2023: “Things change, and they don’t change back.”

Currently (before application of the proposed reform), 62 is the early retirement age in France, the normal retirement age being 67 and maximum is 70. People generally don’t retire at 62 because if they do, they only get a reduced pension unless they started working before they turned 20. In my case, if I retire at 62 I’ll get 32% less than if I retire at 67, and if I retire at 70 I’ll get 16% more.

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It is not so easy to compare. You can get pension in France from 62 years on. The plan is to increase this to 64. But you only get your full pension if you payed for 42 years.
So this 62 years holds only for people who started paying for their pension since they were 20 years old, else you have a reduced payment. A detail a lot of people here in Germany also don’t know when they are comparing ist to 67 years in our country.

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Annoyed France is not a good place for a king lol

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Inspired” would have been a much more useful epithet though.
If something good is being done elsewhere then it is always good to wonder “hey, how come we don’t have this thing here???” especially when you are the biggest economy of the planet and there shouldn’t be any excuses to lag behind other, smaller, countries in such matters.

Very interesting. The question is, when does it balance out?
Five years of work and five years of giving money to the insurance system till you get 67 is obviously calculated so that the citizen will be incentivised to do so.

However, if you factor in the life expentancy there is a limit where it is more lucrative for the citizen to “tap out early” and get money/pension instead of continue giving to the system. Past that age it is obvious that if you live longer, then it would have been better to have stayed till 67.

I wonder what that age is.
I am doing some calculations in my mind and I think it is 75 and only if you live longer than that the “full pension” starts being worth it (if you factor only the money).

Personally I’d tap out as soon as possible since there is also the “life factor”.
Investing in life, even at 62, is always the better idea. Five extra years of work at that age will drain you faster than five years of work in your earlier decades, and a lot of people disregard that, push on, get a better pension and realise, to their horror, that they do not have the energy or the will to actually enjoy their hard earned rest. After all, the way I see it, if I managed to reach 75 and my biggest problem is “damn, I am losing money now” I’d say that’s a huge win :stuck_out_tongue:

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I don’t really care if/when it balances out. If I retire at 62 (assuming the current reform is abandoned), my pension will be 54% of my current salary. That’s a big loss of income, so the incentive to continue working is there. On the other hand, I don’t know how many years my health will allow me to enjoy life, so the incentive to retire as early as possible is there too. Anyway I choose not to care for the moment, who knows what will be the state of the economy and the dynamics of demography 15 years from now?

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Retirement age here is 65 for males and 60 for females after the recent reform (though right now there’s apparently a transitional period so no one actually retires in 2023). Funnily enough male life expectancy is around 68 or so. Of course, this is at birth, includes infant deaths and blah-blah-blah, so it’s not exactly a good comparison. Though even if you do retire there’s a good chance the pension is too low to live so either work until you die or rely on your family.

The population is aging so we have a lot of old people and not enough young people to support retirement system. Unexpectedly there’s enough to support a war and indirectly oligarchs’ yachts too.

All in all, retirement system is a scam and I hope I’ll die early.

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I’m curious why the earlier age for females? As they generally have a higher life expectancy, it doesn’t seem intuitive (if one had to make a difference at al).

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Well, only a dream in your country perhaps? When I watch the news it seems that preliminary steps to this are happening in several formerly “democratic” countries … and mistanthropic and pessimist me is convinced that this will happen all over the world within, say, 30–50 years.

I am sure it will “all” get MUCH worse before it begins getting better again.

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I think ArsenLapin1 was ironic. His dream has mostly come true.

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Be honest what do you see?

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I’m assuming there is a controversy about it being a religious symbol?

I did not see it on the kids, but with the guy holding it it seemed clearer.

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Many people see a swastika, and tbh I didn’t need to squint.

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Thanks, then no I didn’t see it.

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I was just curious to be honest. I am many decades away from retirement (if such a thing will exist by then), but I’lve spent many years poring over the local retirement system so I could help parents, grandparents and uncles with their retirement plans.

Noticing those people and how their outlook on the whole thing changed depending on their health and age, I came to the conclusion that at the end of the day, a lot depends on that balancing age, to make people decide what to do and how to steer themselves.

Noone does, but 15 years pass faster than we expect. For example:

That’s what my grandfather used to say when he was young. He expected to die waaaaay before retirement and in that certainty he even refused to apply for the “resistance pension” which was awarded to WW2 war and Resistance Veterans.
Imagine his surprise when he lived way over the retirement age and realised that a lot of his friends that were hidden under their beds during the war got the “resistance pension” and he, who was recorded in the local history as one of the seven people to intercept the landing Germans in the island (his aunt was captured and the first to be executed), got nothing. Prudence was not among my grandfather’s virtues :thinking:

But to be fair to him, most of us, when we are young we say a lot of grandiose things.
Even if retirement funds are in a lot of ways a what-if betting scam, it is better to place some bets there, than waking up one day at 65-70 and realising that believing that “you were not going to reach retirement age anyway”, was the biggest scam of them all.

