Golden Years
June 27, 2021 10:27 AM   Subscribe

The Broken Promise of Retirement. "If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system, 2.6 million formerly middle-class workers will be plunged into poverty by 2022." posted by Lyme Drop (97 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
It just seems like the article’s proposed solution is ... Social Security under a different name. We thought of this during the New Deal. And then have been dismantling it since the 80’s.
posted by kerf at 10:48 AM on June 27, 2021 [28 favorites]


Elders vote, but can be easily distracted with guns and baby Jesus and squeals about Mexican gangs. So, they vote against their own best interests and it's getting a little tiring to keep responding to the domestic disturbance of a senior begging for help on Facebook with medical care, mobility, assistance and also posting Stop the Steal and QAnon memes.
posted by lon_star at 10:53 AM on June 27, 2021 [67 favorites]


People tell me I'm insane when I say that I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in 20+ years. I honestly think with all of the crazy changes that keep happening in the world, the option will be taken away, or the money will, or both, or something. People will need to work until they die.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:57 AM on June 27, 2021 [56 favorites]


The big picture for society is terrifying, although some of the examples cited don't support the cause. The first anecdote is someone who didn't expect to still be working at... 63?! Many public pensions grant benefits at an astonishingly early retirement age that even I - a lifelong liberal Democratic activist from a family of trade unionists, who is a former trade union employee myself - find insupportable, literally and figuratively.

Yes, the right answer is a universal retirement and disability system along the lines of, uh, yup, Social Security. Maybe these soaring numbers of needy retirees by... next year?!... will lead to some good outcomes at ballot boxes?
posted by PhineasGage at 11:32 AM on June 27, 2021 [17 favorites]


People could fix this if they wanted to. It's not even that hard, but they choose not to (more accurately, they continue to reward the people who are actively trying to turn them into serfs).

Conclusion: either a plurality of the population are morons, or they want to be placed in serfdom (the case of "well I want everything but those other people should get nothing therefore I will vote against anyone being helped" is just an iteration of being a moron). I keep waiting for the GOP to propose that what remains of social security be turned into a lottery system; with the right messaging I'm pretty sure they could pull it off. You can win with the new ULTRA-SSDI scratchoff cards, available at your local lottery retailer, only $249.99 per play! Combine with a Medicaid Pick-5 for extra winning power!
posted by aramaic at 12:01 PM on June 27, 2021 [15 favorites]


If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system
There's a system?

People will need to work until they die.
But at what jobs? We can't all be Wal-Mart greeters. You notice a lot of enthusiasm, at your company, for hiring 70-year-olds?
posted by thelonius at 12:03 PM on June 27, 2021 [44 favorites]


It's not just elders who "can be easily distracted with guns and baby Jesus and squeals about Mexican gangs." There's no evidence people get stupider as they age.
posted by villard at 12:05 PM on June 27, 2021 [35 favorites]


Conclusion: either a plurality of the population are morons, or they want to be placed in serfdom (the case of "well I want everything but those other people should get nothing therefore I will vote against anyone being helped" is just an iteration of being a moron).

Or, y'know, people are... humans... and hence not particularly good at assessing future, abstract risk and are hence reluctant to spend in the near-term to mitigate it.

But sure, maybe they're just idiots.
posted by multics at 12:07 PM on June 27, 2021 [15 favorites]


The article talks alot about how Detroit essentially destroyed itself instead of allowing Black people to be prosperous there. And now the rest of the country is following suit. And that's why no one can retire now. The only thing you can do is luck your way into earning enough for your current life and your retired life at the same time. And after that your life when you need to pay for full support from other humans when you can't take care of yourself. Oh and you also need to be earning enough for your child's life, and your parent's life now that they can't work anymore. One salary has to support multiple entire lifetimes at once. And people are still arguing against a minimum wage that can't even accomplish that.

It's really sad but true that humans would rather destroy themselves than let other humans prosper.
posted by bleep at 12:07 PM on June 27, 2021 [83 favorites]


I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in 20+ years

Yeah, given that I'm scraping by now and Social Security is only going to give me less than 2/3 of that at best, I expect to keep working lower- and lower-paying jobs until I'm no longer employable at all. At which point I guess I'll be looking at living under a bridge or in a homeless shelter. My best-case scenario is that I'll keel over from a heart attack before I get too decrepit/senile to work.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:08 PM on June 27, 2021 [21 favorites]


One possibility might be to make 401k and 403b style retirement or savings accounts available to all. Like narrow privatized healthcare options, tying retirement benefits to an employer or to employment, specifically, has not worked well for individuals who need the benefit.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:11 PM on June 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


My boss has told me in the past that we are making good money, and we are. I haven’t been able to put it into words before this but there is an anxiety that I have with making money that is good and sustains me now but that will not generate enough in savings deposits over the next 30 years to fund retirement.

