When can I retire?
August 11th, 2010
The current official ages in the UK for retirement are 65 for men and 60 for women. However as the older non-working population increases and the working proportion of the population reduces the government of the day is faced with some tough choices. This is because the state pension that the retired generation receive is funded through the National Insurance contributions currently being paid by the working population. You may have thought that your own NI contributions and taxes that you have paid over many years has been set aside to pay you an income in retirement. It is not true and therefore you see the government's dilemma. Too many people receiving the state pension and not enough people working to pay for it.
The obvious course of action for the government is to raise the retirement ages which keeps more people working and less people claiming the state pension. The longest holiday of your life, the time when you thought you could relax, travel, spend time with your grand children, do all the things you had dreamed of is likely to get shorter.
The Labour government has outlined plans to increase the age that women retire from 60 to 65 over the period 2010 to 2020 and then further increase it for both men and women to 68 by the year 2044.
The Conservative party have proposed similar increases but they intend to do it more quickly. There are a number of factors that will determine when you stop working one of which may be that you just can't afford to retire. So lets now explore that in some more detail.