The Swedish pension system contains several ticking bombs. It explains the Pension Authority’s Linda Perkiö in an interview with the newspaper Aftonbladet.
As usual, the Pension Authority sends out your pension message every year – the orange envelope. Then you get an overview of everything you earned for the general pension and what your forecast looks like and how much you can get paid when you retire.
The pension system contains a ticking bomb
However, there is a detail in the Swedish pension system that can be described as a ticking bomb. Aftonbladet writes that all the thousands of people who have worked in Sweden, and then left the country, pose a risk to the entire system.
– In 25-30 years, this can start to cause major problems if nothing is done, says Linda Perkiöactuary at the Pension Authority to the newspaper.
Aftonbladet reports that today there are about 6,500 people older than 85 years old and who have moved from Sweden and have not started taking the pension.
Then the income pension grows to SEK 5 million
According to a calculator, the newspaper reports can be a person who at the age of 65 and who has an income pension of SEK 10,000 a month, before tax, receives as much as SEK 5 million a month if they wait to withdraw the money for their centenary.
Then the pension can be lowered
The problem this causes is that the pensions grow quickly the longer you wait for the withdrawal. In addition, in many cases, the Pension Authority has not controlled whether a person has moved to another country and died there.
– In our system, they live on until we get confirmed that they are not alive. And in general we do not get that confirmation, says Linda Perkiö to the newspaper and continues:
– The two factors, that we are not told that they are dying and that their pension amounts are growing enormously, makes the debts take over in the system if you do nothing about it within the next few years.
The risks that growing pension amounts can result in is that the debt becomes so great that the brake takes in and lowers income pensions – which would affect everyone who has worked or lived in Sweden.