Its good money but not retirement money.

And this is under the (probably safe) assumption that I will own this condo or some other home at that point. For people that don’t, you have to add “continuing to rent” onto the anxieties of aging.
posted by Slackermagee at 12:14 PM on June 27, 2021 [9 favorites]


But at what jobs? We can't all be Wal-Mart greeters. You notice a lot of enthusiasm, at your company, for hiring 70-year-olds?

What Greg_Ace said. You won't have many options. Eventually you can't get employed and well.... I'd probably get my comment removed if I finish that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:15 PM on June 27, 2021 [17 favorites]


to make 401k and 403b style retirement accounts available to all

Are you thinking that these can’t be eviscerated the way pension plans are? There’s nothing but norms protecting either, really. Either we get the political will to protect both of them, or neither will be safe.
posted by clew at 12:22 PM on June 27, 2021 [11 favorites]


One possibility might be to make 401k and 403b style retirement or savings accounts available to all.

This seems like such a no-brainer (the government already runs an excellent 401(k)-alike, the Thrift Savings Plan, easily the largest such plan in the country, if not the world) that it seems like the only possible explanation for the lack of civilian access to it that it'd step on the feet of the Fidelities and Vanguards of the world. That's not to say that it's a good idea to tie everyone's retirement to the market, but it just seems like a natural piece of the solution, especially if combined with annual government contributions.
posted by multics at 12:24 PM on June 27, 2021


One possibility might be to make 401k and 403b style retirement or savings accounts available to all.

I'm pretty certain that any plan that relies on people being able to put away more of their own money isn't going to be a solution. People're scraping by for their current expenses, much less "set aside 1-15% of takehome, without matching, and navigate between the Scylla & Charybdis of inflation/cost-of-living versus getting eaten by some new market manipulation".
And then there's the parade of "let's give people a way to tap into their retirement, rather than fund something I'm being pressured into looking like I'm doing something for" (houses, healthcare, eldercare, etc)

There's the modern makeshift risk-pooling system, i.e. "the same $20 sent from one GoFundMe to the next", but nobody's pretending that's an answer either.
posted by CrystalDave at 12:26 PM on June 27, 2021 [33 favorites]


If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system
There's a system?
Yes. Lazy cynicism is one of the tools the GOP has used to attack it but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong about the Social Security/Medicare concepts: we just need to reverse the tax cuts for rich people and similar attempts to prove that the system doesn’t work by sabotaging it.
posted by adamsc at 12:30 PM on June 27, 2021 [83 favorites]


One of the things that has allowed this to happen is the under-funding on an ongoing basis of pension funds. Pension funds are supposed to be funded incrementally as pension obligation builds up. The formulas for doing this are a bit involved but come down to this: at the same time as the payroll runs, they determine the incremental money required to pay the pensions of everyone currently employed and put that into the fund. This is intended to prevent future financial distress disrupting the ability of the fund to pay out for liabilities it is incurring now.

What has been going on is a combination of:

-In many states, local and state funds actually don't have to do that at all. Essentially they are assumed to be permanently solvent and therefore can pay their future obligations from future tax revenues because it's assumed that, say, Detroit or Michigan will always be around in a way that GM might not be. That works out fine as long as you don't get a massive contraction in available revenue the way Detroit has. (I don't think this one was so much an issue in Detroit but a lot of state level funds are affected by this). It also requires state and local fiscal prudence to make sure that they are not building up future obligations that will be impossible to service. Many governments historically picked pension increases (either in cash terms or more commonly through generous above inflation CoL increases, early retirement arrangements, etc.) over current salary increases in order to "balance the budget" in the narrow immediate term.

-The US is much more casual than some other parts of the world about what plan sponsors (i.e. the employers) have to do when the fund is underfunded. Everywhere including the US requires something to be done but there are differences in how fast these are required to be fixed.

