Getting Waspish About Missing Out On Pensions

When I was away on a holiday recently, sitting at a table of six solo women passengers, we were discussing various things about jobs and family backgrounds etc.  It came as a rather brutal lesson to me just how much of a disparity there was years ago in the understanding of information fed to the average tax and national insurance paying female worker.  I knew from a long time before it happened, that a previous government of the day back in the ’90s or early ‘2000s had to change the timeline for paying out the state pension – or old age pension as it was called in those days.     Instead of all women being able to claim their state pension at 60, some five years younger than men, a change in the law resulted in all adults of retirement age having to work until a minimum 66 years of age to claim their state pension benefits.   There has been a secondary system in place for folk to be able to pay into an occupation scheme in almost all companies for the last thirty or so  years. But before that it was a bit hit & miss.  My parents insisted I took out private pensions and paid into work based schemes many years ago, before I was even concious of the social divide.  On my dinner table, two of the ladies had never saved or put any money into an occupational scheme and thus were only receiving a fraction of my own pension income.  Because as cleaners and dinner ladies, they were always under the table of earnings !