Today’s statistical 40-year-old will receive a pension of no more than 30 percent. his last paycheck. Little can be changed, because at this age, “half the cards have already been dealt.” Dr. Tomasz Lasocki from the University of Warsaw noted that 25 years after the pension reform, we still do not understand how the pension system works, and we hope that it will treat us as a generation of parents. And this is a mistake.
The host of the “News” program at Wirtualna Polska asked his guest, Dr. Tomasz Lasocki from the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Warsaw, what pension he, as an average 40-year-old man, could expect. The answers can upset even the most optimistic person.
Retirement in Poland. Parents of 40-year-olds played by different rules
Dr. Lasocki began by saying that in the case of the 40-year-old, “half the cards have already been dealt.” Ultimately, much depends on how he was “applied to by the market” in the early years of his professional activity.
- If during your student years you worked on commission, and I assume that you worked, then you have 5 non-insurance years, which are counted only for receiving the minimum pension. If your father graduated from college, he increased his pension by 3.5 percent. The rules of the game have completely changed. In the old system, it was enough to show 10 years of good work to determine the amount of the pension. According to him, not a single allowance is forgiven in the new system. - For 25 years we have not learned this and it has not reached our consciousness.
Replacement speed. How to survive on ¼ of the last paycheck
And what about the replacement rate, i.e. What percentage of the salary will we have a statistical pension? It is estimated that for the generation born at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this will be 25 percent, in some cases this amount will correspond to about thirty percent of the last salary.
However, it should be remembered that each subsequent decade of life brings with it a certain dynamic.
- Aging is divided into stages. The first 10 years, that is, up to seventy years in the case of women, is the most pleasant time when we still have strength, so we earn extra money. We can use various programs: PPK, IKE, IKZE. Only funds accumulated there, which are rarely mentioned, are not subject to valorization. The people who received money from the PPC 5 years ago probably don’t have these funds anymore, because inflation has eaten them up. This is how we lose purchasing power. After 10 years of retirement, all we really have left is money from ZUS, explained Dr. Lasocki.
It’s hard to talk about a pension, it’s some kind of “long life scholarship”
You have to prepare for retirement or we will have a reunion with 10,000 people. up to PLN 3,000 for life. And it’s still in good shape.
The guest of the Novosti program directly says that the money that in 20 years will go to the accounts of today’s forty-year-olds can hardly even be called a pension, because it will not ensure survival. He joked that people used to say “old age pension” for funds for the elderly, but today it is no longer the case “because I don’t have enough.”
- Now we will call this allowance not a pension, but a kind of micro-scholarship for a decline in strength. It will not be money that will allow you to completely switch off, but rather reduce the amount of work, for example, instead of 40 hours a week, you will work “only” 25, Dr. Lasotsky predicted.
Is raising the retirement age the only way out? The guest of the program slyly replied that “we are not doomed to raise the retirement age”, but the question is what will be the consequences. We must understand that if the system does not change and in 20 years it will function as it does now, then we must move away from the idea of pension as a time of rest and think about what we will live on for the next 20-30 years. .
Source: Wprost
I am George Brown, author at Daily News Hack. I mostly cover economy news and I have been doing this for quite some time now. I have a lot of experience in this field and I’m always looking for new opportunities to learn more.