-Calculating the amount you have to put away now to fund a future obligation depends on assumptions about future return rates. Since pensions try to invest in bonds and other safe fixed income instruments, low bond yields mean that you have to put way more money away today to fund a given obligation in three decades than you would otherwise. In many cases, funds clung to unrealistically low rates for a long time on the grounds that low bond yields were temporary and they are long term investors. Over the last few years this has become completely untenable as an assumption and changing these actuarial assumptions has overnight completely changed the funded status of many pensions. Disagreements over the long-term assumption for return and discount rates have also been prominent in Dutch politics over recent years, lest you should think this is a uniquely American situation. Some people think that long-term demographic changes are changing the fundamental ratios of savers/borrowers and that this is basically an unstoppable macro trend, I don't understand it well enough to know whether I believe that, but worth noting.

-Many non pension retirement benefits are not pre-funded. Most relevant for Americans is that retirement health benefits are basically never pre-funded and these obligations (for companies like GM) as well as local governments and states are often where the real trouble is. Not just because there is no pre-funding at all but also because they were often agreed when the amount of available healthcare was a lot less.

Of course successive conservative governments have chipped and chiselled away at these rights at every turn, rather giving the lie to their supposed interest in property rights and rewarding prudence and hard work.

I am really not a fan of just getting people to individually save more into DC schemes like 401Ks. A few reasons:

First, even if you are personally prudent and wanted to put away 15% of your income, what happens if others don't? One thing that happens is that the average incomes drive inflation, not those of the small minority of prudent savers. So even if you wanted to put away that %, the rate at which your cost of living goes up will make it impossible because the level at which rent and property prices grow will be based on the post-savings income of your peers (since they are not saving, they have a smaller pre/post savings difference and in effect have more money with which to drive rent up). So you will in fact find it impossible to save that % because others don't. If the government mandates that this money is withdrawn from current consumption, either into private DC schemes or into government schemes, the problem is solved.

Second, even if the above were not true, we know that people are hyperbolic discounters and will spend their money unwisely by not saving enough. That's not an individual moral failing, that's more or less biological reality. Literally everyone does it. If I hadn't picked the sensible default % retirement contribution offered by my employer when I first started working, I would probably not be saving nearly enough. Despite my job being all about numbers, I'm not anymore short-term rational than anyone else. So we are collectively fooling ourselves by thinking that human behaviour is other than it is when we think we can just advise people to save more and then act shocked, shocked to find under-saving going on here.

There is nothing at all wrong with systems like Social Security. Actuarially, much of the world is in a demographic place where outgoings are now more than incomings and will be so for a while. But nobody said during the many years when contributions > outgoings that it was making a profit, right? It is not making a loss nor running out of money. Also - there is no fund except in the sense of an internal ledger entry between different parts of the government. Yes, there should be adjustments between the rights and interests of current retirees, near future retirees, and far future retirees / current payers but the required tweaks are all easily doable in a variety of ways.
posted by atrazine at 12:44 PM on June 27, 2021 [36 favorites]


I paid into Social Security for 20 years, most of them at the highest rate. After we moved back to NZ I discovered I could never access that money so enjoy it I guess. Mind you my (American) partner now has a great motive to knock me off.
posted by mbo at 12:51 PM on June 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


Are you thinking that these can’t be eviscerated the way pension plans are?

The individual owns the investments, so they aren't like pensions or Social Security. There are tax laws that dissuade early cash-outs, but I am presuming that entirely new tax laws would be needed for the federal government to "raid" or otherwise take out more money from these on debit. Setting up brand new laws to raid 403b/401k accounts seems very difficult and unlikely.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:14 PM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


Boomers are just people who are older than you. They are a diverse generation, just like the generations after them. Only a third of Boomers described themselves as conservative Republicans or leaning Republican.. Yes, they trend more Republican than younger groups, but that's pretty normal. They also make up a huge proportion of progressive activists. A remarkably persistent weekly progressive demonstration in my city is made up largely of people in their sixties and seventies.

People like to claim that Boomers have all the money and are the last generation to be able to retire, but a large proportion of them have little money and can't retire. I just finished reading Nomadland (the nonfiction book on which the movie is based) and it lays out how 2008 devastated the middle class. Yes, people made stupid decisions, buying expensive houses in the belief that the value could only go up or taking out education loans in order to improve their employability. That's because it was the advice the experts were providing. They're giving bad advice now, too.

