Finns' trust in national pension scheme is crumbling according to Nordea

distrust by Fabrice Le Coq on Flickr

A couple days ago Nordea bank released information on a survey they had commissioned about Finns' opinions about their pensions. More and more people are starting to question the pension system and it seems I'm not alone with my ideas. A severe distrust seems to be spreading and fast.

I tried to locate the actual survey data but could only find distilled information. There's a press release about the survey from Nordea and subsequent news articles on national media outlets such as HS, Kauppalehti, Talouselämä, Taloussanomat, etc.

Men were especially pessimistic. Only 23% of the men surveyed had said that they believe the level of the national pensions will be enough. This was an 8 percentage point decrease from last year. Let me repeat that: Only 23% thought their pensions will be big enough.

The survey also asked about people's saving habits and found that more than half of the population, 58% actually, are saving for the future. This represents a 4 percentage point increase over a the previous year's result. The average savings amount was 50 to 200 euros a month. Those are actually pretty ok numbers if they would turn out to be true. The data can be somewhat biased though.

They also report that about 15% of the people who save have a special pension savings account (”PS-tili”) or a voluntary pension insurance. I should look into those with more gusto but on the surface they seem quite expensive and/or susceptive major political risks. Maybe I'll write a blog post about these in the future.

I also took a look at another data source which seems to contradict Nordea's data. OECD reports savings rates as percentage of household disposable income per country per year. According to OECD the savings rate in Finland was actually a negative in 2014 with a savings rate of -0.2%. This corresponds to about 5% in the USA and about 15% in Sweden. Man, those Swedes...

OECD: Savings rates of countries as percentage of household disposable income

The OECD data feels more representative overall and the Nordea data more biased but this is merely my speculation. At least the OECD data tells the same story as my last blog post about Finn's net worths. What do you think?