Gen X and Retirement Benefits: Uncertainty Abounds \ stacker news ~econ

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Gen X and Retirement Benefits: Uncertainty Abounds mises.org/mises-wire/gen-x-and-retirement-benefits-uncertainty-abounds

729 sats \ 56 comments \ @Undisciplined 11h econ

By Jane L. Johnson

As people from Generation X move toward retirement, they are starting to understand that Social Security really is in crisis and many public pension plans are underfunded.

Many of the Gen X-ers surveyed say that they can’t afford to retire at 65; and a quarter of those without a 401(k) account don’t expect to ever retire at all
44 percent say they currently have a plan for how they will take income in retirement
48 percent worry they will be forced to live too frugally and not enjoy retirement as much
45 percent worry about how to best take distributions from their retirement savings for income during retirement
35% worry that they will outlive their retirement plan assets
Nearly half have done no retirement planning
They predict they will need an average $1,069,746 in savings in order to retire comfortably, yet they expect to have just $602,944 saved by then

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90 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 11h

Gen X doesn't need benefits. Benefits need Gen X.

92 sats \ 1 reply \ @TNStacker 11h

💪🏾 GenX used to the hard, independent way!

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 10h

Damn right.

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 9h

And Gen Z. The way the benefits system is set up it is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.

41 sats \ 1 reply \ @dough 3h

Isn't social security a pyramid scheme by definition? Bring in new money to pay the old money obligations.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 3h

Pretty much. They pretend to put what you pay in into a trust fund and then pay you out with that, but it's just an accounting fiction.

96 sats \ 8 replies \ @elvismercury 9h

Nearly half have done no retirement planning

Wtf?

28 sats \ 3 replies \ @kepford 9h

People have been crying wolf about SS my entire life. I think many have just stuck their heads in the sand.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 7h

It is that they have just been kicking the can down the road on the problem until the can became so big that they are breaking their toes on it now. Always, they promised they had fixed the problem and it looked that way to the uninitiated.

68 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

That's how my mom is. She dismisses any criticism of Social Security's structural problems, because of how long people have been making them.

She won't even entertain that people have been making those criticisms for decades, because they are obvious.

26 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 7h

Yeah, my mother was like that, too. However, she got a really nice pension from the place she worked at for so long. She wasn’t too worried about social insecurity.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 9h

Why plan when social insecurity will be paying money and the value of your house and 401K is going up daily? TRAP!!!!!!

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 9h

Right? Even my idiot brother has his idiot XRP holdings.

25 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 9h

The XRP hype is growing... wonder when that gets wrecked.

111 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 8h

We're working hard in Korea to make XRP stronger by the day. /s

Tell him that most of XRP's degen trade is happening here and Korea will be the first to fall due to its aging population. His shitcoins will be worth less than nothing by the time he retires.

38 sats \ 15 replies \ @cryotosensei 8h

Oh you summoned me.

Don’t mind if I narrow the scope down to teachers. I read about how teachers in the States are so lowly paid that they have to work a second or third job to make ends meet. How can these individuals (and people in similar circumstances) plan for their retirement when their everyday is so tight? Were times easier for your dad?

29 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

That's just teachers' union propaganda. Considering that it's only a 9 month job, they make better than median salaries. If they work a second job, that's usually in the summer when they aren't teaching. Teachers also generally have substantial retirement plans.

We had some financially tight years because my dad had to go on early medical retirement for a few years in the middle of his career. When he was working, we were doing fine.

36 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryotosensei 8h

This is really good to know!

I will hate to think that young teachers are burning themselves in more ways than one to fulfill their aspiration of moulding younger ones.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

Pay in the first few years can be on the low end, but teachers generally have defined pay scales, so they don't have to worry about negotiating raises. After a few years, the pay is pretty good (or at least it would be if the job weren't unnecessarily trying).

28 sats \ 2 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

Your father was a teacher? It is true that careers run in families!

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

We had three straight generations of math teachers.

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

Oh, I did not pass the desire to teach on to my kids. One is a math/stats specialist, one is a ChemE and another is a material handler. They love to study, learn, read and do what they can, but not teach. I am lucky to have taught considering my father absolutely despised the school system and its workers.

24 sats \ 8 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

Perhaps the teacher’s union is the strongest voice in this arena. They are giving out really bogus information about the working conditions in the majority of cases. Take for instance: Chicago schools. They are paid a lot more than any reasonable person would pay them for the results they are getting. Perhaps rural schools in the south or reservation schools are lowly paid. But not the big city schools.

20 sats \ 7 replies \ @cryotosensei 8h

for the results they are getting.

OUCH. Haha

24 sats \ 6 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

I don’t think you would laugh at the results if you saw the stats from the Chicago Public Schools. Most cannot read, write or cypher better than a 3rd grader when they graduate from high school. I would call that a dead end.

31 sats \ 5 replies \ @cryotosensei 8h

Are you f me?

That’s f up! Really?!

