It's gonna get so bad such questions are irrelevant. Don't bother worrying much about twenty years out;the jackals and vultures are living for today.
Kevin Drum links to Glennzilla
As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, "We're not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don't need to. We know who you're talking to."
You won't recognize the place in five years. Can't.
A lot of seniors never had 401(k)s to begin with, just for the record.
If the poverty of senior citizens is discussed, it will be spun as the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and its failure as a social support system, instead of the failure of 401Ks and privatized savings plans.
Yes.
401(k)s also have done a nice job of juicing the stock market, which in turn caused pension plans to be over confident in the type of returns they could expect, which caused companies and governments paying into said pension plans to contribute less, and pay out the balance as CEO bonuses and tax cuts on CEO bonuses. Which has lead to pension plans being woefully underfunded today, which of course is really the fault of greedy unions, for expecting that their members to receive a decent remuneration in the first place.
Yeah, I'm wondering if we're going to go back to old age meaning poverty for most people.
I feel like we've gone around and around on this many times before. 401(k) accounts may not be ideal, but I'd rather have one (and I do) than be at the mercy of some corporation who's going to screw me out of my supposedly great defined-benefit pension. I mean, obviously, in the procedural liberal social democratic full welfare state utopia, most services for seniors would be free and everybody would get a gov't pension with generous annual COLA increases. And five ponies and a unicorn farm.
In terms of "how many big annoying changes to how 401(k) accounts work can we expect in the intermediate term", I think that's always going to be ameliorated by the fact that so many members of the managerial class are depending on them for comfortable retirements. The actual ERISA requirements are actually pretty progressive -- you can't really have a 401(k) plan for a company of any size without basically giving even your most trod-upon full-time employees a crack at it. Not that this is going to reduce concentrations of wealth, but it does seem to create less of a moral hazard than previous private-sector pension schemes.
401(k) accounts may not be ideal, but I'd rather have one (and I do) than be at the mercy of some corporation who's going to screw me out of my supposedly great defined-benefit pension. I mean, obviously, in the procedural liberal social democratic full welfare state utopia, most services for seniors would be free and everybody would get a gov't pension with generous annual COLA increases. And five ponies and a unicorn farm.
That utopia is in fact the case for people born roughly 1910 to 1940, right?
I'm with you, I don't trust either an employer to not raid my pension fund or the government to not decide that reduced infant mortality means 75-year-olds should be just as hardworking as 45-year-olds.
that's always going to be ameliorated by the fact that so many members of the managerial class are depending on them for comfortable retirements.
Huh. I think this is a 99% issue -- that it's going to become likely for not-extravagantly-wealthy members of the managerial class to have uncomfortable retirements. Not everyone: middle and upper income people who save a lot and don't have any major financial shocks will be okay. But people in that class will be at much greater risk of poverty in old age than their parents were.
5: No, it's the fault of unions for accepting an unsecured annuity from their members' employer, instead of MONEY which could be put into a diversified fund.
A lot of seniors never had 401(k)s to begin with, just for the record.
Good point. The concept appears to date from 1980. Is there anyone for whom it's been a good system?
8.last makes sense, though. If we're not working babies to death, someone has to pick up the slack.
Being able to have private tax-advantaged savings has been completely great for my mom, who has had income below or at median level her whole life. Likewise my dad, who also didn't do too well financially for many years, and for me so far. I really, really like being able to control my finances. My folks and I all shifted out of equities before the drop of 2001-2003, though.
20% cannot be right. SS alone is a larger fraction than that. Maybe 401k payouts alone, taken without SS, would be 20% of what people retiring right now need? But people first starting using them in the early 1980s.
Underfunded pension obligations are a big deal, there's more to say on those than fits into a little box.
11: Middle-to-high income people my parents' age (born 1938, 1940) did nicely off them, I think. Somewhere in that age bracket you got people who were likelier to have both defined-benefit pensions and substantial tax-sheltered savings. Much younger than that, I think everyone got screwed.
