My retirement strategy is to die young. If I start making a lot more money or my cost of living magically decreases over the next decade I might reconsider this but otherwise I don't think social security is going to provide any quality standard of living. If I can't continue to work (which I don't mind doing) I plan to check out. (sad but true)
Your understanding of life and things never changed before? Recall your beliefs 10 years ago. Now imagine 30 years passed - there is a very good chance that your desire to live will be strong. You will be miserably calling your current selfish self "an idiot" for not saving up while trying to meet ends on the government money.
No offense really, but some people can't extrapolate their own personality even 5 years ahead. Trust me, you will change with age, everybody does. Hopefully it won't be too late to start saving then...
I'm open minded about the future. I think the problem for people my age (30-ish) is that the entire time we've been working real wages are flat or negative. We've never had a chance to get ahead of the game. I make more money than most of my friends, lots of them have student loans to deal with too, and it's hard to project a way to save even $200k-$300k over the next 30 years. Of course I could cut my expenses, move into a cheaper place, eat lots of ramen, but that's just choosing to live poor now instead of later. So for now I'm making the choice to be poor later.
Yep, this is it. I have at least two friends from college that have spent over a year trying to find work. "Defeated" doesn't even begin to properly describe how they feel.
My present self is cursing my 20s self for having spent a load of time traveling and running up lifestyle inflation debts, basically boozing it up non-stop.
On the other hand, I have some really good experiences and memories.
But I've been incredibly focused on reducing debt and building equity for the past year or so, and I don't see that changing.
I'm just glad I woke up while I still have 35 years to repair the damage, I have my health, live in a country with affordable healthcare, etc.
Thinking the same thing here. If I'm not able to work I'm not sure how able I'll be to enjoy much else anyway.
This whole model of slaving away your healthy years in the hope you'll still have the savings and the strength to enjoy life after 70 seems like a scam to me. My plan is to work less each year but keep on working. This isn't so bad if you do work you enjoy.
Okay, it takes effort to make me suspend my rule against politics on HN, but I have my limits. If you are some kind of troll, I nominate you for an Academy Award.
First: Social security is solvent, it will be solvent for years, and to fix it will require a minor tax increase decades from now. Quit believing propaganda.
Second: Our future budgetary problems are nonetheless real. But they are all about health care. If you really want to worry about balancing budgets in 2040, worry about that. Social Security is fine and will continue to be fine unless somebody deliberately fucks it up. (By talking like a fatalist, as you do, you inadvertently help the cause of the people who are trying to fuck it up; that is why we are having this little chat.)
Third: The major problem in the USA today is that we have a massive excess of productive capacity. Not only can the country afford to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you quite nicely, but our biggest problem is that after we did this we might still have too much capacity. The economy is not well designed for such a situation, and it needs fixing.
(Aside: The fix is called "stimulus", literally known as "printing money". People won't spend money? Make them spend it now. Create new money and give it away; make the old money move by threatening to inflate it away in the future. That nobody in power understands this, or that they pretend not to, is an epic failure of education and/or governance; the consequence will be millions of impoverishments and, likely, early deaths, perhaps even your own. Tragedy sucks.)
To the extent that the country does not choose to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you and everyone around you, it is a problem of government, economics, and politics. It is not that we are physically incapable. It is that we are not so organized.
The solution is to organize.
Where will "the money" come from? Money is not a physical thing, like platinum. It's some numbers in a spreadsheet by which we keep score: If your number is higher, you get to control more about what the economy does.
If you wake up and discover that all the money belongs to a handful of people who have gamed the ruleset by which money is distributed, and that they are failing to use their giant pile of money to direct the economy to keep everyone else fed, clothed, housed, and entertained to the correct extent: You change the rules, or you stop playing the game.
By many orders of magnitude, the best option is to change the rules. Or, rather, to change one rule, to turn one knob that was designed to be turned: Raise taxes on the people with the money.
That anyone contemplates suicide rather than go down fighting for this simple rule change is a triumph of modern propaganda.
Get up out of the fetal position and be an American, for the love of all that is holy.
First: Social security is solvent, it will be solvent for years, and to fix it will require a minor tax increase decades from now. Quit believing propaganda.
Solvent in the sense that next month's check won't bounce? Or solvent in the sense that if it were an independent entity entitled to its current revenue streams, and nothing else, you'd happily buy someone's future SS income at 100 cents on the dollar?
Or, wait, solvent in the sense that if I had a balance sheet that looked like theirs, and I made the promises they make, I wouldn't be going to jail?
Solvent in the sense that there's enough money to pay full benefits until the late 2030's or early 2040's without any changes. And solvent in the sense that minor adjustments to benefits or taxes will fix it beyond that.
The accounting profession has created a term for entities that are almost solvent, and can almost pay off their debts. The term is "insolvent."
It's dangerous to have entities for which the clock is running out. What we should aim for is the opposite: a social security system that's gradually accumulating assets, and can eventually use that to offload its risks (by, for example, paying a life insurance company to assume some of its obligations).
That way, 1) we know how much things cost, and 2) our problems are gradually getting solved. Now, we have the opposite situation.
If you wake up and discover that all the money belongs to a handful of people who have gamed the ruleset by which money is distributed, and that they are failing to use their giant pile of money to direct the economy to keep everyone else fed, clothed, housed, and entertained to the correct extent: You change the rules, or you stop playing the game.
Do you think that every rich person has simply gamed the system and that none of them have actually earned their money? To make a blanket accusation against every rich person and simply say that their taxation is the cure is nowhere close to being an American.
I vote and I follow politics closely. I haven't totally given into the idea it's hopeless but I'm deeply skeptical about the ability for democracy to solve these problems. We have a progressive President who enjoys a majority in congress and he's still not able to enact a really progressive agenda. I'm starting to feel like the system is completely rigged. The people voted for change and all they're getting is Republican filibusters preventing most of it from happening. It's a subversion of democracy. Even if you win elections certain factions in this country are going to prevent progress.
I think the US needs to seriously start rethinking its system. What's the use of being so rich if you need to contemplate retiring to another country or dying early after you stop working?
Please look at Europe and Canada. They have their problems, sure, but they take care of their old and sick. And they do it with less money!
This actually works wonderfully if he buys up a lot of property. When everybody moves in and brings their money with them, land values shoot through the roof, and the people who owned that land make out like bandits. Folks who owned small orchards in Silicon Valley in the 1950s made out like bandits (assuming they managed it well), as did people who bought humble ranch-houses in the Boston suburbs in 50s and 60s.
Big cities in developing countries are expensive too. A better idea would be to find some beach property in South America; the continent is developing and getting older as well, so lots of people are retiring to the sea-side (as I said, big cities are expensive).
In the south of Brazil you won't find many bargains left, but I've read that lots os europeans are buying houses in the northeast (the infrastructure is a lot worse there, but it's 3.000km closer to Europe).
Ask the cubans that were forced to leave how much they got for their land. One of the things that people take for vantage and dont realize is the stability of the US government. I'm not saying that mexico is on course for collapse but the police have lost control of the north border
