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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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I won't be retiring. Not particularly good with money, plus a divorce, I'm 60, and have about 200K in retirement. It's my own fault, I could have been far smarter. Now was always far more important than then.
No. No it isn't. It's the country's fault for not giving you enough to retire on even though you didn't make the best financial decisions over the years. People should not be punished in their old age because they didn't follow all the right rules of capitalism (which keep changing anyway).
It might be your fault that you're not as comfortable or as well-off as you would like to be, but it is not your fault that you can't retire.
Remember that time they moved retirement to 67 in 2015?
I don't because I was too busy working 50 hrs a week @$14-19$/hr paycheck to paycheck.
And now I have fibromyalgia at 38 and hope I die at 50.
Thanks America.
The law that changed full retirement age to 67 was passed in 1983 (during the Reagan era, no surprise there!) https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/full-retirement-age/ :
What I always thought was unfair is that those who make the least amount of money get the least amount of Soc Sec, when they are the ones who need it the most. Those who make the most money get the max amount even though they need it the least. Seems backwards.
But I guess it's at least better than how things were before Social Security when you either had to make enough money to save enough for retirement and/or get a pension from your employer, or else work until you died, not to mention no Soc Sec if you became disabled. It was originally designed as part of the New Deal to help widows and seniors (poverty rate for seniors was over 50%).
It doesn't even matter if they did follow the right rules. Plenty of people did are still losing now because the rules have rapidly changed over the last 10-20 years, especially since the pandemic with inflation exploding out of control. Property taxes, insurance, medical costs, housing supplies, food are all skyrocketing. The SSA did up the Social Security payout slightly, but that doesn't help 401k/IRA/pension output one bit.
It also points out another flaw in America. Why does every individual have to be a doctor, tax man, investor, banker? Rather than having people compartmentalized in skill-sets and enabling each other, we're expected to know 100% of how many jobs work. It's a waste of collective brain power, and I really believe it stifles creativity and innovation as we all try to just survive. Even with all this knowledge, if one is in the retirement phase when a 2020-2024 happens, one can't really go back in time to correct for that.
Blaming anyone but yourself is the new hotness around here it seems. Not planning for the future is somehow now your fault but the fault of the country? Sounds a bit entitled to me
Yes it is. Other countries don't force people to work until they die if they're poor.
Other countries absolutely do require people to work to support themselves. The US is certainly not unique in this regard. Some countries have universal income or provide care for the elderly but to think it's the norm is the Lemmy collective putting a bag over their heads.
Yes, shitty third world countries do requite people to work to support themselves until they die.
Non-shithole countries allow people to retire and not do that, even if they're poor.
Actually, I take that back. Not even all the shitty third world countries. I just googled 'Rwanda retirement,' to pick a country at random and they have a government pension scheme.
Sadly, I think that puts you way ahead of most Americans.
Your guess is a bit off, average 401k for a 60 year old is north of 400k.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-american-much-retirement-savings-141907331.html
Interesting how you cherry picked there... This kind of thing makes me super curious: was this an honest misreading of the source? Or do you have some agenda here that involves pretending Americans have more retirement savings than they do.
Like I'm not going to copy/paste the entire article, but I recommend going back and reading it again?
Maybe study up on the different types of averages, and why median is often used (and why the median figure in the article is so different than the "average" that you chose to use).
Here I'll make it extra easy for you, it's literally in the paragraph right after the numbers:
Also, I'm honestly just not sure how much I care about, specifically, the retirement savings of people aged 55-60. That's a really narrow range there.
Are you referring to the use of the average rather than the mean amount saved? The article is only like 4 paragraphs and I don't think there was anything to miss. That said I also have a 401k tracker through my investments and it shows most individuals in that age group have around 400-500k.
It's like you didn't even read the entire article you sent... You're right, it's not long. Try again to understand it. I'm not going to copy/paste quotes from an article that's like 2 paragraphs, I'm certain you can figure it out yourself.
And yes, the use of median instead of mean is important, and you end up with a very different (but more accurate) numbers when using it to try to understand this type of statistic, as that way the data isn't skewed by outliers.
With the median, half of people are above, half are below. If you use the mean (what people generally default to when they hear/say average), you don't end up with useful information because this is America and we have people with billion dollar bank accounts, and all you need is one or two of those to throw off the mean and make things look higher than they are.
Well looks like I went and explained it anyway...