Amazing news… fewer Irish have pensions.

Here’s something that’s bound to surprise all of us. Straight from the Sunday Business Post.

Less than a quarter of Irish adults are saving for their retirement via a pension, according to research due to be published this week.
The latest figures from the Irish Association of Pension Funds (IAPF) revealed that two-thirds of Irish people are not setting aside money for their retirement through a pension fund.

Amazing – eh? The midst of the worst recession in generations and fully two-third of Irish people are eschewing pensions.
And what of this?

According to the findings, those most likely to be saving for retirement include men, middle-aged people, people with families and middle-class individuals.

Who would have thought it? That middle-class individuals would be most likely to save.
And while you’re digesting that information here’s a bit more…

The research also revealed that almost half of all adults expect that the state pension will be their main source of income in retirement. Fewer than one in three of those surveyed said they expected that a private pension would be their main source of retirement income.

Where pension companies expect the majority of workers to get money to fund pensions is something that they remains very coy about. Of course they’ve long had an effective hand out from the state in terms of tax reliefs, reliefs which long benefited those on higher rates. It takes but one look at the following to demonstrate how unrealistic that industry is as regards the issue:

The IAPF research revealed a wide range of answers from respondents on how much of their current income they thought they would require in retirement.
Just over one in ten said they thought they would need less than 30 per cent of their current income in retirement while, at the other end of the scale, almost a quarter said they would need more than 70 per cent of their current income.
Three in five of those surveyed said they believed that more than 10 per cent of their current income should be put aside each year to have their desired income in retirement.

‘Realistically’ as the handy little leaflets in any bank will tell you a pension – if one is to receive anything close to one’s salary – and this holds true at any level of salary, requires considerable amounts of money put back in, money that anyone on the average industrial wage or below simply won’t have. And short of an employer providing a pension and deducting it at source, it’s untenable to expect workers to make that sort of arrangement. The much vaunted PRSA’s didn’t make much of a dent in this. And as the recession has tightened many/some people are lowering the amount of money they’re putting into pensions (as well as causing the industry to go into a spin). Small wonder then that people are expecting to be dependent upon the state pension. And small wonder that the pension providers are getting antsy. The state has little money to throw at the problem. Their former clients are shedding their pensions. Where do they find the space to grow?

None of which addresses the fundamental issue.

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