You’ve worked hard your whole life. You’ve saved up, you’re ready to settle down and retire, but you don’t exactly know what’s in store with your state pension. Before you get to retirement age, you should know exactly what’s happening with your pension funds!
When it comes to UK pensions, the triple lock guarantee is what’s currently in the news. The triple lock was created to make sure you could buy what you needed with your pension once your reach retirement age. But what exactly is the triple lock program, and what is going on with it right now?
Pension Basics
Pensions are set aside so that you can pay into state funds during your working years, and take from them when it’s time to retire. It’s not exactly playing the stock market, which can actually take longer than you think to hit it big, it’s more like a government run foundation for your retirement funds.
The current pension plan, known as the triple lock pension plan, will make sure that pensioners get a certain amount of money for their retirement based on inflation rates. The amount paid to retirees will then grow with the rate of inflation over time.
The Triple Lock Pension
Created by the Coalition government in 2010 and 2011, this pension plan was a guarantee to increase the pension payments at a steady rate. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government from nearly a decade ago decided that the idea was to keep pensioners from suffering from the random increases in pensions that happened in the early 2000’s.
- The triple lock keeps your pension growing at the same rate as inflation.
- This makes is so you can get the same amount of food, goods, services for your money as the year before.
- This leaves the 75p a week rise in state pensions at the door!
- This pension plan makes it so your income isn’t deteriorated by the increasing cost of living in the UK.
The triple lock pension is great on paper, but the reason it’s in the news lately is because the overall price it costs to make this guarantee a reality.
The State of Your State Pension
Because the Triple Lock will cost tax payers an estimated £45 billion in a little over a decade, there is a huge debate over whether it should stick around! Knowing whether you can rely on the triple lock for your retirement income should be priority if you’re at the age of retirement right now.
The current pension was to increase to 6.6% of GDP (gross domestic product) two years ago in 2016 and expected to rise to 8.5% of GDP by the year 2060. However, after 2060, it is predicted that the Triple Lock plan will go down to 8.1% if a cheaper pension is put in place.
However, if retirement isn’t in the cards in the next few years, there are other alternatives that are on the table for state pension plans.
Alternatives
There are plenty of private alternatives for saving for your retirement, but when it comes to the state pension plan, there are tons of options up for discussion. Discussions for reducing it to a double lock, or moving it from a 2.5% minimum growth per year to a smaller growth per year, is being heavily considered
However, trying to predict the rates of inflation can be extremely tricky! Although there are lots of benefits of online gaming, and you can hit it big on the jackpots, you shouldn’t rush out the door to gamble your pension away!
Keep an Eye Out
With a growing society, and many people living for longer, the UK’s elected officials have a lot to consider. From the overall cost, to all of the technicalities of predicting inflation, you should look out for your future by keeping an eye out on what is happening with your pension!
You can check on your pension now, or you can watch the news to see what your future income will be like when you retire. Either way, a lot of changes may be on the horizon for your gold year financials!
The mobile phone retailer Phones 4U says it will ban all of its 2500 employees from using email. The statement was released yesterday saying that the company will save about ?1 Million a month. The CEO John Caudwell, would rather employees talk to staff and customers rather then write emails, he said that he was fed up of seeing workers glued to their computers all day.
Apparently each employee should have an extra 3 hours a day free because of the ban. "I saw that e-mail was insidiously invading Phones 4U, so I banned it immediately," Caudwell said in a statement. "Phones 4U staff have been told to get off the keyboards, get face-to-face or on to the phone to colleagues. The quality and efficiency of communication have been increased tremendously in one fell swoop; things are getting done; people aren't tied to their PCs," the CEO said. While this may seem a bit extreme could we see more companies in the future taking similar measures or could we see the introduction of more voice typing programs?
About two months ago I sold my first website on Flippa.com, a site dedicated to buying and selling websites and domains. Launched earlier this year by a team from the internet resources site Sitepoint the marketplace is like Ebay for buying and selling websites.
The site I sold was www.ipodhistory.com, I originally bought the site from the Digital Point Forums about 18months earlier for $180 (£90 at the time), it was my most expensive site I had bought and was a relatively big gamble. Over the following year and a half I invested in search engine optimisation, added new content and grew a community. In this time I tripled the traffic and advertising revenue.
I listed the site on Flippa and immediately received interest and a number of offers. After around two weeks the site sold for $2000 (£1300). I was paid through PayPal and the transaction went very quickly and smoothly.
You can list sites on Flippa either with an auction style listing or where people submit private bids for a site. Flippa charge a listing fee with various optional extras (about $28 for my site) plus a final value fee of 5% (with a cap of $498).
It's sad to see the iPod History site go from my portfolio but I'm more than happy with the return on investment.
For those that don?t know the Xbox is a major games console produced by Microsoft, so far the Xbox has been very successful and has sold many games including the very popular Halo. On November 15th 2002 Microsoft will start to offer a new service for Xbox called Xbox Live, this is basically a complete world of online gaming for the Xbox meaning you can play games with other people around the world. However Xbox live will only be available for broadband/cable users because of the large amount of bandwidth such games take up to play online. A starting kit will be available for the Xbox that will include the necessary kit needed to be able to play games online. It also contains a microphone as all games will have voice chat enabled this is mainly because as the Xbox does not come with a keyboard as default it can get hard to chat to fellow gamers with a game pad.
Microsoft is taking a different view into online gaming for its console compared to its rivals which include Sony who produce the Playstation series. Microsoft are providing all the online software needed to get a game online while Sony rely on the games developers themselves to produce all the necessary software for getting their game online. The smaller games producers like the approach from Microsoft as it saves them a lot of work for little extra money, while the big companies such as Electronic Arts, who produce such games as Red Alert 2 and Medal of Honour, find the approach annoying as they have already invested heavily in online games markets.
Either way Microsoft looks to once again being at the forefront of the console online gaming revolution and will be a major contender in many years to come in the console market. Its system will certainly make it easier for the end user to play games online with its simple interface making all online games easy to access. Games producers for Sony intend to have games coming online to the Playstation 2 early next year.
The face of console gaming is going to change a lot in the coming months as it did when people started getting into online gaming on the PC. I personally think that games sales will continue to increase and the number of people taking up broadband will also increase.