Does old age really start at 85 now?

One of today's newspaper headlines suggested that people no longer regard themselves as old until they reach the age of 85.

It is certainly true that many people are living longer, staying fit and active longer, and ages at which things happened for my parent's generation are not a good yard stick to judge mine. As of this year I am five years older than the age at which my father retired, but do not want or expect to retire myself for another decade yet if the good health I have been fortunate enough to enjoy thus far lasts as long as I hope and think it will.

The "younger retired" are doing a fantastic job for many areas of the community, mostly unpaid.

However, I think "old age does not start until 85" is overstating the case a bit - particularly for those who are not fortunate enough to share in the majority experience of staying fitter and healthier for longer.

Comments

Jim said…
Look, this is a clear way the government are trying to admit, with out admitting they have been running a Ponzi scheme.

Basically National insurance payments are ringfenced for pensions, but this never happened and the governments (past and present) spent the money replacing it with "guilts" or govenment bonds if you like.

Now they realise that all the money that people paid in is gone, so the only way they can pay it is to tax everyone else, and they still continue to do this with NI payments, so the answer is "oh, everyone is living longer they must pay even more in, even though they have been doing so for the last 49 years. (thats when i started work and being taxed aged 16, i intend to retire aged 65)

So in short no it does not start at 85, as my dad once said to me, you can have this money and let it see you though, if you choose to p*** it up the wall then dont come calling back.
8:11 pm
Jim said…
I will never forget that video you once posted of a labour MP (i forget who) stating, "you can't trust people to spend their own money responsibly"

well i will tell you this much, there is no one who can spend my own money more productively than me, and if that means off shoring it to lower tax places so be it, remember you forced my hand there, not me.

so no, i will retire when i think the time is right, Not because you tell me to. I have paid into the system all my life, always have, now start acting like a conservative government who recongnise that fact.
8:20 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
OF course, government were operating on the dubious basis of paying the previous generation's pensions with the present working generation's taxes for many decades, and with people living longer and fewer working people to support more retired people it was obviously going to stop working.

So Tony Newton, a member of Mrs Thatcher's cabinet, decided in 1984 that Britain had to switch over to properly funded pensions. He did this by breaking the price/pension link for the state pension but scrapping ACT (Advance Corporation Tax) for pension funds so that pension savings would not be taxed twice and there would be a proper incentive to save.

Up until the appointment of that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned-idiot Gordon Brown as Chancellor it worked brilliantly, with Britain accumulating more money in occupational pensions schemes than the whole of the rest of Europe put together by 1997.

Then that fool Brown just couldn't see something working without getting his hands on it and wrecking it up so he reimposed ACT in the infamous £5 billion a year raid on pensions and within a few years everything was completely ruined again.

About twenty expletives were deleted from the first draft of the above sentence.

Cameron and Osborne are trying to find a way to fix that mess.
10:08 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
The "You can't trust people to spend their own money" quote was from John McTernan.

It says something about how nutty Jeremy Corbyn is that McTernan can see it and is one of his most vehement Labour critics.

Here is the link to the post with the McTernan clip:

http://chris4copeland.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/labour-adviser-you-cant-trust-people-to.html
10:14 pm
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