Is your pension a piece of wet soap to you?

For many people, retirement is like picking up a piece of soap in the shower: hard to get!
It starts with the confusion between the state pension date (AOW-datum) and the retirement date. Although the two dates ideally are the same at the end of someone’s working life, there may still be years between the entry dates.
State pension is a government matter and pension is an individual matter depending on the circumstances of the person in question.
I see pension as a piggy bank, which you fill during your working life and you can smash it on retirement date.
After that, during the rest of your life you can always spend the proceeds piece by piece.
If there is a good chance that you will get very old, you have to take it a little slow with the annual consumption, otherwise you won’t have any money left to spend during your retirement.
In addition to low capital market interest rates, pension funds are struggling with the aging problem. They have committed fixed lifetime pension benefits to participants during the build-up period. They assumed a shorter life expectancy of the participants.
This results in a kind of negative price in the lottery, because these funds now need to have more cash in order to be able to make future longer-term benefits.
In a number of cases, this will therefore cause discounts on the defined pension benefits.
Retirement is far too important to know too little about it. Therefore, this article and the following series of pension items.
Hopefully this will make this subject less slippery.