' quid.
Na, not worth it.
I'd rather have 23 years of freedom and then drop dead on May 6th 2034, than wait.
DISCLAIMER
Dear God
I want to live as long as possible.
The last sentence was for dramatic effect.
Love, Maria
Another huskied WTF.
What disturbed me though, apart from the fact that my Chinese neighbors are always playing computer games, was how the deliverer of such tragic or joyous news, depending on which camp you're in, brushed it off as if it were merely a case of having to wait for your computer to reboot after it freezes, and even had the audacity to say that it was really nice of the govt. to announce it now because it gives those people under the age of 52 a decade or so to 'get used to this new retirement age'.
Like wtf.
Anyway, not one to just listen - ha ha ha - or read stuff merely from the rags - ha ha ha - I decided to dig deeper on this pension stuff, you know, look into it at the historical level, and it turns out that the first ever state pension was paid in 1684, when a senior Port of London official had to quit his job due to ill-health, (copy and paste time, fck typing it all out) and his successor was appointed on a salary of £80pa on condition that £40pa of this was paid to his predecessor. And so began the first 50% pension, paid out of the salary of a younger employee.
Rah rah rah, eventually 60 was decided upon as the age at which folks could retire, with 65 being set as the default age where you absolutely had to get off the treadmill, or else.
 |
| A mid-blog special guest appearance from Thor |
Right, I'm gonna use the State Pension Calculator http://www.pensionsadvisoryservice.org.uk/state-pensions/state-pension-age-calculatorto see when I can officially retire.
I hope it says '2012'. Let's see.
Tum tum tum tum tum.
WTF. Fcking kants.
I can officially retire on Saturday - so it's a weekend, yiphee - May 6th 2034.
Reading that makes me feel sick inside.
It really does.
 |
| 'You humans just don't get it.' |
Hang on though, what will I get if I put in another - hmm, how many years, 2034 minus 2011 equals .....shit, I need a pen..hang on.....okay, that's in 23 years time.
If I put in another 23 years of work - and imagine that I'm in the F.UK and have been paying into a pension scheme for years already - I will get, upon retirement on Saturday May 6th 2034, 90 pounds a week.
90 pounds a week.
If, that is, there's money in the state coffers in 23 years time.
90 quid.
For 40 plus years of work.
90 friggin' quid.
Na, not worth it.
I'd rather have 23 years of freedom and then drop dead on May 6th 2034, than wait.
DISCLAIMER
Dear God
I want to live as long as possible.
The last sentence was for dramatic effect.
Love, Maria
9 comments:
I found out a couple of weeks ago that I can retire from the school when my age + my total number of years having worked for the district total up to 80. That would be in 6 years. But if I try to live on my retirement I'll only be able to live 5 years on the amount of money I'm living on now (not including the hubby's income of course.)Yeah, I can retire but I can either eat and live in the park or live with a roof over my head and starve to death. So, I'm planning on dying on the job and leaving a huge mess at my desk. Seriously... they will have to bring in the haz-mat suits and breathing equipment, we're talking payback.
LOL, the image.
As long as you get to take your knitting into work in your twilight years, it won't be that bad.
Over here you get just as much money from the government when you retire whether you paid your contributions or not. So who are the stoopid ones???
I made a mistake - the retirement age has risen from 66 to 67, and the same guy said that the year after I'm supposed to retire, it will probably rise again to 70 or 75.
Big wtf.
Gah, I have to keep logging in and out to get to the frickin' dashboard on the blog, so can't be bothered to go through the pavlova, hence mistake noted here.
Anon - that sucks for those who paid, and actually sounds like it will self-destruct at some point.
Where is that? US or Canada?
Me
Yeah, the thought of me blowing around the room spewing like a huge balloon, lol.
I have a feeling that the US is going to keep raising the age until none of us will ever be able to retire.
There's two contrasting concepts here:
1) Governments have treated pension funds as piggybanks at the same time as they have kept contributions artificially low to avoid alarming the peasants. Thus, the commitments far outstrip the ability to pay. That doesn't make pensions stupid. It means that you have to have them run at total arm's length from idiot governments who can only think in four-year cycles. A pension demands the ability to count to 100 and to stick with it whether people whine and bitch or not.
2) For the same whining and bitching reasons, governments have not directly linked life expectancy to retirement age. The age of 65 was arrived at whether men died, on average, at 67. You don't need a lot of planning or even cash to pay out two years of benefits for 40-plus years of planning, esp. as the average age of 67 implied that a lot of men kicked off years before that and got NOTHING. My grandfather died two days before his 65th birthday in 1968, for instance. Not a penny did his widow get from the pension scheme. My mother died at 68; she got three years, having contributed since the age of 18: 50 years.
These days, men live until 81 and women nearly 84 in Canada, on average, and collect pensions for 16 to 25 years as they can "retire" at 60 on a partial or 65 on a full pension. Trouble is, having built all those universities and discouraged the trades, we aren't STARTING work until 22 or 23 (or 25 if you go for a master's or a PhD) and therefore expect to pay generous pensions (in the context of maximum years of earnings) for 20 years from a working life of 35-40 years. So the second concept is that in order for this pie-in-the-sky pension scheme to work would have being to kick the retirement age to 75 about 20 years ago by upping it a year every two years or so. The biggest bulge in the python would have been therefore "encouraged" to put away more themselves, because the bareness of the cupboard marked "pension benefits" would have been clearer earlier, when we had a hope of applying some fiscal probity instead of clapping Tinker-fucking-bell back to life.
Anyone else see a problem with this? In all of the Western democracies save perhaps Germany and Scandinavia, the pension-plaaners' "house" cannot collect enough to pay out all those winners. Those of us who work as self-employed persons actually make a double contribution to a fucking pyramid scheme that will be sucked dry from the enormous generation of "boomers" directly ahead of us in age...and who will NEVER support pension reform because it is not remotely in their interests to do so.
Looked upon in that light, buggering off with no income (visible to my nation's government at least) in a boat is actually a break from the daily prison rape of living in a society that wishes to print money without doing the requisite math.
For those interested, I have expanded upon these thoughts in my latest blog entry, so exercised am I on this point:
http://alchemy2009.blogspot.com/2011/12/saying-yes-to-sailing-off-into-sunset.html
Thanks for all that,r.
I'll come read your latest when I'm at school.
Ah, the teacher learns from the students.
Post a Comment