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Donors raise $233,000 to give US cart pusher, 90, chance at retirement
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Orphan Crushing Machine
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At the risk of coming across as insensitive, I really wonder what happened in this guy's life leading up to this. He lived through the "easy times" where boomers were buying houses on a single income, in fact he had a 10 year head start on them. The article says he only receives $1,100 from social security - so does he have $0 savings / investments at 90 years old? Genuinely curious, not taking a shit on him - this will be me at 90 too, if I last that long.
Mental or physical problems, ptsd, whatever. Many ways you can get fucked over by life.
Yeah true. It said he was an air force veteran. The world is a scary place.
At 90 he would have qualified to retire in 1996. Very strong possibility he outlived his savings. Similar thing happened to a couple of my relatives who reached that age. They owned their homes. They were smaller homes too. But on fixed income the property taxes were awful. We worked it all out in the end. But it was hard getting them to even open up that help was needed.
The way some countries discard of their veterans I'm not that surprised.
Believe it or not, there are a lot of poor boomers too. It wasn't all peaches and cream like the agists would have you believe. We're actually facing an explosion of homeless elderly people right now because of the skyrocketing costs of living, especially rent. If you're only getting $1000 per month from SSI, with no hope of ever increasing that amount, you're physically and/or mentally incapable of working, and your rent triples in price, what do you do? They have far fewer options than younger people, so they end up on the street.
The poverty trap existed back then, too
Is expecting his life to contain such excesses as to afford a retirement plan more than victim-blaming? It's hard to monday-morning quarterback a lifetime of decisions made in each moment and staying objective while knowing essentially the future for each one.
What if the voices second-guessing every decision we ever made were mutterings from a future society which has the ability to go back in time and doesn't realize we can hear the spectators?
You can try to paint me as a victim blamer all you want. I tried to make it clear that I legitimately wonder. I empathize with his situation, and I bet he would be open to share his stories, cautionary or otherwise, and not act like you are.
Can't tell whether the down-votes are from people who DO like to blame people when their lifetime of choices paint them into a neveretirement corner, or just people who've traveled back in time trying to silence me. I WILL NOT BE SIL