I could get significantly more excited about the PLSDFWSU if there were actually a significant current in the Democrat Party that was pushing a holistic agenda to rival the repugs' "drown it in a bathtub" vision for the future. I bet a lot of other people, significantly less radical than me, would be too.
Short of anarchy, I want:
Free pre-K through grad school education
Full maternity & paternity benefits with 1 yr. paid off work
Major new investment in greening the infrastructure & transit
Free healthcare, full stop.
Progressive foodstamp benefits up to say 200% of the poverty level
Free public housing for people who need it
Federal Department of Peace
Major new funding for art that benefits the public
DC, Guam and Puerto Rican statehood
Independence for the other colonies
Community-benefit reparations for slavery, Jim Crow & racist laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act
And pay for it with:
Cut the military by 90%
Progressive income taxes for individuals with confiscatory marginal tax rates on the highest-paid
Close all corporate tax loopholes
Create an expanded federally GAAP law that would make fancy accounting fraud very difficult
No more agricultural subsidies
Abolish the Senate
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Fukushima ...from Barry Rittholz 5/07
"Anti-nuclear physician Dr. Helen Caldicott says that if fuel pool 4 collapses, she will evacuate her family from Boston and move them to the Southern Hemisphere."
Revolution or Party Down, but don't plan or worry. At 60, we just bought our most expensive car ever, and starting up the credit cards again. Ain't gonna be no retirement.
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Overhaul the prison system and get nonviolent offenders out of jail.
Meaningful EPA and FDA with actual power to enforce actual regulations.
End campaign contributions over $200 from anyone to anyone, and make it all public.
Abolish the electoral college.
To be honest, the only reason that I'm not on team BURN SHIT DOWN is that my own life is so comfy, and that sounds like so much work, and I don't believe things would be any better after we put out the flames.
you can't really have a 401(k) plan for a company of any size without basically giving even your most trod-upon full-time employees a crack at it.
Yeah, the shitty job before this one sent out a notification to its employees about the 401(k) plan. It was just ironic. They were clearly "notifying" everyone, but since 90% of the employees were paycheck to paycheck, there was absolutely no way that anyone but management was going to buy in. And of course most of the employees were deliberately kept below 35 hours a week so as to minimize the number who were eligible as full time workers.
Many people basically stopped saving as home values went up.
This is the thread where I remind myself I need to increase the number of job applications I send out while simultaneously wondering what's the point, there's no future in anything.
One's pessimism should correlate directly with one's output of job applications.
17: Right! I knew I'd forgotten a couple. Legalize it!
19: Yeah, they are sneaky about it. Still, for a lot of lower-middle class employees who do work 40 hours a week, they do have the opportunity to save a bit.
What exactly would a Department of Peace do? I've always wondered but never enough to read any proposals.
24: Yeah, I know there are a number of different visions. I mean, what does the Department of Agriculture do? They don't go out in the fields every day with overalls and a hoe. Probably a Dept. of Peace would fund a lot of studies and projects about increasing peace domestically and internationally. I mean, we've got the Peace Corps already, move that to the DoP's authority and expand it a bit and there's your international section. Within the US, you could fund plays for middle-schoolers about important pacifists in US history or whatever. Levitate the Pentagon maybe?
And once the Department of Peace was up and running, we could have a Department of Love and a Department of Truth too! It would be great!
What exactly would a Department of Peace do?
Fight wars, but ironically.
AB got a pension while she worked for the City, which I believe has been rolled over into something 401(k) like.
Needless to say, we've saved nothing over the last few years. Well, home equity, but not a ton of that.
But we're both in fields that will allow us to work until death, so that's pretty much the plan.
I don't understand what's so funny about 26
I don't trust either an employer to not raid my pension fund or the government to not decide that reduced infant mortality means 75-year-olds should be just as hardworking as 45-year-olds.
bob has unaccountably let this one pass unremarked, so I'll step in: There is zero chance that this will happen until infants get the right to vote.
Maybe the Department of Peace could convince congress to sign the Cluster Munitions Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the International Protocols on Also I'd Like a Pony With That.
