General Chat

I will let her know :-(

Good old Martin! <3

Wow! Post has just arrived. I am going to get the grand sum of About £180 a week. Made of of state pension of £169.50 and bits of other things like additional state pension.

Still nowhere near the new state pension rate.

Pensions are certainly a lot more complicated than when I retired. At that time women retired at 60 and men at 65. Married women didn't get a pension, as their husbands got the married man's pension (about 50% more than the single pension).

Until sometime in the 1980's married women could opt out of paying full nat. ins. contributions and simply pay 4p a week of graduated contributions. After the law was changed and this system abolished, those of us on it could opt to carry on until retirement. The conditions attached to this system were that you couldn't claim sick benefit, maternity benefit or a few other things I don't remember. Also you didn't get a state pension until your husband reached 65.

In my case I worked for the Civil Service, so none of them mattered, apart from the pension!! As a result, my state pension, which I didn't get until I was 65, is about £400 per month, while OH gets roughly double that.

I also discovered that I was entitled to a few pence a week of graduated contributions from when I worked before I was married. Inflation had increased it to about £1 and I wasn't going to bother to claim it, but I was told that I needed to in order to prove that I was entitled to a state pension. If I didn't I wouldn't be able to get things like bus passes,which have saved me hundreds over the years! :-)

I can remember a training session when I first started work and the married women’s contribution was explained ( I wasn’t married). Once I heard there was no sick pay etc
I decided then I would never opt for that

The reason it didn't matter if you worked for the Civil Service was that you could have up to 6 months sick leave on full pay, followed by 3 months on half-pay, which was a far better deal than any government hand-outs.

I can't remember now but I suspect things weren't that different.
But I do remember when I worked in the CS a new girl started and 'told' us she was entitled to take a fortnights ( I thnk) of sick leave as ordinary leave.
She was soon told!!

Names, I heard that one too. I think things are a bit different now as people used to play the system and say thy were sick when they weren't. I remember one person who had two jobs and used to turn up for one day every couple of weeks (thus avoiding the need for doctor's notes). Eventually someone kept tabs on when she turned up for work and after a lot of red tape she was actually sacked. This was almost unheard of!!

I agree with Maggie about them paying percentages as increases meaning that those on the old, smaller pension get less. It keeps widening the gap between those getting the new pension and those getting the old pension. Yet bills cost the same for us all.

Maggie's also right about having a small private pension and that you can be financially better off without one! I wonder sometimes whether it was worth a lifetime of work, getting wages less than the private sector to account for me getting a pension. Once my in laws claimed pension credit and the other benefits they gained from it they were better off than me!

To get the old, lower pension:

Men born before 1945 needed 44 years
Women born before 1950 needed 39 years

From April 2010

A man born from 6/4/51 and a woman born from 6/4/53 needed 30 years

From 6/4/16

Both men and women need 35 years.

The above begs the question, 'Why do the older people who had to pay the most years for their state pension get the smallest state pension?

The married women's reduced rate of NI didn't count for any NI benefits as has been said, but covered work related industrial accidents and injuries. Graduated pension contributions were seperate from NI contributions.

Shirley if your daughter gets a pension forecast as others have said she may have already paid enough years without needing to pay anything more.

Florence I think the letter is a stock letter with everything from your NI account filled in to show the full position. I can't remember your age, but assume you only needed 35 years to get your full pension if 2028 is your pension age. Your NI account shows not enough NI paid in one year and that you have 5 more years when you could pay if you needed to. Does it say on the letter anywhere that you have a full record for your pension? They daren't put that you don't need any more NI payments or people would be telling their employers not to stop any!! If there's a number on the letter you could always ring to make sure and for peace of mind. We still all have to carry on paying till pension age if we are working and earning enough as the NI fund pays out to those who haven't paid in in certain circs and there could be multiple benefits paid from a single NI record in some cases. Employers also have to continue paying.

I had a letter telling me I needed 4 more years NI.
This was when I was 56 - so I had 4 more years to work - but they'd put the pension age up - so I had 6 years more working time to pay off those 4 years!

I was not a happy bunny, so phoned them
It was obvious they had no idea what they were doing. It was like no-one had told them about the rise in pension age.
I eventually received another letter informing me I owed no NI contributions.

I could not work when my children where young for personal reasons so never paid a stamp when I divorced my first husband I got a job at lunch time in a school but then part timers could not pay into pension, two years before I left the government brought that we could have I joined I get a very small pension from the council, I was lucky I remarried and I have his works pensions but he died when I was in my 40s so got a widows pensions but when it came to my state pension they took from what my husband had paid in but only from 1978

Annx I didn't get a letter, I looked at the gov.uk and did my pension forecast. So I'm right in thinking then, I already have more than enough years to get my full state pension in 2028. I'm 63 this year.

Because I'm technically unemployed but not fit to work, I get ESA and that pays my NI contributions and will do until I retire. When I stopped work to have my first child, claiming CB continued to ensure my NI contributions were paid right up until my children left education but by 2006 I had returned to work so was paying my own then.

Because I have 2 small pensions, this takes me over the level and therefore, Im not entitled to any benefits.
Mind you by the time I retire in 2028, they probably will have raised the age!

Florence in the hebrides

Shirley - I hope that your daughter has found the information she needs.
There is a useful article in todays Money Mail ( Wed 14th) on the subject of missing years and the urgency of getting payments up to date.

Retirement terrifies me or rather how we will manage financially terrifies me. Mr Owl was born in 1982 & I was born in 1984 and the government have said they will not raise our pension age again as it has already been raised more than once. However we’ll see if they stick to that promise.we are both missing years due to health and unemployment so here’s hoping we can make it up.

Sorry Tawny, but I think there has already been a suggestion that it will rise to 70/71 in your time. Frightening.

Make sure you check out which years are short/ missing as you only have a year to up your early years.

Re unemployment - if you were signed on aren’t you covered?

I was covered for part of my unemployment but not all of it as I could claim job seekers but not universal credit. I will need to look into missing years and so will Mr Owl. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the new pension age rise will only affect those born from 1986 onwards. Those of us who were born no later than 1985 have had our pension age change three times during our working lives so they promised no further rises.

I’ve tried to use the pension calculator but I can’t unfortunately. It asked for my total earnings from my P60 for the year 22/23 so I put in nothing but apparently I must have earned more than nothing.

I’ve just had a thought. In the next couple of weeks or so I should get a new P60 as the tax year 23/24 ends in less than a week. Maybe the pension site will update then to ask for the latest one.

Put simply the government is Robin Hood in reverse.