Motherhood bonus mostly.
At some point, in my country, women could get a pension from the age of 40 or 45 :wink:
Villages are “fun” like that and we all know women that barely worked for 10 years in the civil service and then got a pension for life. This is known in Greece as the “PASOKara” era and no other logic or explanation is needed.

It is the natural ebb and flow of society unfortunately … we do not learn from it, so history will repeat, as it always does. Even grand empires fell to ruin and oblivion. Why would we be any different?

I see waste of money … who knows how many hundreds of thousands of euros were spent to design this. Why do we even need a new jersey for the national team anyway? What’s wrong with the good old blue ones?

And if they do change it again? oh “joy” … they will have to REPEAT the order and re-pay hundreds of thousands of euros for another design and another batch of jerseys.

“Money with tail” as the local saying goes …

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I didn’t see it either. I just saw a blue cross like on the Greek flag and the Nike logo.

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Considering that the team is in decline and not too much into winning, that logo could be considered a bit ironic :stuck_out_tongue:

We need a new sports company with a Dionysos logo asap.

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A few years ago, the situation made me change my ideas about work and retirement completely and now I simply say “Let’s live until then, never prioritize job over life. Let’s act based on what laws will be valid at that time.”

Unless you are a public servant with a permanent-term contract, there is no reason to make long-term plans based on the country’s laws. They may change overnight.

You may lose 25% of the core salary horizontally, which affects your retirement money total. Then, some money that were diligently (and mandatorily) paid to government organisations and would fund your retirement, get annihilated. They simply cease to exist, no explanations. Poof. This represents another 10-25% of the total retirement money you would get (and which is already reduced based on the core salary). The retirement age can go up randomly. The costs of living may go up and what seemed like decent money when you were going to work come rain or snow will be a ridiculously small amount that isn’t enough for groceries.

In the meanwhile, taxes and health costs will be calculated by public servants with high salaries.
Ah yes, the health system, in which you may have counted for your retirement, is now butchered and will be butchered further.

Pay for private insurance? We already had several huge, trustworthy firms that went awol or belly-up. I wouldn’t risk paying money to private insurance any more, but many people do.

My plan for retirement? Hope to reach that age. Hope to be healthy enough. Hope to have some money for food and heating. Then I’ll see what else can be done based on the retirement conditions of the moment. I don’t think that far any more.

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The retirement system for public servants may also change overnight. In France, the retirement pension is based on the 25 best years in the private sector, and on the last 6 months in the public sector. A few years ago, if I remember correctly Macron wanted to unify both systems, i.e. use the less advantageous system for everybody. This idea has been abandoned and is not in the current project. Who knows what the next reform will consist of?

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My old name on kgs was justdidit, and my avatar, the updown logo of nike (the banana turned by 180°)

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64 would be the minimum age. It’s a discrimination against people who didn’t study and began work early. They’d have to work until they’re 64 even if they started working as early as 16.

For someone who pursued studies after high school, this minimum age doesn’t matter, since at 62 or 64 they wouldn’t have worked enough years to retire anyway. Their actual retirement age would be much higher. I’d have to retire at 71 to get the full pension.

But the protests are not just about the proposed law itself. They are also about the way it was passed. The government used every tool at their disposal to bypass the legislative process. The law was never voted by the parliament.

A few years ago the government declared a “state of urgency” because of terrorism. Then in 2020 there was a second state of urgency declared because of covid. These special measures give extreme powers to the government. In particular, the first state of urgency, although officially declared because of terrorism, has been used extensively by the government to arrest immigrants with methods that would have been illegal if not for the state of urgency.

And now this. The government passing his most unpopular laws by force, against the parliament’s will. This is an extremely slippery slope we’re on. The protests have been mostly peaceful, on the part of the protesters; but the anti-riot police have been more violent than ever in their responses. They have orders to use violence to discourage protesters. Openly hurt people during today’s protest, so they’ll think twice before coming to tomorrow’s protest. In my city the number of cops (counting regular cops and anti-riot) has tripled in the last two years.

I don’t know how we can possibly move forward from the position we’re in today. In the 2027 presidential election it is very likely that Marine Le Pen, our local equivalent of Donald Trump, will be elected.

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