I love that people ignore that Team Strangle Shit in the Bathtub and Team Burn Shit Down are the same team, because I am a cynical jerk love irony.
As for the OP, old people aren't, in general, anything like as wise, kind and noble as their propaganda suggests. (To Biohazard: Present company excluded!) They get far too much public money and attention already, infants and children (and their parents) too little.
I'm on Team Complain Bitterly on the Internet.
I do think there's a change coming: current retirees are likelier to be comfortably off than people retiring in the near future.
I conclude from 16 that anti-nuclear physician Dr. Helen Caldicott is a nut.
OT: I am on Team Wow, Cornel West Just Keeps Getting Cornel West-er.
West has said that his Christian beliefs form the most fundamental part of who he is. Earlier, I asked him which of Jesus' disciples he most emulates. "Disciples?" he responded in a soft voice. "None of them, really. Nah. 'Cause I want to be like Jesus, I don't want to be like those disciples."
Rock on, Cornel West. Rock on.*
* To be scrupulously fair, in the quoted paragraph, West is not saying anything that (i) most prominent American preachers since the nineteenth century at least would not have to admit or (ii) would be, interpreted theologically, all that controversially, although it's not entirely clear that the quoted desire is wholly or even materially theological in nature, but, you know, benefit of the doubt and all that.
32.1 Team Bathtub is lying though, they actually want a big government that controls every aspect of the lives of people who aren't rich, white, straight/closeted US men. And they want the corporations to have lots of power.
As for the OP, old people aren't, in general, anything like as wise, kind and noble as their propaganda suggests. (To Biohazard: Present company excluded!) They get far too much public money and attention already, infants and children (and their parents) too little.
And they vote horribly.
30, what I mean was that because of reduced infant mortality, we have longer "life expectancy", which jerks use to explain why today's healthy and spry 65-year-olds should not retire at the same age as the decrepit 65-year-olds of the 1970s when everyone had black lung and missing fingers and lumbago.
I do think there's a change coming: current retirees are likelier to be comfortably off than people retiring in the near future.
PEOPLE RETIRING IN THE NEAR FUTURE ARE BAD INVESTORS AND FAILED TO PREDICT THE FUTURE AND DESERVE WHAT THEY GET.
JUST LIKE THE LAZY YOUNG PEOPLE, WHO CLAIN THEY CAN'T PAY FOR COLLEGE WITH A PART TIME JOB, AND THEN CLAIM THEY CAN'T FIND A GOOD JOB WHEN THEY GRADUATE, AND THEN TRY TO TELL YOU THEY CAN'T AFFORD HEALTH CARE
36:
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
And one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
And there's not any reason, no, not the least,
Why I shouldn't be one too.
41: I was reminded of Tom Sawyer's failure to name all twelve, but yours is better by far.
And they vote horribly.
So Team Drown The Aged In The Bathtub?
I generally don't worry about old age too much because I assume I won't have to deal with it. I don't think any of my grandparents lived past 75, and two of them had lost their minds years before they died. I gather that Alzheimer's is particularly frightening. I am glad that euthanasia is more socially acceptable these days than it was 20 years ago, though.
"team BURN SHIT DOWN" should lead by example; burn their own fucking lives down, and let the rest of us decide for ourselves if preening self-righteous self-immolation is the way we want to live our own lives.
43:Hah! Got a hole in >strike>my her bathtub!
(Been worrying about that for weeks, it's right around the drain, which at age 30 is non-removable. Worked it once, but obviously failed. Used this quick-setting super-expensive shit from Home Depot, you ever try to patch fucking glass? Fucking hell. How the hell does she get rust holes in her fucking shower? Never heard of such a thing)
38:I do not. Everybody else does.
I conclude from 16 that anti-nuclear physician Dr. Helen Caldicott is a nut.
She's also a well-off Australian citizen who maintains a home there in addition to her digs in Boston, so it wouldn't be nearly the undertaking for her that it would be for the rest of us.
Team Ice Floe!
Climate change may cause some issues for that one.