The belief that company pensions were widely available to a particular generation is incorrect. Pensions provided a very small portion of retirement income for a small minority of people.

Retirement is a relatively recent concept. Mostly what happens is people aged into poverty and death.

When you get to your sixties and seventies, and find out you don't have enough money, the funny thing is, you don't decide to kill yourself, which a surprising number of people have told me they plan to do. That's because you're still pretty healthy, you like being alive, and you don't feel any older than you do now. We have a hard time imagining ourselves being old, even when we're old. You also may think you'll just work forever, but when you get to your eighties, you will realize it isn't gonna happen--and even then, you will still feel just like yourself.

The thing about old people is that they are us, just as children and teenagers are us. I took care of my Greatest Generation mother for ten years when she got Parkinson's, but because she was lucky enough to have property to sell, Social Security, and Medicare, she didn't bankrupt me. That means I am not a charge on my own kid. We all pay for a broken retirement system.
posted by Peach at 1:17 PM on June 27, 2021 [113 favorites]


"Private" value will be taken by required fees to and investments in the few giant companies that satisfy "protective" regulations. People owned their pensions, too.

Plus, I don’t think it’s mostly the taxes keeping private savings from protecting peoples old age; it’s the lack of enough money to save.
posted by clew at 1:20 PM on June 27, 2021 [5 favorites]


I retired this year and I'll admit I have no financial complaints (I receive two pensions, Social Security and have a little over $1 million investments.)

I accomplished this by not having a life. I live in the same house I bought when I was 25. I drive my car to death before buying a new one. I have no wife and no children. I don't travel.

So, financially, I'm well off. But the opportunity cost was very, very high. I'd give up most of my money to have actually had a life.
posted by SPrintF at 1:22 PM on June 27, 2021 [67 favorites]


Here's a little-known social security wrinkle. I was a stay-at-home Mom for approximately five years when I was married. During that time, I earned no money. If I had been married for ten years, my ex-husband's earnings for those five years would count toward my social security. Since I was only married for seven years, that's just a zero for me.

I also had years of low income after graduate school. I eventually ended up with a job that pays a substantial amount into my 503b, but still, I'm terrified of retiring. I have a cancer that is currently treated with permanent chemo, and I'm not sure how long I can realistically keep working.

Elders vote, but can be easily distracted with guns and baby Jesus and squeals about Mexican gangs.

I saw this article thinking maybe we could at last put the "Boomers are rich" stereotype to rest, but then the second comment got right into "Boomers are stupid." Sigh.
posted by FencingGal at 1:36 PM on June 27, 2021 [25 favorites]


Folks, the "individual" 401k/403b program already exists, it is literally called the Individual Retirement Account

https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/individual-retirement-arrangements-iras

Unfortunately IRAs share a large number of problems with 401k and 403b programs.
  • The average American worker pays little or no income tax, whether working or retired. So what good is a tax shelter?
  • How are workers supposed to find the money to fund their IRAs? $6k a year isn't pocket change
  • As with the 401k and 403b programs, this is self-directed investment. How many people are comfortable with the ins and outs of stocks and bonds? How many can afford financial advisors to guide them?
  • How many people, even people on MeFi, really understand the difference between Roth and non-Roth contributions to an IRA or 401k?
No amount of tweaking and fiddling with tax sheltered accounts will ever create security for the average American. These programs only work for the relatively affluent -- people who pay a lot of tax and are very concerned with minimizing the tax liability on their retirement funds.
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 1:51 PM on June 27, 2021 [22 favorites]


You also may think you'll just work forever, but when you get to your eighties, you will realize it isn't gonna happen--and even then, you will still feel just like yourself.

Sir Stephen Spender told our poetry class that getting old is like driving the same car for many years. You, the driver, feel fine, but the damn thing starts falling apart around you.
posted by thelonius at 1:53 PM on June 27, 2021 [54 favorites]


I saw this article thinking maybe we could at last put the "Boomers are rich" stereotype to rest, but then the second comment got right into "Boomers are stupid." Sigh.

No one said "Boomers are stupid," they pointed out that Boomers skew more conservative, more racist, and less open to voting for policies that will help younger generations. That's not a stereotype, that's a series of trends that gets validated in pretty much every modern US election.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 2:03 PM on June 27, 2021 [19 favorites]


Thanks for this post, Lyme Drop.

