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Last Sun­day af­ter­noon, I was sit­ting at a ta­ble just out­side the restau­rant at the far end of the Pi­geon Point Her­itage Park in To­ba­go, when I was ap­proached by a man who asked me if I was Wil­son. I said I was and asked him his name, which he gave me. He in­di­cat­ed that he is a re­tired pub­lic ser­vant, who knew my name from read­ing this col­umn. He told me he had re­ceived his lump sum for his years of ser­vice and al­so gets a month­ly pen­sion, which he said did not go far enough be­cause the cost of liv­ing was ris­ing, but his pen­sion was not.

His state­ment that his pen­sion does not go far enough res­onat­ed with me be­cause I turned 60 last year and had an ex­pec­ta­tion that my Na­tion­al In­sur­ance and oc­cu­pa­tion­al pen­sions—from my 35 years of em­ploy­ment as a jour­nal­ist—would have been more. And had I stayed at Guardian Me­dia, which has (or had) a de­fined ben­e­fit pen­sion plan, for all of my ca­reer, it would have been more. For­tu­nate­ly for me, I got bit­ten by the in­vest­ment bug when I was 18 and have re­mained a con­sis­tent in­vestor for all of my life.

But I would haz­ard a guess that most of the T&T pop­u­la­tion aged over 60—which the 2025 Re­view of the Econ­o­my es­ti­mates at 182,989, amount­ing to 13.37 per cent of the coun­try’s to­tal pop­u­la­tion—is strug­gling to “make ends meet,” as they are faced with ris­ing cost of liv­ing and in­creased health­care ex­pens­es that ac­com­pa­ny the ag­ing process.