44: One of the many mantras I use to calm myself is that, sometime with in the next 100,000 years or so, all this will be under a kilometer of ice, and whatever bullshit they are doing now is really not going to matter much. This does not apply to Floridians and Arizonans, of course, so y'all are still pretty fucked.
43: Only the unwise, ignoble, bad voting, unarmed ones.
The financial industry made out like the bandits they are. I'm not sure the 401k ever really made sense as the primary vehicle for most Americans -- but of course we can't stop relying on it, since I'm going to need you people to be buying my stock as I start drawing mine down, 12-15 years hence. And buy my house for a ton more than I'm getting ready to pay for it.
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I am watching the first episode of a series created by a friend of a friend about public defenders in NYC. It lasted one season on account of it's bad, but it's tempting to watch more because it's based on familiar things, like the judge in the first episode is pretty surely a judge I have written things for. The Mary Sue is annoyingly played by the guy from Saved by the Bell.
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1) Not interested in any distributional disparities until the 1% is defenestrated
2) Generational Wars? Hah. Hah I say! Bring it on. Bob Mc vs Yggles + Klein = Hulk vs Loki. Rag doll see.
3) But infants should have the right to vote. A betrayal of American ideals, this makes me cry.
You'd be surprised at how many things make infant voters cry.
16: I'm not worried -- I have it on good authority that the US is planning to drop a fusion bomb on the #4 storage pool, which should neatly take care of that problem.
55. ! Do we have the same friend?
I tried to watch it, to be supportive, but holy cow.
55, 59: I do so want to relate the tale the time Bonsaisue and I ended up reading a screenplay (as scientists) for a filmed updating of a beloved Robert Louis Stevenson novella. But I won't. It's just so bad, and might be too identifying for the poor bastards who wrote it.
Since Opinionated Grandma brought it up, does anyone have advice on buying basic (i.e. covers emergencies) health insurance while not employed in California? My universal, mandated, single-payer insurance is gone.
I used to be in a plan aimed at people in their twenties without employer-sponsored insurance, and while it did roll over into some similar coverage when I got into my thirties, I then left the US and canceled it.
Ah, I see now on IMDB that they no longer have it in development. A shame, truly.
61: Depending on the county you're in, there could be a public program that would accept you. County social services is the place to go, but for reference, here are the names of the Low-Income Health Programs by county.
sometime with in the next 100,000 years or so, all this will be under a kilometer of ice
No chance: there isn't going to be another ice age until the excess carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere, and it'll take at least 100,000 years for that to happen. Scrubbing of carbon dioxide via weathering of rock is a slow process.
Since I'm now actually retired, here is what makes a difference:
1. Having the house paid off and the children graduated.
2. Having a defined benefit pension.
3. Social security.
4. 401(k) or 403(b) or ....
We could live without our tax-sheltered savings. Not so much the other three.
I wish I could retire. Then I might actually have time to work.
9
Huh. I think this is a 99% issue -- that it's going to become likely for not-extravagantly-wealthy members of the managerial class to have uncomfortable retirements. ...
I don't see why unless you think a drop in income at retirement automatically means you are uncomfortable. The more you make the more you can cut back at retirement without significant hardship.
65: That's not what Dale Pendell says. Besides, 100,000 or so could mean 1 million years, just an eyeblink in geologic time, really.
35
I conclude from 16 that anti-nuclear physician Dr. Helen Caldicott is a nut.
I concluded that back when she said (IIRC) that nuclear war was mathematically certain if Reagan was elected.
11
... Is there anyone for whom it's been a good system?
Compared to what? Certainly better than nothing for me.
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People with car alarms should all be arrested.
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People who like Ronald Reagan should all be nuked.
They get far too much public money and attention already, infants and children (and their parents) too little.
This is the same kind of stupid attitude that turned this nation of assholes into anti-unionists in the Reagan Years. As soon as old people aren't fucking freezing to death while eating dog food and drinking tea made with twice re-used bags, they're just too fucking comfortable. Just like when workers weren't coughing their lungs out on the mill floor anymore they were suddenly a bunch of greedy bastards who were tearing this country down. Children aren't getting enough? Take some from Bill Gates and the Waltons, not my mom. Fuck the analogy ban, too.
