Ageing drivers and driver shortage

albion:

kcrussell25:

albion:

truckyboy:
.When you look at other countries pensioners, they live very well, can afford a car, and trips abroad, but we have a pension system thats way below what others get.

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I forget which way round it is, but Germany and France have a 6.7 and 7.6 million euro deficit on their pension plans. They face the same problems as the UK.

A cheery little report

theconversation.com/huge-pensio … ting-88420

The net effect is that the pension industries in many countries are in a bad way. According to a Citibank report from 2016, the 20 largest OECD countries alone have a US$78 trillion shortfall in funding pay-as-you-go and defined benefit public pensions’ obligations. This shortfall is far from trivial. It is equivalent to about 1.8 times the value of these countries’ collective national debt.

Do you mean million or should it be billion? A few million isn’t a big thing to countries the size of those but billions would be

Well spotted,should be billion. And I’m hopelessly out of date as well

uk.reuters.com/article/uk-franc … AI20141211

President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government enacted its latest reform of the system in December 2013, the fourth since 1993. The overhaul aimed to plug a deficit due to reach 20.7 billion euros (16.4 billion pounds) by 2020 if nothing was done.

Being a nasty greedy boss of a haulage company, I hesitate to post this…but a lot of pension planning is down to where you are in terms of housing costs (particularly in the last decade or so), and what you are willing to forgo now for later.

Until the last two years, I never earned enough to put me in the 40% tax bracket. During the 28 years of business I’ve not been the top earner for around half that time, my point being I earn a semi decent wage but not mega bucks and in the early years I was very poorly paid. I bought my parents house off them when he became bankrupt and in some respects I was lucky because it was priced cheaply to cover debts rather than market value, so I acknowledge my luck (if not my parents’ luck) as regards housing.

However, I always stuck money in a pension, a whole £25.00 a month when I started in my early 20s. It has increased considerably since then, but to do that I haven’t had a foreign holiday since 1991 and had 7 holidays in 28 years. Apart from one mad car purchase, I’ve generally knocked around in ex GPO Combo vans and my house is a very average 30s semi in a very average town. I don’t have broadband or a television at home. I do spend too much on dogs though.

I read a book many years ago, quite dated now but the concept stands the test of time, called your money or your life.
The basic is that you look at what you are spending your life hours on rather than view things in monetary terms

amazon.co.uk/Your-Money-Lif … +dominguez

So when you buy a gizmo costing £100.00 and you are paid £10.00 an hour, ask yourself is that worth 10 hours of my life? The book introduced me to a new way of thinking and the idea of being not able to work was born. It’s a ‘thing’ now, FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early)., plenty of blogs out there. I think that people could save more for their future than they do generally, but it’s down to motivation.

Bit of a ramble, but pensions is a subject that anorakily has interested me for years.

If you started putting money away in the 70s you were getting double-digit returns and huge tax reliefs, or participating in good index-linked company schemes. My old man cleared his mortgage in the 90s with the proceeds of a savings policy.

Nowadays, you’ll be lucky if your private pension returns exceed inflation, and it’s pointless shovelling money away if it involves grievous compromises now, only to get a pension later which still won’t afford a reasonable standard of living (or worse, just eats into the state benefits that you’d be entitled to, as many older retired workers have found with small company pension pots from decades ago depriving them of pension credits and free dental and eye care).

Many people in their 50s and 60s now just cash in small pots (now that it is possible to do so). And if you have debts or mortgages, it makes more sense to put capital towards these and pay them off sooner (and very few people nowadays are free of any debt).

I used to have savings accounts years ago. Now I don’t bother (and if savings become excessive, then I look to spend them on durable assets).

You can’t spent your life living on bread and water, just so that you can retire on bread and water.