Retirement Income | Your Money With Mary Holm | RNZ

Описание: 2019: Mary Holm offers insights from conference on retirement income policies at the University of Auckland's Retirement Policy and Research Centre.
All sorts of issues were aired last week when about 20 speakers addressed a conference about retirement income policies at the University of Auckland's Retirement Policy and Research Centre.
Minister of Consumer Affairs Kris Faafoi spoke of his concerns about the growing income inequality in New Zealand, and the need for a "massive culture change. We need to be talking about money around the kitchen table. Money is not a dirty topic," he said.
He also said that raising the age when you start to get NZ Super is "off the table". The Labour Party talked about that in the last two elections before the 2017 election, and did badly, he said. "We live in a political reality."
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Listen to the full conversation.
Financial journalist and author Mary Holm tells Jesse Mulligan she doesn't agree with that.
Among the themes that interested Mary was the idea of smoothing out how much people have to spend throughout their lives - before and after retirement.
Another topic that came up at the conference was the fact a lot fewer older New Zealanders are in poverty than children. But still, many people depend on NZ Super for all or most of their income in retirement. Also, many more people over 65 are continuing to work - some because they want to but some because they have to.
"I thought this was really interesting, about 5 percent of people over 65 are by one definition in poverty, whereas, children up to age 17, that's 38 percent."
And poverty early on in life tends to dictate how people will end up when they're older, she says.
"Having said that, a lot of old people rely totally on New Zealand super, of all people over 65, 40 percent of them manage on New Zealand super plus less than hundred dollars from elsewhere per week.
"So, they're living on largely on New Zealand super and of single people over 65, 40 percent of them have got no other income other than New Zealand super."
On a brighter note, Treasury was reassuring about whether we can afford NZ Super in the future, she says.
"Because the population is aging, which we all know about baby boomers coming into retirement, there will be a bigger percentage of gross domestic product spent on super, but it's not growing as fast, is not projected to grow as fast, as they thought 10 years ago or 20 years ago, the problem is looking not as worrying and that's largely because the projections of what's going to happen the gross domestic product - they think the economy is going to get bigger."…
Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details (https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/your-mo...)