Just like when workers weren't coughing their lungs out on the mill floor anymore they were suddenly a bunch of greedy bastards who were tearing this country down.
Surly about it, too.
Although maybe we could stop them from voting.
77: Jesus, Flippanter, workers can't afford Surly -- it's like $8 a four-pack any liquor store you go to. Workers are lucky if they get to rinse the blood and lung particles out of their mouth with Milwaukee's Best or Steel Reserve. And then tear their mouthflesh to shreds with Earl's cheese puffs.
Wait, that doesn't sound right. $16/four-pack? Really expensive, in any case. Except they don't really sell it by the case.
Yay, mcmc. I have no idea what's wrong with Flippanter.
59: Well, friend-of-friend for me. But it would still be small-worldish. Yeah I don't think I have it in me to watch another episode. The Gary Stu is just too egregious.
Wow, Cornel West Just Keeps Getting Cornel West-er
Until he achieves his goal of becoming indistinguishable from Jesus, at which point: Cornel Easter!
I've just been editing a bunch of interviews with 401(k) plan administrators. That'll put you in an unpleasant frame of mind.
I have no idea what's wrong with Flippanter.
Slightly subclinical narcissism, most likely.
84: "So, how did you first attract Satan's attention?"
I remain puzzled by Flip's 32.2. What is the deal there? It was directed to the OP, right? Which said in its third paragraph that privatization was failing to secure the general welfare, which I gather Flip took to be an appeal to shore up public means of securing said welfare, and he felt that this was bad because ... it's a zero-sum game in which support for seniors means failure of support for children? Because seniors are just old crotchety people who should die if they haven't scored enough private cash for themselves? Honestly, I don't know what the idea was, but if it hear enough of it, I'll spend increasingly less time here.
87 before seeing 85, which is no more clear to me as an explanation.
"For a lot of people, it's not going to be about retirement."
85: In the best Jackie Cooley/April June tradition!
87
I remain puzzled by Flip's 32.2. What is the deal there? It was directed to the OP, right? Which said in its third paragraph that privatization was failing to secure the general welfare, which I gather Flip took to be an appeal to shore up public means of securing said welfare, and he felt that this was bad because ... it's a zero-sum game in which support for seniors means failure of support for children? Because seniors are just old crotchety people who should die if they haven't scored enough private cash for themselves? Honestly, I don't know what the idea was, but if it hear enough of it, I'll spend increasingly less time here.
Seems clear enough to me, seniors as a group are better off than average and hence not a priority for additional government help.
32: But they are poor in the most important thing: years of life remaining.
50- An opportunity for agreement between team ice floe and team drown.
92
But they are poor in the most important thing: years of life remaining.
Which makes them a bad investment.
94: Possibly true, depending on how close you think we are to a post-scarcity and post-mortality world (I suspect we're quite far, and are more likely not to get there than to get there).
But that's a totally different argument from "seniors as a group are better off than average and hence not a priority for additional government help."
There's an interesting point to be made in all of this about the transition from a model that depends on growth to one that is sustainable, but it's kind of lost in the sniping about Boomers vs. The Children (neither of which, in the immortal words of Flippanter, are "in general, anything like as wise, kind and noble [energetic, promising or idealistic] as their propaganda suggests"). Ultimately, demographics will win out. If we still expect, as we should, that retirees and children will not have to work, then the labor of the 25-65 year olds will have to support them. A smart society will provide 1) a minimum level of support to everyone that is comfortable but not lavish and 2) an investment in the education/development of future workers. We are far from both of those goals.
76.
mcmc, this is beautiful and perfect. I'm going to print it out and put it on my wall.
