It feels faintly absurd to be thinking about retirement at 25. Not in the sense that I’m too young to do so, but in a more existential way.
It’s hard to think about how much I will need tucked away in my later years when I’m not even sure if the state pension – which millions currently rely on – will exist in a few decades.
I have been putting 10 per cent of my salary into my pension since I started my job at The i Paper in 2024, hoping to build a substantial pot in case the Government support is scrapped in the next half a century.
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For now, the state pension offers a thin kind of reassurance. At £241.30 a week – £12,547.60 a year – it’s not exactly luxury living, but it’s something.
Strip out a paid-off mortgage (optimistically) and no debts (even more optimistically), and you’re left with just over £1,000 a month to live on. Manageable, perhaps, depending on what “living” looks like in 40 years’ time.
But that’s the problem. Forty years is not just a long way off – it’s another world entirely.
Housing, healthcare, politics – everything that determines whether that £241.30 a week is enough is wildly uncertain.
And beneath it all sits a deeper, more unsettling question: will the state pension even exist in its current form?
To be totally honest, I don’t think it will. In fact, I’m increasingly convinced it won’t.
So I’m saving as if it won’t be there at all.
This is what “taking responsibility” looks like for my generation. We’re all – or at least my friends and I – quietly assuming that the social contract won’t hold.
It’s not a particularly empowering mindset. It’s more like pre-emptive disappointment. And yet it’s hard to ignore the direction of travel.
The idea of means-testing the state pension – once controversial – is no longer unthinkable. It wouldn’t even be unprecedented.
When the state pension was first introduced, it was only available to those on low incomes. Countries like Australia already taper support based on retirement income.
And means-testing is happening here. A few years ago, free TV licences for over-75s were taken away as a universal benefit and narrowed so that only those on pension credit still qualify, meaning many pensioners are now required to pay.
Winter Fuel Payments were then also tightened from a near-universal payment into a means-tested one with income thresholds, prompting political backlash and partial reversals, but not a return to full universality.
If these benefits can be trimmed, restricted or reshaped, why not the state pension itself?
The cost alone makes it an obvious target. By the end of this year, official predictions suggest that the UK is expected to spend around £146bn a year on state pensions.
That figure is so high largely because people are living longer, so more people are drawing a pension for more years than in the past. On top of that, the triple lock means the state pension rises each year by whichever is highest – wages, inflation, or 2.5 per cent – so the cost doesn’t just grow with retirees, it grows faster than the economy in many years.
That’s not just a large number – it’s a political pressure point. Something will have to give. The question is when, and for whom.
Which leaves people like me – young, financially stretched, and already juggling rising living costs – trying to prepare for a retirement that may look nothing like the one we’ve been promised.
We’re constantly told to think ahead, to start early, to make pension contributions as soon as we can because “future us will thank us for it”, even while the present makes that harder to do.
This is where the contradiction bites. I’ve just bought my first home, so inevitably, money is tight.
Every spare pound has a job and is directed into different pots – furniture, repairs – the endless, invisible costs of setting up a life. And yet I’m supposed to prioritise a version of myself that may not exist in a system that may not either.
So, yes, I still save – or try to. I push money into my pension each month, even as another part of me whispers that I deserve to enjoy it now. And maybe the more rational response to all this uncertainty isn’t to keep over-optimising for a future that keeps shifting, but to make sure I’m also able to live properly in the present.
But that’s the trap, isn’t it? If my generation collectively leans into that thinking, we’re even less prepared for what’s coming.
I envy my grandparents. Not just for their “gold-plated” defined benefit pensions – though that certainly helps – but for the stability that underpinned them.
My grandad told me a story the other day about how his employer helped him buy his first home, lending him the deposit like it was nothing extraordinary. Today, that sounds like fantasy.
We are told to be prudent, disciplined, forward-thinking but it’s difficult to plan for a future that feels so fundamentally uncertain.
So I save. Reluctantly, inconsistently, sometimes resentfully. Not because I trust the system – but because I don’t.