Been working with local council on the bins last couple years but been doing shifts recently 1 week early 1 week backs and can’t get my head into (sleeping pattern etc) and also getting p***ed off with some of the loaders attitudes, anyway had an offer with a local firm driving skips day shift not bad money, real thing holding me back in taking is the council pension, but is it really that important that you should work unhappy for?
Yes a good pension is very important but it depends how unhappy you are and really only you can answer that I’m afraid.
If you can bang money away and never touch it can’t see a pension doing much more to be honest unless it’s an end of salary one.
The money that you have paid into the council pension is yours so you wont be losing that.If you go on the skips there are “perks” also the pesion rules are changing so there will be a pension scheme of some sort starting soon.I liked the skips once of the premises you are your own man,no arsey loaders or forkies let the gaffer see that you can do the work and use common sense and you are left alone.
A lot depends on what kind of pension you have now. wether it is a final salary or a money purchase, how much your employer pays into it etc.
i doubt that you will get a pension as good in normal work compared to council work, but many councils are having to close their schemes or downgrading them.
If you can earn substantially more on the skips and are disciplined enough to save it (maybe via an ISA ) then it could be that you would have enough savings to not need a pension.
One life, live it!..
I planned for my retirement, now in my 5th year. We have been doing 4 months in Spain (2 x 2 month trips)
and 1 month in USA each year and have not found it necessary to dip into the savings, all covered by pensions.
HOWEVER I meet umpteen people who did nothing for their retirement, many did not work at all or fiddled their way onto disability, and they are all as well off because of the help they get. I am entitled to nothing help wise and apparently never will be.
I am in Spain at the moment and just this morning met a man on disability who has driven out from UK in his disability
Nissan Quashquoi, taxed and insured on my tax from my pensions that I paid tax earning. He can drive to Spain but is unfit to do any sort of work in UK.
Makes me wonder was it all worth it.
If you go for a pension make sure it is either massive or nil because you need it to be really big to keep it well over the benefits system of you need it to be nil to make full use of the benefits system
I’ve got the standard company one, I put £10 in, they do, and a fiver of my tax. What that will be worth, who knows. I’ve been putting £20 a week into a high interest account with ing for the past 12 years. Got quite a few grand there. I also want to buy a buy to let flat when I’m 40, so as I hit 65 it should bring in the market equivalent of today’s £6-700 a month, plus it’s another asset for the kids
My council just downgraded the pension scheme shortly before I joined it anyway
I had a awesome final salary pension at my last job, made redundant after 9 year but if I was a lifer my lump sum would have been 70k with something like 1.5k a month 
Still 9 year is a good wee nest egg but not what I could have got. My current work pension is a load of pish would be more use to save in a penny jar!
when younger I never thought about it but am fairly lucky as have a little local government pension my RAF one ( which is on the old index linked style ) and the new nest thing ( which is pointless really ).
as jay said bang money in an isa or similar and get a buy to let property, judging how dodgy the banks etc. are at least you have something to show for it.
you have to bear in mind that your pension is taxable , and state pension is added to your private pension for tax purposes , thank you gordon brown . my brother in law has a good water board pension , which added to his state pension costs him 200 pounds a month in tax .
“A good pension” IS a final salary one - at least so far this century.
“Defined Benefits” rock. “Defined contributions” ■■■■. These things follow very long term cycles.
A defined contributions pension outperforms when interest rates are sky high for more than the time it takes to pay down a mortgage, eg. if you’d taken out a defined benefits contribution mortgage across the year 1972, and retired in 1992 - You would have seen the best possible returns for the whole of the 20th century right there in those 20 years of “historically high” interest rates, which of course ended with them being 15% right after the ERM fiasco of 1992.
Your pension pot would have been available at exactly the right time to get a 22% annuity that locked that rate in for YEARS afterwoulds, thus ensuring a great income for retirement built from a decently high pension pot to begin with as well.
A “defined benefits” pension does best when inflation is low, interest rates are low, and “non risk” returns on investment are rubbish - such as has been the case for the past 7 years since the credit crunch in particular. Low interest rates creates “Black holes” in such pension plans, and as they become an increasing liability to the employer to fund - they gradually get withdrawn from new members initially, and everyone over the medium to long term.
In this new low-returns environment - the “defined contributions” pension has never been crappier, and the defined benefits one never so good - a bit like “fixed rate mortgages” being crap but “Bank of England base rate trackers” being the dogs pretty much over the same time period.
You will get pushed by the financial industry to take out crappy products, and be denied outright getting onto the good ones - because they’ve all but gone already.
I have a paid up final salary pension, and I’ve decided not to bother at all with the defined contributions variety, having opted out of two (so far) I had been auto-enrolled for already. 
The best pension for someone starting up right now - I’d recommend getting a SIPPS and joining an investment club. Historic stock market dividend returns are still ranging from 3-5% assuming you spread the risk over all the different sectors. If each member’s “chunk” is small, then the club will need that many more members to keep away the scourge of “high commissions on low considerations” as the City has always employed against the small private investor otherwise. 
Personally, I’d rather be in a club where 40 people put in £25k lying around in a bank account each rather than 10 people put in the proceeds from re-mortgaging their houses each. 
Depends on the longevity of your parents, if they are both dead and your in your 40’s then id pay little worry to it and crack on, but if your father is 90 and your mother 75 and they waited till late in life to breed you then sink all you can into the grasping little claws of a thirty something bloke half addicted to cocaine and high end Russian prossies who masquerades as a portfolio manager.
It’s no good coming on a forum like this for pension advice. Everyone’s circumstances and expectations are different and it takes an expert to sort it out. Add to that the recent and future changes to the pension ages and benefits it is not possible to DIY unless you are pretty with it financially.
The council scheme is almost certainly a final salary one and they will give you a forecast if you ask. The state pension is changing and it’s not worth asking unless you are near to drawing it. I kept working and didn’t draw my pension straight away. This is a very good investment if you can do it.
I would also suggest that most skip lorry drivers seem to drive like Stirling Moss. Most council drivers barely break a sweat. Skip drivers have never heard of job-and-finish. Think carefully before you jump.
Nobody has mentioned tax relief on payments into a pension. Which means if you put £20 a month into a pension, the govt will give you a fiver on top. If you pay £80 then you get twenty quid extra and so on. With the new pension rules coming into force allowing you to draw the cash when you like, without being tied to an annuity, then it is an attractive way to put money away. I have a personal plan with Standard Life, and it is doing very well indeed.
The number 3 bus could have your name on it. Give me a higher rate now and dont worry about me retiring. I have absolutely no desires towards living long enough to draw a pension
contractdriver:
One life, live it!..
+1
you may not make it to … 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 or whatever the government move the pension threshold to, by the time you are old enough to receive it.
Then IF you get a pension the government will tax you on it, or refuse you earnings related benefits because you have too much income coming in.
The number 3 bus could have your name on it. Give me a higher rate now and dont worry about me retiring. I have absolutely no desires towards living long enough to draw a pension
Surprising how many of my ex-colleagues thought that way, and now they are retired on basic state pension and a bit of social they all seem to say “if only…”