Pain delayed but retiree braces

SCRIMPING to make ends meet is already part of the lot of many pensioners.

Jeff Coath on the beach near his Southport unit. ‘When you wake up every day having to budget for every movement, every action with no wriggle room, that makes a difference’.

JEFF Coath won’t face a hit to his aged pension until 2017 and even then it won’t be cut.

But the rate of growth will slow from September as the indexation is tied to inflation rather than the more generous average male weekly earnings, and that, to him, means an erosion of his ability to “keep up”.

Modelling by the Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association shows a single aged pensioner will have their pension grow by $75 less a fortnight across the first five years of the indexation changes, between 2017 and September 2022.

Couples will be $100 worse off in real terms during the same ­period.

Coath presently receives $766 a fortnight.

“So OK, it doesn’t start until 2017 and it’ll grow slower, but there are still so many unanswered questions,” he says.

“I’m still not sure what the ­effect will be.”

The federal government argues its axing of $1.3 billion paid over four years to states and territories for senior card concessions won’t result in cuts because the other ­jurisdictions will pick up the tab.

The jury is still out on whether the states will maintain the same level of concessions.

The Coalition has maintained the Clean Energy Supplement — renaming it the Energy Supplement — at current rates, worth $13.90 for pensioners.

The 72-year-old widower moved from Melbourne to a ­rented retirement village unit in sunny Southport, on Queensland’s Gold Coast three months ago, after a long and varied career in sales and marketing.

He says he was surprised at how difficult it was for him to find low-cost, one-person rental housing, with the retirement village the only place he can afford.

Whereas once he might have tossed groceries into his shopping trolley without a second thought, Coath says now he has to ­constantly scrimp and shop for bargains. Aside from rent — for which he receives assistance from Centrelink — his biggest expense is ­insurance.

He has private health insurance and recently switched from Medibank Private to NIB to save $15 a month in premiums.

“To a pensioner, that’s like winning a hundred bucks,” Coath says.

He is in favour of incrementally raising the pension age.

“It’s absolutely vital,” says Coath, who — after urging from a friend — began claiming a full aged pension when he turned 65.

“People have got to contribute more, because they’re living longer.” He agrees welfare entitlements should be indexed across the board to contribute to cutting the national deficit.

“We need to get the country back on a reasonably even keel,” Coath says.

Although he concedes the pension slug may not be as great as the headline figures, the end result could not be viewed in isolation.

“They are double dipping, in my opinion, because the pension growth rate is being reduced and we’re paying more for other things,” he says.

“When you wake up every day having to budget for every movement, every action with no wriggle room, that makes a difference.”

Additional reporting: Sarah Elks