I know I shouldn’t find this funny, but having read many reports from commissions telling people they’ll need to work till 70, I can see this fellow’s point.
Here we need to take a step back and ask what commissions (let alone the uncommissioned reports that appear every month) are designed to do. 15 million, about of us aren’t ready to retire when we reach our “state pension age”. Most of us that with older ages come bills that are not pleasant, the bills to pay for social care. That older people care that they are not a liability to others is obvious.
Commercial daytime television is paid for by adverts focussing on older folk and their paranoia that they will leave a funeral bill to their bereaved family. Of course the funeral is the least of the financial problems old folk face but it’s the one that can be sold on TV.
Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone’s children would probably be watching adverts for old folks and thinking the same thought that Fred is thinking.
“Why isn’t someone taking care of my later life for all the taxes that I pay?”.
We all know that there is a problem with growing old and that it is largely financial. The NHS was not built to deal with old age as we experience it today, any more than our pension system was designed for the length we live or our stock of housing for the changes in demand from those living far from “virtually”!
This is not a blog about how we chaps and chapesses push pens about to find ways for Fred Flintstone to lay down his spade. It is just to have a laugh to pretend we can find answers to the huge problems of getting old without solutions we all sign up to.
This is really what we want from Government, not rival systems that change every time a new group comes to power but which is driven to find problems for folks like Fred and Barney and voted for by those very people.
So far we have failed to get solutions for housing and health and a replacement wage in retirement which we feel comfortable with . We have a Commission on how we can look after elderly people’s needs for social care and we have a Commission on how we will get people a decent wage in later years. We have begun to think again about housing (I see Andy Haldane is making some suggestions today)
These are the big three issues for those of us who are “in decumulation” as people with pens call growing old. We cannot have us on the “sell-side” determining the answers to Government’s problems. Instead it must be those who represent Fred and Barney. I mean the people they vote for, the people who they pay their workplace taxes to. We do need an answer to Fred’s question.
The conformational bias is becoming absurd
The Flaw in the “Magic Bullet” Narrative
The article highlights Fred Flintstone’s fundamental question: “Why isn’t someone taking care of my later life for all the taxes that I pay?”
Promoting CDC as a complete solution fuels a dangerous misconception: that shifting to a collective structure magically creates retirement adequacy without individual effort.
CDC cannot fix the underlying mathematical reality:
Under-contribution: If contribution rates remain at 8% (the UK Auto-Enrolment baseline), no pooling mechanism, structural design, or investment strategy will generate an adequate replacement wage in retirement.
Individual Responsibility: CDC reintroduces intergenerational risk-sharing, meaning younger workers’ pooled returns can be trimmed to support older cohorts during downturns. Without active individual oversight and adequate saving, reliance on a collective pool simply replaces market volatility with structural uncertainty over payout levels.
CDC is an investment and risk-pooling tool, not a substitute for funding. Without sufficient contributions forming the underlying pots, changing the plumbing does not create extra money.
Whatever happened to individual responsibility?
Give people products that they understand and they will use them. ISAs do one thing and Pensions another- we should make it easy to work out what comes out of the pension for what goes in. It is more complicated but not incomprehensible and people do get the state pension.
If it’s so simple why over 80 years has it not happened
Once you have converted many pots to your one pot you can invest for the longer term and stopped dulling performance with bonds or active management.
Simplistically with DC if you retire at 60 you can have a pension guide of 3% pa At 70 4% then have an 10 month bucket to cope with sequencing risk and a further bucket to cope with Care home net of tax fees
If the target pot is identified for each bucket early enough the contribution rate can be dealt with otherwise the pension will be inadequate CDC might be one of the options but each bucket has its own objective and the right decumulation method
Loss motivation is more powerful than profit
In the original (?) Danish cartoon, Fred’s speech bubble says “Er det ikke underligt at alle dem, der fortæller os, at vi skal arbejde til vi er 72, aldrig har løftet andet end en blyant og en kuglepen”, so it’s working till age 72, not 70.
The Danes of course have already raised their state pension age to 70 for those born in 1970 or later.
As a former pencil and pen pusher myself, who’s past the ages of 70 and 72, I’m afraid my first reaction on seeing the cartoon was: are Hanna-Barbera Comics in the public domain now? And I don’t think they are, Henry.
The Jetsons & The Flintstones are not expected to become public property until the late 2050s to 2060s for their earliest 1960/1962 debut seasons.
I wonder what the state pension ages in Denmark and the UK will be in the late 2050s?
That’s a lot of concern – Mr Pen Pusher! I’m on Fred’s side and hope we get some help on when we get our pension sooner rather than later!
A triumph of hope over experience rarely works