Trivial things you don't understand/mildly annoy you

[Bob's Orange]

Can see this thread being revisited for similar discussions when the council tax bills and the energy cap get increased over the next few months.

The only thing not going up, is our football team.

[Nemo]

Why not ?, you’d be earning an absolute fortune.

Honestly think it's a pretty shit job - you get paid fairly well but not lifechangingly so (MP salary is £91k currently, very good but you can't retire after 5 years of that) for a job that utterly consumes every waking second of your life and makes you at best a hate figure for half the population and at worst a hate figure for all of it. Unless you make it to be a senior minister, it probably doesn't do much for your long term employment prospects in any other field either.

It's a bit like being a lower league footballer except much longer hours!

Now, being a Lord looks a lot more fun...

[4D]

Cost of living is crazy. I am lucky enough to own my own home, but I was nosing at rental costs in Swindon. Even a small 2 bed terrace is around £1,100 a month to rent.  

Add in bills, food, running a car etc, for a single person it must be another £1,000?

The average salary in Swindon is about £36k, at a rough guess is £2,300 take home per month.

So that leaves £200 per month for holidays, entertainment, clothes, gifts, savings. Crazy.

[fuzzy]

The population is getting older and will continue to do so (average age increasing over time).

This is a symptom of the improvements in medical science allowing people to live longer.

A question that they should perhaps ask when embarking on research that helps crumblies (like me) to live even longer might be "should we? instead of "Could we?"

[Nemo]

To quote er, myself in another thread:

Just maths innit, when the state pension was introduced it was introduced in the UK, it was from the age of 70, despite life expectancy being (according to Statista) just 52. You have to live 18 years past the average life expectancy to get it at all.

Post WW2, it's 65 for men, 60 for women. Average life expectancy then about 68 or so, so most people get it, but not for long.

Today life expectancy is 78 for men, 83 for women, give or take a few months. Not hard to see why it might cost a lot more than it used to!

Not an easy one to deal with for any government - not saying any of them have made much of a fist of it so far - but someone needs to work out a way that either people can work longer or healthcare costs are going to have to be a whole lot lower. Two pretty difficult things.

If folk are going to live longer, they need to work longer or the maths goes horribly wrong.

Probably the goal is something like "years of quality life" rather than any life - certainly we all know people who left this earth bodily long after their minds had departed.

[Audrey]

Yet, reading this, it’s soft, young worry warts that are clogging up A&E.

Bunch of soft leps!

https://news.sky.com/story/health-anxiety-not-emergencies-clogging-up-aande-doctors-warn-13308195

[Quagmire]

Yet, reading this, it’s soft, young worry warts that are clogging up A&E.

Bunch of soft leps!

https://news.sky.com/story/health-anxiety-not-emergencies-clogging-up-aande-doctors-warn-13308195

As someone who was signed off work for 6 months with severe health anxiety 5/6 years ago, if really isn’t as simple as being ‘soft’

I literally went through a period where I genuinely believed every day I was about to snuff it, every headache I had I thought it was a brain tumour, every heart flutter you’d assume was a heart attack

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through it, and thankfully I look back and laugh about it now, but at the time there was absolutely no reasoning with me that I was okay.

[Batch]

I literally went through a period where I genuinely believed every day I was about to snuff it, every headache I had I thought it was a brain tumour, every heart flutter you’d assume was a heart attack

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through it, and thankfully I look back and laugh about it now, but at the time there was absolutely no reasoning with me that I was okay.

It consumes almost your every thought doesn't it. Bloody relieved I respond to medications.

[Audrey]

But it does beggar the question why so many people have succumbed in this way. I’d say it’s a fairly recent phenomenon.

[4D]

So, another car ramming of people in Germany. Suspect a 24 Yr old Afghan asylum seeker with drug and theft convictions. I can't believe he hadn't been kicked out already.

[Samdy Gray]

Going back to the state pension thing, it is completely unsustainable in its current guise.

It gets more expensive each year because of the triple lock, more people receive it because we're an aging population, and the tax base is reducing so there's less in the coffers to pay for it.

No recent government has had the balls to scrap the triple lock because they (typically the Tories) rely on the grey vote. So the next best option is to increase the state pension age again.

It was only supposed to be a safety net, yet with the growing inequality and lack of personal savings millions of people will be relying on the state pension to feed themselves in retirement. It's a very very tricky and expensive conundrum.

The only thing that hasn't really been discussed, but is the most sensible solution, is going back to a means tested system and keep it solely for those who need it.

[tans]

Ok, but if its means tested and you dont qualify because you have a good workplace pension etc, what happens to all the money you have put into your pot as NI contributions prior to that?

Out of interest, do we have the highest state pension retirement age?

[Samdy Gray]

Who knows, that's for the government to figure out. NI basically just goes to the general taxation pot anyway, that's why we really need to scrap it and just go with a single income tax rate.

As for state pension age, most western countries are at 67 now.

[4D]

Just one big pot, can't tell me that car tax and fuel duty all goes on road repairs 

[Boydy]

Ok, but if its means tested and you dont qualify because you have a good workplace pension etc, what happens to all the money you have put into your pot as NI contributions prior to that?

Out of interest, do we have the highest state pension retirement age?

I've always figured everyone paying NI aren't actually funding their own pensions, they're really paying the current bunch of retirees pensions who in turn paid for the previous generation etc.
I reckon the pension pot has never been big enough to fund each generation directly.