Qualifying Age For Pension Entitlement

With more and more people having a longer life expectancy, thanks to advances in modern medicine and other natural remedies, the Labour party have announced that if elected it would increase the pension age from 65 to 67 by 2033.

In fact, the official baby boomer population, born between 1946 and 1965, would have all retired prior to 2033 so really, there would not be any point raising the age of entitlement to 67yrs.

By comparison take a look at some of the Pension entitlement ages from various other parts of the world:

Australia - currently 65yrs (increasing to 67yrs by 2023)

UK and Italy - currently men 65yrs women 60yrs (UK increasing to 66yrs for all by 2020)

France - currently 60yrs (have plans to increase to 62yrs by 2018)

Germany, Netherlands and Spain - currently 65yrs

Greece - currently men 65yrs women 62yrs.

These countries are certainly showing signs that their own economies are struggling, but are they actually thinking about all of the men and women who have worked and paid taxes in some cases for more than 45 years?

To this end Grey Power are firm in their view that the pension age remain permanently at 65 years.

Read more about Grey Powers Superannuation Policy here.

What Are You Entitled To?

How many people between the ages of 45 and 65yrs old are fully aware of what they are entitled to when they reach retirement age and start to receive a pension?

In fact, if we were to take this one step further, how many people receiving a pension are fully aware of their entitlements?

It would probably be a very interesting survey to undertake.

Has it happens the Nielsen Company was commissioned by the Retirement Commission to carry out such a survey.

The survey, three questions were put to 400 respondents aged between 45 - 59yrs, provided some very interesting results.

In brief:

"84% of respondents didn't know how much New Zealand Superannuation a single person living alone would receive"

"81% of respondents didn't know how much New Zealand Superannuation a couple aged 65yrs+ would receive"

"42% of respondents had not calculated how much they would need to save for retirement"

A media release is available discussing the findings. This can be viewed by following the link below.

Most kiwis are unclear about their retirement finances