I am so so sorry you are going through that.

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Did you have retirement savings before the heat attack? How about insurance with a max you’d have to pay?

Marketing and the media are also to blame. We’re constantly bombarded by advertising and people telling us that what we have isn’t enough. We’re so status conscious and aware if how much is out there that they have us chasing dreams straight into massive debt.

Aktchually… SS benefits are pretty progressive. Those with lower lifetime earnings will see a much higher income replacement percentage than higher earners up to that $165k-ish limit.

Lifting the taxable income cap would not fully eliminate the funding gap. We’d also have to pay out more to those higher earners too. If we didn’t, it would change SS from insurance to wellfare. And that would lead to (Republican) lobbiests fighting even harder to privatize, limit, or end SS.

Exactly BigMacHole@lemm.ee Musk can’t give us a share of his prosperity if the guberment keeps taking the money from him /s

Were you putting in a nickel per paycheck? The market has killed it over the last 30 years, even with a relatively low contribution, if you contributed consistently for 30 years you should have way more than that

Did you fuck up and leave it all in the cash-equivalent fund instead of actually investing it?

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When the magic money generation machine goes wrong.

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They can just eat the weeds growing between the cracks of the sidewalk, what’s the problem?

I’m going to take this opportunity to recommend that no one scrimp and get the budget fiber. It’s not worth it bro.

It’s time for a revolution because it looks like most of the population’s in the same boat. The war between the super rich and everyone else has been fought and we lost. They’re leaving us with two options: revolution or die starving on the streets.

You may not have much money, but you still have a huge amount of time you can invest. You only need to figure out a few percent of your income, much smaller than taxes, rent, or food, then let time do the work for you. Use the power of compounding returns

I mean, social security will help you get enough medicine as long as only take 1/4 of the prescribed amount and there’s lots of fancy cat food out there…you can eat like a rich person’s pet for only $2-$3 a can!

On the bright side, between the too-poor-to-retire elderly and kids, we think we can fill all the open jobs created by covid deaths without having to let any immigrants in.

On an unrelated note, we’re on track to invent the “trillionaire” within the next decade. If that’s not innovation, I don’t know what is.

Pensions in the U.S. were largely replaced with 401k’s. Now we have hedge funds playing the stock market with trillions.

In the UK we do similar.

We accumulate pension credit too, but then we get a maximum amount of about £10,500 a year assuming you paid tax for the full 35 years.

I appreciate seeing this information but lines like this will dissuade non believers. “while 1 in people are fighting to survive on less than $15,000 annually.”

The editor or whomever submitted the article missed it during revisions.

I assume they meant to say 1 in 10?

Edit: updated typo lives to lines

I’d kinda favor 401(k)s or something more like that

I’d rather not have to rely on market gambling to survive in my old age. Many people probably agreed with you until about 2008, when a LOT of retirees lost most of their retirement money during the recession and a lot of really old people went back to work. It was pretty bad, and I’ll never forget it.

Not that it matters. I can barely afford to live week to week now, let alone save money for retirement. I’ll probably just die, I guess. 🤷‍♀️

Social Security has each generation depend on the next generation paying for its retirement.

This is a true statement but misleading.

Social Security deductions from worker’s paychecks just go into the general government coffers, not specific savings for Social Security recipients. The government spends this regularly, and separately takes part of the money out of the general coffers and pays today’s Social Security recipients. For decades the government has spent the Social Security surplus on non-Social Security stuff. If it hadn’t, there would be plenty of money in the Social Security “savings account” without having to reduce benefits to future Social Security recipients.

Al Gore was going to set this up in the year 2000. Instead Florida couldn’t count votes cast properly and we had President George W. Bush.

SS is insurance you cannot outlive. 401K’s only work for the middle class and up that are able to out save living and medical costs. They are not the same thing and do not work as a replacement.

Problem is that everyone else’s kids pay for your retirement, which means that your incentive to do the work of raising kids goes away; Social Security puts the load on people who have kids to turn them into the next generation of productive workers. It’s great if you never raise kids, but it’s a pretty raw deal if you do raise kids.

I think it more closely follows social insurance than simply asking for a handout from everyone else’s kids. Afterall, you are paying into it until you are eligible, and when you are eligible, a person just one year younger than you is supporting you. Saying that it’s just “kids” paying into it makes it seem like we all stop paying into Social Security when we turn 25. I agree that the onus falls to the next generation in so much that it is their burden to pay into, but making it seem like we are forcing them into baby farms to push out kids to pay for our retirement is a bit dramatic. The population would have to take a pretty drastic nosedive over one generation to cause the system to collapse for the current retired generation, and the population numbers of the US don’t support that line of logic.

The biggest issue that we are running into with Social Security is the Wage Base Limit that stops the payment of Social Security tax after you are taxed a certain amount. It adjusts for inflation each year, which is great, but it doesn’t adjust for the disparity in wealth. Sure, the average person makes a certain amount per year, but that average doesn’t mean anything anymore when it’s the smallest percentage of earners in America. There are too many that don’t pay up to the cap due to their low wage, and too many that make more than the cap and don’t pay any more, and so we are left with a shrinking bank of fund as the wealth disparity increases each year. If we want to fix Social Security, we don’t need to set up “generation funds”, we need to abolish the Wage Base Limit and force everyone to pay in the 6.8% they owe, instead of just relying on the bottom 60% of Americans to do what they can.

As far as 401(k) goes, those are dependant on a volatile market, and often struggle to meet inflation, making them just slightly better than hiding your money in a mattress, but if you hide it in your mattress you don’t have to pay a fee if there is a medical emergency you needs the funds for. 401(k) is great for people with true disposable income in the excess of thousands a month, but there aren’t enough of those people around anymore, and they aren’t the ones that will rely on Social Security, anyway.

lol your entire premise is that everyone is selfish