Thursday, April 26, 2012

growing old and growing poor

Millions of workers will be forced to work past the age of 75 for a comfortable retirement. The Pensions Policy Institute 45 per cent of people over the age of 50s would have to work for an extra 11 years past the state pension age, currently 65, if they wanted to live a comfortable retirement.

Michelle Mitchell, charity director general of Age UK said: "Lower annuity returns and other factors mean that more and more people will have to work past their state pension age – and often for many years – if they are to have enough money to live comfortably."

Joanne Segars, chief executive of the National Association of Pension Funds, remarked “Millions of workers are in for a rude wake-up call when they find they can’t afford to retire and instead see their retirement date slipping away into the distance. Those who don’t want a fall in their living standards when they retire face a stark choice: work longer or save more, or do both."

Source
Yet a recent ruling by the Supreme Court gives employers the right to dismiss old people because they are old, or at least in certain circumstances. The judgment appears contradictory. Governments want to reduce youth unemployment, and one means of doing so is to get older people to retire, so that young people can climb on to the job escalator but on the other hand, they want to delay the retirement age because the cost of pensions on the economy.

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