Anthony worked for forty-one years, most of them in engineering, and paid National Insurance throughout. He retired to Thailand in 2011, where his pension went further and where he had been visiting for years.
His UK state pension has been paid at the 2011 rate ever since.
He did not know that would happen. There was no warning at the point of departure, nothing in the pension forecast he had received, and no letter afterwards explaining the position. He found out in the way most frozen pensioners do — by comparing notes with someone from a different country. A friend in Spain mentioned an increase. Anthony had not had one.
Fifteen years of uprating have passed him by. The nominal figure on his statement has not moved, and everything he buys with it has. He describes the effect as slow rather than sudden: each year is a little tighter than the last, which makes it easy to attribute to something else until you look back over a decade.
What he objects to is not the amount so much as the arbitrariness. A colleague who retired to Florida receives annual increases. Anthony, with a longer contribution record, does not, because Thailand has no reciprocal agreement and the United States does. Neither man had any say in which list his destination appeared on, and neither was told the list existed.
"I paid the same stamp as everyone else," he says. "I didn't get a discount for planning to leave."
Anthony registered to vote in 2024, after a BOVF talk in Pattaya, having assumed for years that he had lost the right. He had — and then got it back in January 2024 without hearing about it.
Case studies on this site are written from the experiences BOVF members have shared with us and are presented in anonymised form. Names and identifying details have been changed.
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