mr_anderson wrote:
It's interesting the watch the pension dominoes fall one by one.
The daddy of them all - state pensions - will hold out until the very end.
But the figures are simply too overwhelming.
A 'reorganisation' is inevitable.
Best not rely on anyone else for your future.
But how to do that?
I've had this conversation various times.
The DB scheme looks great in theory, but it's only as reliable as the counterparty offering to pay it. Because of the precedence given to people already on pension, and the tendency to let things get to the wire before calling halt, that means that those who are towards the end of their career when it gets closed/rationalised will tend to do disproportionately badly out of it all (they get cut hard so some others don't get cut at all).
But the DC world is pretty precarious, and hard to build up the pot required (or even to be confident at this remove, 20-30 years in my case what that pot would be). And we've seen in the form of pension levies that that money is not safe either. You say that the state DB scheme will fall last, but the private DC funds have already been raided to pay state DB pensions, so that could be quite some time.
Fundamentally, pensions should be DB, at whatever level we manage to fund them. Also, no matter what saving and other mechanisms are put in place, when retired you end up being funded by those still working, at least to the extent you need to use labour and current production. The meat and potatoes you eat are grown by the people working at that time, and if you eat them it means that another person who's working can't.
I have to say the whole thing makes me feel very precarious (working, decent job, decent salary, DC scheme)