February 2020

Retirement Migration from the U.S. to Latin American Colonial Cities (International Perspectives on Aging Book 27)

By Philip D. Sloane, Sheryl Zimmerman, Johanna Silbersack This book provides a comprehensive overview of a growing phenomenon in migration: retired Americans moving to Latin America. Through in-depth profiles of two of the most popular destinations – Cuenca, Ecuador and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the book provides a unique commentary on the social forces shaping this new diaspora and its impact on the settings to which retirees relocate.  Sections of the book address the lives and activities of retirees themselves; their...

Pension inequality: Not enough is being done to close the wealth gap for women of colour in retirement

Since the dawn of auto-enrolment in 2012, the narrative from some in the corridors of power is that we have a pensions system which works for everybody. Not quite. While more than 10 million more workers have started saving over the past eight years, we still have a long way to go before we can argue with a straight face that the playing field for retirement saving is a level one. We now have more evidence about who the...

Measuring the ethnicity pensions gap

By The people´s pension Last year The People’s Pension examined in detail the drivers of the yawning gap in pension income between women and men, as the first part of a series examining the UK’s ‘under-pensioned’. Our second report focuses on another dramatically underpensioned group: ethnic minorities. New calculations by The People’s Pension reveal that the UK’s overall ethnicity pension gap – the percentage difference in pension income for pensioners who belong to an ethnic minority group compared to pensioners...

January 2020

UK’s ethnic minority pensioners are GBP3,350 a year worse off

In the UK, the average pensioner from an ethnic minority is GBP3,350 a year worse off than other people their age, according to new analysis from The People’s Pension. The pension provider’s new report, Measuring the Ethnicity Pension Gap, highlights that the average ethnic minority pensioner’s income is 24.4 per cent less than their white counterpart. The divide is even greater from a gender perspective; on average, the gap in annual pension income between a female pensioner from...

Risk and Equity Release Mortgages in the UK

By: Tripti Sharma, Declan French, Donal G. McKillop Accessing elderly housing wealth through equity release mortgages (ERMs) continue to be the focus of policy debates about how to pay for social care and how to support retirement incomes in the UK. We demonstrate in this paper that the spatial concentration of this market in just a few regions is not due to demand but to the risks faced by suppliers. We show that by ignoring regional variations in No Negative...

Germany’s other migration wave: the pensioner exodus

As retirement neared a decade ago, German butcher Waldemar Hackstaetter took stock of his finances and concluded he and wife Hildegard couldn't afford to remain in their home country. So they moved to rural Bulgaria, where they knew their combined income of 1,200 euros (£1,026) would buy a lot more. Read Also Greek Authorities to Raise Pensions after Years of Cutbacks "The month stretched further than our pension did (in Germany) and we didn't want to become a burden to...

The World’s Best Places to Retire in 2020

“Where should I retire?” This is the question we hear most often at International Living, and every January we give you our most definitive answer in the form of our Annual Global Retirement Index. When it was first conceived, our Retirement Index was our special way of coping with an embarrassment of riches. At that stage, IL had already spent over a decade exploring all manner of dream locales. The result was a huge and exciting variety of choice and opportunity. Fast-forward to...

December 2019

Estonia: use robust growth to improve income equality and well-being

Estonia’s economy is performing well, and public finances are in excellent shape, yet growth is softening and spending pressures from infrastructure needs and an ageing population are mounting. Efforts should now focus on improving income equality and well-being, greening growth and accelerating the country’s digital transformation, according to a new OECD report. The latest OECD Economic Survey of Estonia notes Estonia’s expertise in information technology and its global head start in digitalising government services. Estonia now needs to accelerate...

Greece. Mechanism for retirees with low pensions

The government is planning to abolish the so-called 13th pension, i.e. the handout to pensioners the SYRIZA administration distributed before the elections this year, though the 971 million euros handed out to 2.5 million retirees will stay in their pockets. The Labor Ministry is already working on the creation of a permanent mechanism for the support of recipients of low pensions, within the social security system. The amount of the support and the width of the pensioner catchment will...

The Comprehensive Wealth of Older Immigrants and Natives

By David A. Love, Lucie Schmidt This article compares the retirement preparations of immigrant and native-born Americans aged 51 or older. The authors estimate the present value of future income streams in calculating measures of comprehensive wealth and an annualized equivalent. In addition to some significant differences in median annualized wealth between immigrants and natives, the authors find that the most recent waves of immigrants are more financially vulnerable in retirement than earlier immigration cohorts were at similar ages....