I can't decide what I think about the retirement age going up. On one hand, it's good - I see my parents and inlaws and lots of their friends retired (many early), and even in retirement far more comfortable than we will probably ever be (even though C now has a higher salary than his dad or my dad did at the end of their working lives), which doesn't seem fair. Mostly because all they had to do was buy a family-sized house 30 years ago, live in it with their family and then sell it for a huge profit. But the longer they work, the fewer jobs are available for young people - I was listening to one woman on the radio saying that she got another job after her public sector job retired her at 61, because she wanted to be able to carry on having holidays - so she gets to have holidays when a 25 year old can't even get a job and leave home?
I really don't know. It's fucked up for us, and as far as I can tell it's even more fucked up for for my children. I really worry about them.
401(k) accounts may not be ideal, but I'd rather have one (and I do) than be at the mercy of some corporation who's going to screw me out of my supposedly great defined-benefit pension.
What I'd like to see is a federal amped up version of Social Security where you could opt in to pay a higher percentage for higher benefits. Kind of like the defined benefit plans me and the wife are on. Putting it in the hands of individual companies is fraught in the same way as it is in the public side when it's individual cities and such providing the benefit rather than a state or the feds.
7: 401(k) accounts may not be ideal, but I'd rather have one (and I do) than be at the mercy of some corporation who's going to screw me out of my supposedly great defined-benefit pension.
The difference is that if you invest all your savings in shares which lose all their value, then you have just lost all your money. If, on the other hand, you have a defined-benefit pension and your employer screws you out of it, or goes bust, or raids the pension fund or whatever, then you will still get a pension thanks to Gerald Ford, the might of the US government, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
We already have a mechanism through which the government can take our money. I'm quite happy for them to take some of mine, and then give me a chunk of it back later when I am old and no longer working.
Right now I am faced with the following choices: pay rent, pay down college debt, save for retirement. I can do two of three.
Choice four: buy somewhere to live, is comically unrealistic, of course.
100: They don't guarantee the whole pension. Only to a certain amount.
Only to a certain amount.
And it's unlikely that your 401(k) portfolio will be entirely worthless; however it's quite likely that any annuity you can buy from it after the last few years will compare poorly to whatever the PBGC has to offer someone whose defined benefit pension has gone down the tubes.
Plus there's always the outside chance that a company pension may be managed honestly and competently. Unlikely, I know, but the possibility exists.
103: true. But the ceiling is quite high and regularly revised - $4,653 a month at the moment. If I was retired on $55k a year I would not consider myself to have been badly treated.
In most cases it's not an issue because the pensioners weren't getting that much from the schemes anyway.
My problem with company pensions isn't just the management, it's the difficulty in switching jobs.
That being said, I'd much rather have my prosperity in retirement the concern of someone who has an incentive to pay me money (because otherwise I won't vote for them) than have it the concern of someone who has an incentive not to pay me money (because then they can pay more money to their shareholders).
101: You could get away with not paying rent? Plenty would disapprove (including me), but that might be the best option for you financially.
Otherwise, paying down debt IS saving, often with a guaranteed (and sometimes quite high) rate of return.
re: 108
I'm curious as to how I could get away with not paying rent? Sleeping under a cardboard box?
Oh no! NMM to Maurice Sendak, not that I was. But this is the saddest recent celebrity death for me.
109: I thought you were implying you could, for a awhile. I don't know what tenant protection laws are like in the UK, so I didn't want to assume you were wrong.
95
But that's a totally different argument from "seniors as a group are better off than average and hence not a priority for additional government help."
I meant in financial terms. I guess you can argue they deserve more money because they are about to die.
There have been recent times and places un the US where one could get away with not making mortgage payments for a year or two, so the claim was not totally implausible.
But it sounds like when you said 3 choose 2, that's only true literally, and more realistically it's 2 choose 1.
113: Also, if you apply a positive discount rate, adding a year to an old person's life is more valuable than adding a year to a young person's life, ceteris paribus.
111: Are there tenant protection laws anywhere in the world that prevent you from being evicted for non-payment of rent? I don't think you can get away with that even in Germany unless you have a particular, transient hardship, e.g. being 6 months pregnant. I'm not sure they'd accept "I'm skinnt" as an excuse.
