social security - FOD Sociale Zekerheid

Old-age pensionsPensions! Nowadays you are almost inevitably confronted with them! The pension problem is oneof the major worries of our social security system. What will the future bring us?A. More and more retired peopleThe entire pension problem and its announced aggravation cannot be tracked down to onebasic cause. Indeed, we can point out various factors that mutually reinforce their influence onpensions. In the first place, life expectancy has grown. People live longer thanks to the newmedical techniques. Of course, that also means they are entitled to receive a pension during anever longer period.Secondly, employees stop their career earlier and earlier. As a result of several types of newmeasures designed to discharge the older active population for the sake of the employment ofyoung people, the true pension age no longer corresponds with the legal pension age..Moreover, as study periods at the beginning of the professional career become ever longer, theactive population who pay contributions to finance the pensions keeps on diminishing.In addition, birth rates in Belgium are going down for some decades already.Finally, the increasing employment of women will also influence the growth of pension costs,since working women also create their own personal pension. Because of this, a couple livingtogether receives two single persons' pensions instead of one family pension - which is moreexpensive.As a summary, we could say that the 'degree of dependency' (i.e. the ratio of the number ofretired to the number of actives) will increase.Below we shall list the specific regulations of the entire pension sector. Our starting point is thesalaried persons' scheme, and then we will indicate the differences with the other schemes. Butfirst, we should explain the difference between retirement pensions and survivor's pensions:- a retirement pension is a benefit you obtain after a given age through formeremployment;- a survivor's pension is a benefit you obtain through the employment of the deceasedspouse.We will discuss these two pension types separately.34