From the FPP link, emphasis mine: [Economist Teresa Ghilarducci] has shown that private-investment retirement accounts were originally designed for upper-tier corporate managers as a supplement to their existing benefits. The idea was to create a tax benefit as an incentive for executives to invest their extra cash. 401(k)s were not intended to establish security for middle- or lower-income Americans. We should not be surprised that these plans have failed them.

- In 2016, CEOs at America’s largest firms made, on average, 271 times more than the average US worker. Fifty years ago, that ratio was 20-to-1. (BillMoyers.com, July 20, 2017) [referencing this Economic Policy Institute report (.pdf) & press release, July 20, 2017]

-- Since 1978, and adjusted for inflation, American workers have seen an 11.2 percent increase in compensation. During that same period, CEO’s have seen a 937 percent increase in earnings. That salary growth is even 70 percent faster than the rise in the stock market, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (CNBC, Jan. 22, 2018)

The State of American Retirement Savings (Economic Policy Institute, Dec. 10, 2019) How the shift to 401(k)s has increased gaps in retirement preparedness based on income, race, ethnicity, education, and marital status
posted by Iris Gambol at 2:07 PM on June 27, 2021 [24 favorites]


America Is Run by Geezers
But Biden didn’t win by as large a margin as Democrats hoped, and ballooning turnout didn’t win Democrats back the Senate. That’s because turnout for Republican constituencies, including the elderly, was really high, too. The elderly’s proportion of votes cast was higher than ever before, simply because the Baby Boom is entering old age.

It’s easy to lose sight of the aging-voters story because turnout among young voters really does seem to have increased a great deal in 2020. According to the Tufts Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, somewhere between 52 percent and 55 percent of all eligible voters aged 18 to 29 voted. That’s an increase over 2016 of 10 or 11 percentage points. Give young people, who traditionally have a terrible record on turnout, a gold star for Most Improved.

But 52–55 percent turnout is still peanuts compared to this year’s 65 percent turnout among the population at large, driven at least in part by even higher turnout among elderly voters. The true age-demographic story of 2020 wasn’t that young people flocked to the polls in higher proportions than ever before. It was that this youthquake had no discernible impact on the makeup of the American electorate, according to Edison Research’s exit polls, because there were so goddamned many old people.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 2:08 PM on June 27, 2021 [23 favorites]


The comment I referenced said Boomers are “easily distracted.” That’s saying they’re stupid.
posted by FencingGal at 2:09 PM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yes, they are more easily distracted by racist stereotypes and inability to focus on the effects of their choices than younger voters. Again, this isn't stupidity, this is a common cultural trend of changing viewpoints as people age.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 2:23 PM on June 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


There's no evidence people get stupider as they age.\

Age-related cognitive decline is a thing; the brain, like every other part of the body, ages and becomes less efficient. Hence you get people who used to be sharp as a tack being conned out of their life savings by phone scammers. Somewhere along the line, someone weaponised this and scaled it up, conning the aging into devoting their lives into a crusade against imaginary bogeymen.

(Sources: many, among them, observations of once astute and open-minded older relatives who have been zombified by Qanon-adjacent brainworms.)
posted by acb at 2:29 PM on June 27, 2021 [11 favorites]


I think there are a lot of ADHD sufferers who would take issue with being called stupid for being easily distracted.

Taxes should be much higher, it's as simple as that. We're going to be living in a disgusting world of suffering and malaise in like 20 years if nothing changes.
posted by rhizome at 2:42 PM on June 27, 2021 [10 favorites]


Mod note: Folks, maybe sideline the "Are older people stupider" derail? It's not helpful, devolves into harmful stereotypes, and is off-track from the original post.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:54 PM on June 27, 2021 [42 favorites]


I'm 46 years old, and there is no way I can retire in the sense of entirely stopping work and living off some combination of Social Security (assuming the Republicans haven't destroyed it by then), the tiny 403(b) I have, and the pitiful savings I've accumulated.

I'll be working until I die, and I think pretty much everyone who works and is my age or younger is in the same situation.

