It said New Zealand should also focus on retirement income as the primary purpose of KiwiSaver and improve the decumulation options available to draw down the money when people retire.<\/p>\n
The countries with the top-rated systems were the Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, Singapore and Israel.<\/p>\n
While there have been questions about whether NZ Super was sustainable, Jenkins said it was not alone in that. Other countries had even more urgent problems to fix.<\/p>\n
Austria, Brazil and Italy all scored an E for sustainability for their schemes. France and Germany had an A for adequacy but a D for sustainability.<\/p>\n
Jenkins said New Zealand had improved on every measure in the latest index update, but other countries had increased more quickly.<\/p>\n
Sustainability had improved on the basis of economic data published by the IMF that no longer included some of the Covid years.<\/p>\n
He said New Zealand was in the top third of the countries surveyed \u2013 \u201cjust\u201d \u2013 with a relatively low score for income adequacy.<\/p>\n
The report looks at how much the average wage earner receives as retirement income. It seeks a benchmark of 70% of pre-retirement income.<\/p>\n
\u201cNZ Super is okay,\u201d he said. \u201cBut KiwiSaver is below average adequacy. It\u2019s voluntary with relatively low contribution rates.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said people who were in roles where they were offered a total salary package had less incentive to contribute because they were paying for their employer\u2019s contributions, too.<\/p>\n
Lower-income people and those not in work were also being left behind.<\/p>\n
Jenkins said thought could be given to decoupling employer and employee contributions to an extent, and introducing a minimum contribution for low-income people.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo help them accumulate private savings on top of NZ Super\u2026 for people who can\u2019t afford to contribute 3.5% or 4%, they don\u2019t get the extra 3.5% or 4%.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said as people lived longer, thought also needed to be given to how retirement settings responded.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re retired for 20 years from 65 that\u2019s very different from 10 years. Countries around the world are starting the debate about whether state pension ages should increase.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said adequacy and sustainability could be addressed together by looking at KiwiSaver and NZ Super as a package.<\/p>\n
In Australia it is possible to access super savings before the pension age, which allows people to retire earlier if they need to \u2013 such as when they work a manual job.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is mood for change, and the time is right,\u201d Jenkins said. \u201cKiwiSaver is 18 years old \u2013 when there\u2019s a birthday like that it\u2019s time to step back and consider what we could do. The world on Tuesday is different to 20 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 RNZ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It said New Zealand should also focus on retirement income as the primary purpose of KiwiSaver and improve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[33039,7127,95,138,3013,813,246,2082,8461,111,139,69,12613,244,245,28225,294,4578,812,61,11226],"class_list":["post-79254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-17th","tag-age","tag-and","tag-business","tag-but","tag-edmunds","tag-finance","tag-for","tag-lift","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pensions","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-ranked","tag-retirement","tag-savings","tag-susan","tag-to","tag-urged"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}