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Seniors in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: City air makes you poor faster in old age
Photo: Jens Büttner / dpa
There is the little word worry in old-age provision.
In fact, many people are concerned that their statutory pension will not ensure their normal standard of living in old age.
Additional private or company protection has been recommended since the pension reforms of the noughties.
How much someone should save additionally also depends on where they live.
This is shown by a new study by the Prognos Institute on behalf of the insurance industry.
Because if you want to spend your retirement in expensive metropolises like Hamburg or Munich, you have to save more money than in rural regions with lower living costs.
That in itself would not be a problem if the people in the cities actually had more money available to invest.
In Berlin, the Senate plans to pay its officials 150 euros in the capital city allowance soon.
A welcome one-off measure for anyone who gets the money.
Economically, however, this does not solve the problem.
The study also shows that the higher average wages in the boom regions have, at least so far, not been able to compensate for the higher expenditures.
In short: city air makes you free - and poorer in old age.
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But one after the other.
In order to get an impression of how much money people in the 401 districts and cities from Flensburg to Freiburg have in old age and how much they have to cover in order to be adequately cared for in their respective regions in old age, the Prognos researchers Model calculations performed at the district level with model people born in 1980.
These model people
all started working at the age of 20,
and started putting money aside for private retirement savings at the age of 26.
Cuts such as unemployment, sabbaticals or a few extra semesters before starting a career were not taken into account by the model people
you save regularly and evenly,
all retire at the age of 67 in 2047
and have 22.8 years until their death after retirement.
This is very woodcut-like, but allows the data to be compared: According to the study, the model people have different amounts of money available depending on the district.
Because the later benefit from the pension insurance is measured by the amount of income, which in turn is influenced by economic strength.
The researchers assume national economic growth of 1.3 percent per year, but forecast considerable regional deviations - and thus also different pension levels: Instead of the current 48 percent of the previous income after 45 years of contributions, the model pensioners with 47 years of contributions come to a level between 43, 0 and 46.6 percent - depending on where you live.
According to today's prices, the monthly retirement income from statutory pension and existing private provision would look like this, according to the study:
These values may seem low to some, but quite high to many people when they think of their annual pension information.
The reason for this is that the model pensioner is determined on the basis of an average and not a median earner.
In other words: the average earner earns more than almost two thirds of all wage earners and is actually a higher earner.
Even if you take this already privileged average earner, according to the Prognos researchers, when he retires he is usually still a long way from the amount he last had before retirement - and despite already existing private provision, it is still a long way from the level he was before the pension reforms of the noughties.
That would have been a performance level of around 55 percent.
In order to maintain at least this level in old age, the model pensioners would have to save different amounts each month depending on the region.
The Prognos researchers have calculated how much that matters.
Sure, that is very much in the interests of the study's commissioners, namely the insurance industry.
This gives them arguments for selling their private pension products.
Nevertheless, the amounts can certainly serve as orientation, for example by drawing your own conclusions from the comparison of the personal situation with that of the model person.
For example, someone who had to take longer breaks from the preventive care or who was only able to start late should rather set aside more for old age.
On the other hand, if you own your own property and don't have to pay rent in old age, you may be able to relax.
The differences that emerge from the model calculation are impressive.
According to the study, they vary between 100 euros per month in Prignitz and 360 euros in Munich:
However, it remains to be seen whether the gap up to the 55 percent limit can actually be closed only with these additional savings.
This is all the more true because the values do not assume interest rates will rise again until the mid-2030s.
However, if you put the amounts in relation to the different price levels in the various regions, it becomes clear: "Residents of lower-income regions, for example, do not need a Munich pension in order to be able to live well in their region when they are old," says Prognos expert Heiko Burret.
As a result, the amount of the pension cannot be used to determine the standard of living in old age in different regions - and residents of economically strong regions also have to save significantly more.
According to the study, the 40-year-old model people from Hamburg have to put aside most of them nationwide: 5.8 percent.
In Stuttgart and Munich it is 5.7 percent.
Model people in Hagen, on the other hand, have to save significantly less with 3.3 percent of their monthly income in order to reach the 55 percent target in old age.
In Gelsenkirchen and Wilhelmshaven it is only slightly more at 3.4 percent:
Whether the savings actually pay off in the end, however, also depends on whether the previous framework conditions remain as they are.
The study assumes that the statutory pension level, i.e. the pension formula, and its likely steady decline will no longer change.
What else should one assume at the moment?
However, should a (probably more left-wing) federal government decide in the meantime to stabilize the pension level through massive tax subsidies, one would have to save less privately.
So one can perhaps derive political consequences from the Prognos calculations: The falling pension level is not a law of nature, but the result of political decisions.
Anyone who thinks that the pension reforms of the past twenty years have been too much at the expense of employees can see here as an example how expensive the whole thing will be.
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