There is no possible way the Democrats will create a system that will let me ever stop working. The best I can hope for is that they somehow keep the Republicans from totally dismantling Social Security.
posted by sotonohito at 3:30 PM on June 27, 2021 [17 favorites]


If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system, 2.6 million formerly middle-class workers will be plunged into poverty by 2022

I've been reading the comments here, then I scrolled back to the top and re-read this pull quote. Guys, 2022 is in six months. Crap.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:30 PM on June 27, 2021 [13 favorites]


sotonohito, I didn’t start putting money into savings until I was your age. You have time.
posted by Peach at 3:57 PM on June 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


> I didn’t start putting money into savings until I was your age. You have time.

That assumes we also have money.
posted by glonous keming at 4:12 PM on June 27, 2021 [24 favorites]


I have already seen the retirement systems dismantled in latinamerica. It seems that these policies are tested in MIC, and then in the USA.

Now, I know there is no retirement for me. I am hoping for being able to escape to another country with socialized medicine, as I have been seeing people do.
posted by kadmilos at 4:42 PM on June 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


I am hoping for being able to escape to another country with socialized medicine, as I have been seeing people do.

Golden visa in Greece = roughly $300K USD (real estate investment, so basically a villa at a resort), before various fees. Valid for as long as you hold the property (there will be annual maintenance fees etc). The Greek healthcare system is quite good (better than Germany or the UK by some measures).
posted by aramaic at 4:53 PM on June 27, 2021 [7 favorites]


53% of the Capitol rioters were millennials. Age has little to do with guns and Jesus.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:54 PM on June 27, 2021 [28 favorites]


Escaping to here (New Zealand) to retire is not so easy, essentially we want you to pay into our social welfare system (ie taxes) while you're young and healthy so you can collect (healthcare and retirement) when you're retired - if you want to come here with that in mind you probably have to come in your 40s or so, and even then our govt will reduce our old age pension by the amount you're receiving from US social security (I mentioned above that I lived and worked in the US for 20 years and will never receive the money I put into US SS ... but if I could I'd happily be giving it to the NZ govt to (quite fairly) offset the years I wasn't paying into our scheme here (which I will receive at the full rate because I have been paying in for the past 15 years).
posted by mbo at 5:30 PM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


Since pensions try to invest in bonds and other safe fixed income instruments, low bond yields mean that you have to put way more money away today to fund a given obligation in three decades than you would otherwise.

U.S. pension funds are now heavily into less-liquid investments like private equity funds to "combat" this "problem," which often leads to their pockets being picked.
posted by praemunire at 5:31 PM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


[I] will never receive the money I put into US SS

...which is because NZ isn't party to a "totalizing" treaty with the US. A number of countries are, but NZ isn't, for whatever reasons (Australia has been since 2002).
posted by aramaic at 5:47 PM on June 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


Praemunire brings up a great point on asset allocation.

Because these pension funds are underfunded, they look to alternative asset classes (with higher risk / higher reward) in an attempt to make up the difference. So, you see pension funds investing more and more in private equity.

Now saying PE is ALWAYS going to lay everyone off is an overstatement, but even where PE is trying to grow the business it’s not like they are going to be giving out raises to workers. PE is going to be capturing as much value as possible as aggressively as possible.

So as a result you kind of have these pension funds trying to suck up as much value as possible (partly from other workers) and paying PE managers a hefty price for doing the dirty work for them. I call it…

… The aristocrats!
posted by The Ted at 5:54 PM on June 27, 2021 [6 favorites]


..which is because NZ isn't party to a "totalizing" treaty with the US. A number of countries are, but NZ isn't, for whatever reasons (Australia has been since 2002).

but also because the US will not pay retirement money to non-resident non-citizens who have contributed to the Social Security fund (but they're happy to tax my 401K when I finally empty it)
posted by mbo at 6:06 PM on June 27, 2021 [3 favorites]



And this is under the (probably safe) assumption that I will own this condo or some other home at that point. For people that don’t, you have to add “continuing to rent” onto the anxieties of aging.


For me, it is the opposite. I am glad I cannot afford to own a home. What a crushing debt to have into old age. Renting forever means options.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:18 PM on June 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


I'm a geezer. I was screwed when I worked for the city; didn't qualify for the pension plan, they didn't pay into Soc Sec/ FICA. So they paid in to a 501(C)3. I think. I moved on, and didn't have enough money in it, was forced to cash it out, pay 10% penalty, pay taxes. and have no FICA contribution/coverage for that period.
I was screwed when I worked for a non-profit because the funding period for vesting was different from the hiring (fiscal year) period.
People in the military don't pay into FICA/ Soc. Sec. and I can't figure out of they just get screwed.

