Even more about the recession and the 50-plus

Today’s FT has an article about the “increase in part-time pensioners”. What it is really about is the need for older people to keep or restart working to make ends meet. Here are a few of the tasty bits of information

• Norwich Union said it had seen nearly a 50% per cent increase in people taking income from their pension while leaving it invested in the stock market, compared with a year ago. It believes this is evidence that more people are phasing their retirement.
• Scottish Life and Standard Life are seeing more people than usual were phasing their purchase of an income from their pension.
• A report on the impact of the recession on older workers, to be published next week by Help the Aged and Age Concern, will show 60% of the 50-plus may have to work longer than planned because of the downturn.
• An economist at Architas, Axa's fund management company, estimates that people will have to work a further six years on average in order to have the same level of income in retirement they would have had before markets crashed.

Of course none of this applies the public sector workers who receive their pensions irrespective of what happens to the economy.

Unbelievably, one of the reasons why people in the private sector will have to work longer is to enable government employees to retain their ludicrous pension rights.

If you detect a note of anger/contempt/envy/disgust, you are right! Dick Stroud