@BIG-notorious There is a
purchase and transfer option to "buy back" referable amounts on the single pension scheme. It's expensive but the option is there.
I'm well aware of the facility and when it was announced I was quite excited about it, right up to the point where I looked at the details. It's not only expensive as you say but only available by way of lump sum purchase rather than (like the older schemes) salary deduction. So unless you have a large lump sum hanging around which you can use to purchase what is effectively an index linked lifetime annuity from age 66, then that option isn't open to you.
Most public servants (myself sadly included in that majority) don't have a large lump sum available to dump into their pension all at once. Most also don't have eligible accrued benefits from other employments to transfer in. So it's not for the large majority a realistic option, even if it's an option in theory. Also the purchase is based on a return of around 4.5% at 66
AND there's no return other than inflation between when you purchase and when you draw down, so if you buy €1,000 worth of pension or lump sum at age 55 you've basically put €23k earning a paltry 2% or so interest for a decade while it could be doing something useful.
You could use an AVC fund to build your SPS benefits up to about half final salary (ok, this would include the state pension) and get the full Revenue allowed (?200k) tax free lump sum too.
TFLS is max of 1.5 x final salary, and the 50% of final salary is based on working until 66. Retiring at 60 as I plan to do I would (even if I somehow maxed out my Single Scheme entitlement to 50% of my final salary which I'm not sure is even possible) result in a 20% drop in my SPSPS pension
AND a reduction of around €16k as I wouldn't have access to the supplementary pension or COAP for another 6 years. That'd cut my income from around €80k a year to just over €19k a year during the earliest and what are likely to be my healthiest and most active years of retirement.
So the SPSPS is for most really only a modest supplement to the COAP and AVCs, as compared to being the main event in terms of retirement like the earlier schemes. Not to be relied upon really.
Giving self employed people an inflation linked pension for life in exchange for 4% of their salary is bonkers. It will have to go.
Inclined to agree on this one but think upping the contribution rates significantly is the way to go. But I'm one of the few people who believes that they personally should be paying more tax.
Giving very wealthy people the COAP when they don't need it will have to go.
Yes & no. A hard cutoff brings its own problems as people will moan about it being either too high or too low. I think it's more politically reasonable to leave it to the general taxation system to claw back 50% of it. Also, very wealthy people (say top 5%?) will be by definition always be the small minority of recipients and paying half of it back to the exchequer and therefore cutting or reducing their entitlement to the COAP will have a small impact.
The time to address these issues is now, when we have some financial headroom, not when the international lenders again refuse to give us any more credit.
The time to address these issues was 10 years ago but successive governments made the conscious & deliberate decisions to prioritise tax cutting ahead of either building up a significant strategic reserve or investing in infrastructure. Current strategic reserve is what, €12 billion? Compared to €35 billion before the 2008 crash, so maybe 20% of what it was 17 years ago after accounting for inflation. So if the decade long taxes bonanza returns to normal then we'll be in a far worse position than we were before due to the already wasted decade.
But the second best time to address these issues is now. But I don't really see that happening.
The country went bust during the financial crisis and had to be baled out. They probably won't bale us out again.
They probably will bale us out again. QE is a big bazooka in the hands of the ECB which can be deployed again if needs be to ease borrowing rates for the State and businesses. Also having one of your member states collapse under financial pressure isn't going to be a better look for the EU in 2028 than it was in 2008....
That's actually pretty low by European standards. Aggregate (employer + employee) social insurance contributions in various countries as a percentage of earnings:
UK: 23.8%
Finland: 31.4%
Spain: 37.1%
Germany: 38.4%
Italy: 40%
France: 68%
Shhh. Either whine and moan that we're getting taxed too heavily or just keep your head down and be silent on the subject. You'll get no thanks here for providing evidence or numbers which contradict people's firmly held views that they're living in some kind of communist hellhole....