With suicide being the most common cause of death in young men, It seems to me we may have an entire generation who have major issues. I'm not going to go on a rant about this, but if we gave them decent jobs for decent pay and they had access to affordable housing so they could make their own lives, maybe we wouldn't have quite so much of a problem.

With women doing better at University the young men must be finding life even tougher. Though I wonder how much of this is down to the current state of the economy?

apart from the minor problem of who is going to give them decent jobs for decent pay and affordable houses. Theres just a minor funding issue with that!

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No, there isn't. It's a simple case of what we choose to do and where we choose to spend our money. Or, more accurately, where those we elect choose to spend our money.

I think it is a combination of both. Bob is right that they leave university with a mountain of debt will need to build up a nest egg of more than a million pounds to give them any chance of a decent retirement and then buy a tiny flat for £200 000 and then hope it works out. The problem is that we have an older generation who blame the young for being lazy and want to cut benefits which will only increase the problem for most of them if they go in and out of employment. The people we elect are bailing out the banks and those who gambled on a property pyramid to enable them to retire. Yet unless we burst that property bubble the you will not be able to afford to get on the housing ladder unless it is left to them in a will and it will mean an every slower birth rate and a societal collapse like that in Japan.

It is not just young women.

Mark

Which other group/s would you say is/are feeling the pressure?

Well you obviously. You're a one man vortex of despair.

Adding this to my sig. (8+)

Mark

I imagine a similar survey of young men wouldn't exactly be a picnic of a read either tbh.

It's an investment in yourself, you wouldn't call buying a house or buying shares getting yourself into debt. The loans if unpaid are written off after a period of time anyway and track just above inflation (which is lower than interest on a mortgage currently)

Where does it say you need a million to retire? A nest egg of just a third of that at £350k pp works out over £20k pa as a salary in retirement

I'm not fully clued up on the rules/figures on the new pension scheme details but I think looking at some calculators/backround on how it works based on a £25k pa job you would need to invest £300 a month personally to end with roughly a bit over £8k a year if you will be 30 when it comes in fully (with the employer contributing 3% and retiring at 65, retiring at 70 ups that to almost £11.5k. Of post tax (pre student loan income) that works out as 18% of your wage. No idea how those work with factoring in inflation etc as I believe those are more costly as a result

While investment in a degree is possibly worth while for some, many degrees are simply not worth the paper they are printed on. Also many degrees like Engineering or Computing can pay little more than average white collar jobs. Even when the government originally touted the idea of higher earnings as a result of degrees that was based on that would not benefit many degrees. One would actually leave you worse off, even ignoring the debt aspect, that was a Fine Art Degree, especially if you were a man. Also the lifetime earnings premium from a degree has also plummeted from over supply of graduates. So it would be like a mortgage on a house that has just fallen off a cliff. You cannot get it written off and you cannot call it an investment if the degree is a bad one.

There are large numbers of graduates who are in jobs right now that they are grossly overqualified for. The basic degree has become the entry level for many jobs. In fact to actually differentiate yourself in a world with millions of graduates you will need additional degrees and debt to get the higher incomes.


I was watching Dispatches on Channel 4 last week and it mentioned that new borns will need to earn or save more than £2.5 Million before they can retire. Obviously they have 18 years of non payment and inflation, so strip that out and it could be close to million.


There are two aspects. First pensions have traditionally been sold on the basis of 8% annual investment income returns, yet they have been for many years under performing that level. So this will mean that pension pots will be smaller than expected. It is this element that caused all the problems with endowment mortgages that failed to cover the mortgage a few years ago. Add in fees which could take 25% of your pension pot over the years and you can see why it starts to look doubtful.

It all depends on the annuity rates and they have been plummeting with the Bank of England's zero interest rate policy. With annuities they have an element of insurance in them. It is that which allows annuity companies to over pay you. They work on statistical confidence that a certain percentage will die before they hit the age at which the annuity pot is exhausted. If you die before then the company keeps the balance of your annuity. If you live longer the company losses money and if they have enough oldies still claiming they go bust. So if you had a million pound annuity paying £50 000 a year but you died the second day they keep the balance. If you had a capital protected annuity then your family would get the money back but the pension payments would be very low around the rate of interest, which is around 0.5% or £5000 pa from the same sum.

I put your figures into the Aviva pension calculator. For an 18 year old with a salary of £25000 retiring at 65. It estimated a pension pot of £372,342 It had a wide margin for your income from between £785 and £2099 per month. That is all in todays money. We have no idea how inflation will impact this.

It came out with a monthly income of £1275.

What a maudlin little determinist you are. Dispatches on Channel 4 doesn't know what the economic fate of future generations will be; that is going to be decided by innovators who make the future happen, not TV's investigative futurologists who try to guess what those guys will get up to decades in advance.

You cannot possibly predict whether today's youth will gain or lose financially as a result of attending university, not even in aggregate, yet alone case-by-case. It is logically impossible to derive lifetime earnings statistics based on on a recent trend, all you can demonstrate by the attempt is lack of basic reasoning skills (which could have been addressed by better educational choices that you ought to have made at the appropriate time). Simplistic supply and demand reasoning is not appropriate for such analysis in anything but the short term.

There is nothing wrong with a Fine Arts degree, it is entirely worth spending money on if that's what will get you out of bed in the morning (or whenever Jeremy Kyle is on TV).