Thread: Pension Age may move to 70

Dr John Hewson has taken up a post at the ANU.

According to some people around here we can now disregard anything he says because not only is he now an academic and therefore lacking any knowledge about how things work in the real world, but he will be operating from Canberra, which according to some people is hardly a part of the real Australia. That is in spite of the fact that he was a founding executive director of Macquarie Bank.
Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

It will be interesting to see how many others are willing to look more broadly at the issue. At the moment, the signs aren't hopeful.

surely the politicians [both sides of politics] will not have to worry as they get so much super. For example Howard got a pension of Two million dollars a year when he retired [and I only gave Howard as an example because I did not have the figures for the other side of Politics.]

And If they do not increase the pension age of workers they may have to cut back on their own pensions. So make the workers retire later so that the Politicians can get high wages and very good pensions.

My wife is on the age pension. Why???

Well she had good Super in the days Super was not protected [1960's to 1980s], and her company borrowed against her Super and went bankrupt. And she lost the lot.

Hence she needs the pension in order to survive.

If the aging population is a problem for the economy (it probably is) I'm not sure how reverting rules governing financial advice helps. Surely those most vulnerable to scammers are the very young and the almost-retired. The very young because they have no experience, but they mitigate this by having plenty of time to get over early mistakes. They almost-retired because they may be prone to taking big risks and losing everything if they aren't advised in a way that removes bias towards certain products.

Having been ripped off by a financial advisor early in life, as a 17yo apprentice I'm of the opinion that the industry has all the imprimatur of the rag-and-bone trade. I'm sure that's an unfair characterisation but if these regulations are in place because of scams like Storm Financial what is the idea behind removing those consumer protections?

Many people simply can't work fulltime until 70 for various reasons, including poor health and the fact that many employers discriminate against older workers, which is why there has been a big spike in the number of people on disability pensions. The age pension is going up to 67 anyway thanks to changes made by the previous government. That is also the average lifespan of indigenous people, so if the pension goes to 70 many indigenous people will die before they qualify for the age pension.
This government will cop a lot of flak if it raises the pension age to save money, but goes ahead with its plan to waste $3-4 billion paying wealthy women $75,000 over six months to have the babies they would have had anyway.
Actually, our age pension bill is a much lower percentage of GDP than in other developed countries, so the whole 'budget crisis' argument is rather manufactured anyway, I think.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/04/14/...cation-of-joe/


Sent from my GT-P5210 using AULRO mobile app

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Many peop,e simply can't work fulltime until 7

Sent from my GT-P5210 using AULRO mobile app

True dat...sometimes I find it hard working full time until 5 ,

Regards

Stevo

Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

In my case while I had a private super fund before the compulsory date, a lot of my money was being swallowed up by a "financial advisor" who turned out I had never met or received any financial advice from.

I found out I had one of them last year.

I got a letter from XXXX bank before Christmas advising me that under new laws it must be disclosed to me that they were receiving about ~$1000 /year from one of my investment fund for 'financial' advice. This was unknown to me because it was never fully disclosed. This has probably been going on for more than 15 years.

When I rang the bank to find out more and ask what financial advice had actually been given over all those years to earn the $1000/year the reply was along the lines of 'none, because you didn't ask for any'.

Early in the year I had my real financial advisor write to the fund involved to stop further commissions from being paid out, appointing her as my financial advisor to the fund and having her waive all rights to further commission payments.

Bugger me if I get a letter from the bank ~2 weeks ago appointing somebody I had never heard of or met as my new 'financial advisor'. When did I ever request that I think to my self. How do you get rid of these blood suckers?

I think these recent disclosures laws are part of what is planned to be retracted to cut 'red tape' in the financial advice industry.

Reading Stevos posts I can see that we are close to the happy hour