Tuesday, May 02, 2017

A 65 year-old woman will live quarter of life on Super

The qualifying age for Super has to rise.

Latest data from Statistics NZ show:

In 2014, 650,000 people were aged 65 and over in New Zealand. That’s about 14 percent of our population. This number is projected to more than double by 2039, to 1,286,000 people, almost one-quarter of the population (Stats NZ, 2014).
People are also living for longer. In 2012–14, a 65-year-old woman could expect to live another 21.3 years, and a man for another 18.9 years. This is up 6.5 years for women and 6.1 years for men since 1950–52, when they could expect to live another 14.8 years and 12.8 years, respectively (Stats NZ, 2015).
(Notwithstanding any individual savings scheme would be preferable to taxpayer-funded pensions.)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You must love to be a hater.

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Hater of what?

The Veteran said...

The real kicker in the debate, highlighted in the stats and ignored by Peters, is the projected massive increase needed in healthcare spending to meet the needs of an aging population. The increase in the eligibility age for NZ Super will only fractionally offset this cost. One can see the age being pushed back further still.

A taxpayer funded, universal and non asset tested superannuation is so embedded in our national psyche that I'm not sure the fundamentals can/will ever change. Kiwisaver (and all other schemes) are a top up to NZ Super rather than a replacement.

Mark Hubbard said...

You hate free lives, Lindsay, because brave young anony-mouse believes we must be enslaved to a ruthless tax surveillance state, in which we must have no privacy nor very little volition, so politicians can bribe their electorates with the carrot of the free lunch. The notion of lives lived in liberty bound on self-responsibility and the right to pursue our happiness in any way we like so long as we do no harm, is frowned on by these fools as, of all contradictatory notions, greedy. Anony-mouse is a bully hiding behind the bars of the collectivist prison s/he preaches.

It's all absurd. They're awful. And I'm sick of it.

paul scott said...

Superannuation people are a fetid feminist cabal. They knock back a Man's Super if he travels overseas or has a relationship woman friend. [ Dirty logic > Not resident in NZ the full year and relationship = de facto ] . But not the other way around. Not to women . Oh no. Pure discrimination. Next year you will see me in the High Court thrashing the sickly feminist zombies that run Super. Paul Scott