Why We Moan About Pensions (Since You Asked).

The I've Been Everywhere Man There’s a lot of anger going around about pensions. The old are outraged about the state pension being called a benefit. The young are outraged that their National Insurance is paying the pensions of old people. As usual, there’s a lot of misunderstanding. It feels like Governments of the past 40 years were happy to let punters think they were "buying" a pension with their national insurance contributions. But now they want to postpone (by raising the state pension age) or cut back the rate of pension the Govt (Tory & Labour) has been reminding us that the State Pension is really a Benefit. It's just another gift they can withhold or reduce. And the biggest self-inflicted myth, is probably that pensions were going to provide us with some future life of luxury. The idea behind the state pension was always that it would stop you from falling into absolute poverty. It was never going to provide you with the life of the “I’ve Been Ever...