Er, yeah. I meant it in the rhetorical sense. The reality is, I don't really have any choice at all. I can't save any money, I can't buy anywhere to live.*
* tiny violin time, obviously. I can still afford to rent and pay down some debt, so it's not the end of the world.
117: Just don't say "first world problems, lol" and it's cool.
How do local councils feel about yurts?
115: extention of life isn't the only meaningful transfer you can make to the young. A fair bit of research seems to indicate that you can dramatically reduce certain expected social costs with pre-K investments. Even with discounting I bet that's loads better as a value proposition.
100
The difference is that if you invest all your savings in shares which lose all their value, then you have just lost all your money. If, on the other hand, you have a defined-benefit pension and your employer screws you out of it, or goes bust, or raids the pension fund or whatever, then you will still get a pension thanks to Gerald Ford, the might of the US government, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
Only if you work for a private company. If you work for a public entity like say Prichard Alabama on the other hand you may get nothing.
Not entirely unseriously, does the U.K. allow trailer parks, aside from the by the sea vacation sort? If there's been a crash in prices and still nobody can afford a house, you just put in a trailer park and give it a suitably old-school name like Worcestershire Heights.
122: If ttaM lives in Oxford, as I think he does, he can join the boat people moored along the Isis.
re: 122
They exist, but not common. And the crash in prices isn't much of a crash in much of the country. Where I live, a small flat is 10 times UK median wage, and a small family home about 20 times median wage. And property prices have gone up, not down.
re: 123
Work there, but no longer live there.
105
true. But the ceiling is quite high and regularly revised - $4,653 a month at the moment. If I was retired on $55k a year I would not consider myself to have been badly treated.
Only if you are 65 or older when your plan goes under. If you are younger the amount guaranteed can be much less, $2094.03 a month at 55 for example. See here.
Maybe you need a side business? You could become the trailer park king of England.
Alternatively, you could come here. All you need is a small amount of money, some bagpipe skills, and a great suit.
109 -- From 128, a city of the future made of packaging waste is the better phrasing.
I have just assumed that I would never really retire.
My plan for old age is to hope that my health holds up.
My problem with company pensions isn't just the management, it's the difficulty in switching jobs.
Yeah, this is a problem, and it exists with public-sector pensions as well. The general pattern seems to be that during collective bargaining, a union will agree to make the vesting schedule longer/steeper in exchange for something else. This works well for the long-term employees who already have most of those years under their belt, but it's pretty challenging to discover that you're 0% vested until you've been at the job 20 years (as at my wife's workplace).
110: Well, he did live a good long time. I guess I find it sadder that he had to live without his partner for the last 5 years of his life. That just seems so crushingly sad to me that I feel like death would be a relief. Obviously, I realize not everyone feels that way, but personally I would not want to outlive my partner at all.
110: From NYT obituary:
Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten
Only if you work for a private company. If you work for a public entity like say Prichard Alabama on the other hand you may get nothing.
Well, Prichard, Alabama has a legal obligation to pay its pensioners in full, and it has the tax-raising powers to do so. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell from that article, the city authorities decided to break the law and the legal system in Alabama has been extremely slow and dilatory in going after them. Assuming you work for a public entity in a functional state, you should be OK.
Assuming you work for a public entity in a functional state, you should be OK.
I can't tell which side your arguing here.
132 - He did feel that way, I think. "There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."
134, 135 work for a public entity in a functional state :
I think the archives had an unfogged correspondent from an inaccessible plantation and island state
which could show Alabama is not so exceptional.
And states like Texas are sovereign and their state retirement schemes are not to be challenged by
mere standard-setting professional actuarial and accounting boards.
On the Cornel West thing, what's the issue? It's not "What Would Peter Do?". It's "What Would Jesus Do?".
65: That's not what Dale Pendell says.
I based my comment on David Archer and Andrey Ganopolski (2005), "A movable trigger: Fossil fuel CO2 and the onset of the next glaciation", Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. 6:5. See especially figure 3.
