In this week news: Japanese Pension alone is inadequate in aging society

[ricardo]

Gotta love Japanese TV and newspapers.

Gotta love the messages from government.

Believe ‘em, darling?

(By the way, I love Japan and I love Japanese people. I just hate the media. The government is kind of doing okay, under the circumstances).

[mule96]

The funny thing is, is that the head of the FSA (the governments financial arm who published the report), Mr. Aso now says that the report is not accurate and misleading... Of course pension is a sensitive topic and the current government would want to avoid this before the next elections.

[0x143]

While I'm all for encouraging more people to save in the discussion around this report no one appears to mention the methodology.

The report looks at existing retiree's spending on average. Then it points out that this spending is not covered by the nation pension. This is a big-"of course" in my book. Any retiree who has non-pension savings will be dragging the average up. To then turn around and report that the average is higher than the base line is not a notable finding.

One could triple the nation pension and ten years later this "problem" would still occur. The only scenario where the average is lower or equal the baseline is if non-nation pension savings were too be outlawed. So long as a single retiree has even 1 yen in their yuchou when the retire the average spending of retirees is going to exceed the national pension baseline.

[captainspoke]

Here's a reddit discussion of something similar, UK version:

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinanc ... t_we_cant/