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 7h

Really. We have to give out thanks and some more money to the teacher’s union for those results, year after year after year. The people there complain a lot about it and want to have vouchers that are attached to the students rather than the schools.

20 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

No, it's really appalling.

One of the places I lived couldn't fill three police officer openings, because they couldn't find three applicants who could pass a 3rd grade reading proficiency test.

39 sats \ 2 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 7h

You know the reason for that, don’t you? The way they teach reading is the problem. They quit teaching spelling and phonetic reading a long time ago. Written language is a code to decipher and if you do not give the keys to decipher it, nobody will be able to decipher it. That is the problem, the keys are phonetic reading and spelling rules. Once the kids have those tools they can read anything they want at their leisure. Here is a good article about it: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2008/03/linda-schrock-taylor/spelling-rules-rule/

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 7h

Yeah, I remember that piece. I'm pretty sure I read every article at lewrockwell.com during those Ron Paul years.

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64 sats \ 1 reply \ @Shugard 11h

That would scare the shit out of me honestly! Luckily we are in Bitcoin!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 9h

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had deflation instead of inflation? It would make savings so much more puissant!

45 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10h

I'm slated to have a generous pension in many years, but I'm operating as if it won't be there. I'm not gonna place my future in the hands of fools. If the pension is still solvent when I retire, that'll be just a bonus, but I fully plan to be sufficient without it

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 9h

In California, I would count on it not being there at all. They will have to start robbing the pensions soon to pay off the deficits. I think there will be nothing but self-custodied assets. I do not mean self custodied paper assets, either. I think it will be the same all over the country by then. I also think 401Ks are going to be snuffled up by the state, somehow, too.

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 9h

You got in on a defined benefit plan?

44 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 9h

Yep, CalPERS.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 9h

Ouch!!! Look out for Blackrock!

55 sats \ 17 replies \ @kepford 11h

As people from Generation X move toward retirement, they are starting to understand that Social Security really is in crisis and many public pension plans are underfunded.

Starting? Wow!

45 sats \ 16 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 9h

Think about how dumb the average person is and then realize half are even dumber than that.

72 sats \ 14 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 9h

Not dumb!! Uneducated! If they were educated to this isht, they wouldn’t fall for staying in the dark and being fed isht. The average person, now, cannot even balance a checkbook or even write it in a register. What can you expect? People are going out today for $7 lattes everyday without reflecting on what they are doing and the lost opportunity costs of it.

52 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 9h

It can be both... the intelligent can be the worst if indoctrinated. There are massive numbers of people that aren't only uneducated but also not bright to start with.

41 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

I have to agree here. I think that comes into play, too. After all, half the people are below average, aren’t they?

57 sats \ 11 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 9h

"Miseducated" is probably even more accurate. Still, I'll argue that they can be dumb because of poor education.

40 sats \ 7 replies \ @kepford 9h

Yes, mal-educated

30 sats \ 4 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

This might work if you could show that they were taught bad information in the first place. I think the problem is that there is no teaching going on in this space, at all. Some of the teachers I knew thought that this should be taught by parents at home! Of course, a lot of the parents didn’t know about these things either.

35 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

Kids don't come up with all the woke progressivism spontaneously. It's part of their mal-education.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

I agree, but woke progressive/lefty/Marxist/socialist/communist/murderering is a different subject from financial awareness. Wokism is inculcated into the kids from their instructors, no doubt about it, but the instructors have been exposed to it throughout thier educations, including and especially college. They don’t get any financial awareness from any of those avenues.

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15 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

Yeah, that's the right one. It implies that the education is harmful, more so than just being wrong.

22 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

Yes, but they are not getting taught or trained in any of these personal finance topics, at all. That may be due to the ELites desiring the plebes not to know about finance, but they are still getting nothing, bubkus, nada or nanimonai. I know they give this basic personal finance information in Japanese high schools to everyone, even though the kids did a lot of goofing off in this class.

26 sats \ 2 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

I don’t know about Miseducated. I once-upon-a-time taught high school business. I made it a point to teach all the classes I had a section of personal finance. It included basic banking (checkbook and savings maintenance)(I used actual bank donated materials), balancing the books and savings and budgeting. I took them through the “pack of cigarettes a day habit” spending and what the lost opportunity costs were. I at least left them with an awareness of how to handle their money and invest if they had the urge.

77 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 8h

Sure, there are lots of good individual teachers, but the system as a whole is clearly not preparing people for success.

I pushed back on "uneducated" because people have never spent so much time in school. It's not a lack of educational services that's the problem.

106 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 8h

I agree with you there. My peeve is that the teachers that are supposed to teach these things don’t know them in the first place. There are several subject areas they place financial education: business, home ec, social studies and ?health???. I could never figure out why health. I understood all the others but social studies is dominated by progressive/lefty/Marxist/socialist/communist/murderers and home ec and business are usually too busy with the main topics of the class to slide in the personal finances.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 9h

True