Having adequate funds in your later years is such an important issue because from what the government is telling us there would not be enough funds in the kitty to depend on the government a pension alone. So we have to be responsible ourselves in terms of how we raise funds in order to cater for ourselves. One might think that the cost of living would go down because our mortgage will be paid off and our kids will be reared. However what we often don't think about is the cost of our health care that is nursing homes and hospitals alike. These facilities cost a fortune, fine if you want to let the state take care of you but if we are honest we all would like to have a choice of where we are going to end up. What type of facility is going to take care of us? We should all have an input into this question however the choice could be very quickly taken away from you if you don't have the funds to pay for an alternative.



Believe it or believe it not the current older generation are in a better position to get taken care of themselves than we will be when it comes to our turn. Going back 50 years in the main people did not have lots of disposable income. This meant that people in general behaved very similar in that they went to work, bought a house, reared at family and in the main took very little risk. The consequence of this is that they may not have had lots of disposable income but had very little debt when their mortgage was paid off so they were asset rich and cash poor. If you compare that scenario to the next generation getting older and will need to be taking care of at some stage, the difference with the next generation is that there was a lot more disposable income which led to huge inflation which in turn led to huge debt. Now that there is a recession and there is a lot of corrections taking place in terms of the true value of the assets that people have they may not have much equity at the end of their working life to raise some funds in order to pay for their retirement. What many people are left with now are low-paid jobs huge mortgages and finding it very hard to make ends meet. A lot of people may not be able to pay back all the debt and could possibly be in negative equity after working all their lives. This would not be everyone but could be as significant percentage of the world's population. This is a new variation in terms of dealing with the ability of people to pay for their retirement.

How many people have a pension? The answer is not enough because everybody in the world should have some level of a pension in order to ensure a reasonable level of living standard in their later years. The fact that people don't have pensions just means that in the main people are putting off the inevitable and are not planning for the future. To compound this the recession has made disposable income even tighter than it was and this will put even more pressure on people's ability to plan for the future.