State, local, federal governments(and railoads) generally don't participate in Soc Sec/ FICA. This is crappy for anyone whose job is temporary, or who moves, whose spouse changes to a job that requires a move, or many other typical modern scenarios. State, local, federal governments also go bankrupt or otherwise screw employees as described in the article. My friend who only worked for the state - no Medicare eligibility because she never paid in (the state gives her an okay-ish plan). The person who worked under the table their whole life - no Soc. Sec., no Medicare.

Everybody who gets a state/fed pension, but contributed to Soc. Sec. bitches non-stop about how they got screwed (accuracy of complaint varies wildly). Some state and federal pensions are pretty generous, but maybe weird; in Maine, you go from 0% vested to 100% at 10 years.

Get everybody on Soc. Sec., FICA, Medicare, contribute additional funds to a pension plan, maybe, contribute to a 401k or similar, whatever, but it's currently beanplatingly complicated, in a way that hurts people.
posted by theora55 at 6:28 PM on June 27, 2021 [10 favorites]


State, local, federal governments(and railoads) generally don't participate in Soc Sec/ FICA.

Most governments do; a modest number don't. The feds definitely do, even if you're on a time-limited appointment and don't pay into TSP or equivalent.

(I'm not sure why you didn't roll over your contribution instead of withdrawing it and paying taxes. I think there is some minimum, but it is very low, so low that it could hardly make a difference.)

It is, however, true that not sticking around in a job with pension can cost you.
posted by praemunire at 7:29 PM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


People in the military don't pay into FICA/ Soc. Sec. and I can't figure out of they just get screwed.

20 years in the military gets you full retirement.
posted by aniola at 8:53 PM on June 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


Years counted toward retirement are also at least partially transferrable to at least some other government agencies such as the USPS.
posted by aniola at 8:54 PM on June 27, 2021


The basic idea with pensions (as opposed to defined-contribution savings plans) is that you get massive efficiency gains from pooling the risk of outliving your savings. Having each person try to save enough money to last until age 90, when the average life expectancy is more like 75 or 80, is a lot more difficult and expensive than doing it collectively.

In the US, there's two different issues:
  • Social Security. The decline in private pension plans and their replacement with 401k-type plans - which put the risk of outliving your savings on the individual contributor, instead of pooling the risk - makes Social Security even more important.
  • Future obligations of pension plans for public employees at the state and municipal levels. This is the focus of the article. A 2017 explanation of the problem from the Economist.
If a public pension plan goes bankrupt, that's a terrible outcome. If it cuts back its pension obligations, that's also pretty bad - public employees gave up salary in exchange for the security of pension benefits.

The article mentions state deficits. My understanding is that Covid has actually improved this situation, i.e. federal aid has resulted in large surpluses for state governments, at least temporarily.

Some recent pension and annuity developments in Canada: posted by russilwvong at 12:18 AM on June 28, 2021 [12 favorites]


At 45, in a country and an industry that doesn’t have a lot of room for older people, I just found out that I’m the oldest foreign teacher at my school, which is a new and terrifying world for me to be in. I honestly struggle with the idea that I’ll still have the job I have in five years, let alone twenty. I’ve been trying to figure out things I might be able to do outside of what has largely been my career, and it’s absolutely terrifying to me.

At this point, my whole retirement plan is based on the men in my family dying in their mid sixties, and the life insurance policy that would take care of Mrs. Ghidorah after I’m gone. I just never expected to be so unsure of my ability to hold a decent job between 45 and 65, but here I am, and I’m fucking terrified.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:02 AM on June 28, 2021 [15 favorites]


You know who will always have a comfortable and early retirement that we pay for?

Cops.
posted by spitbull at 4:11 AM on June 28, 2021 [7 favorites]


People in the military don't pay into FICA/ Soc. Sec. and I can't figure out of they just get screwed.

Military have paid into social security for decades and decades. Presumably, like in most circumstances, they pay into social security based on the part of their salary the military calls their "salary" and not on their full pay, which giveth and taketh away.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:45 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


20 years in the military gets you full retirement.

Indeed. I know someone who is more or less my exact contemporary (a few months younger). He retired as a major in the Air Force at 42, with a lifelong indexed pension that that began just shy of six figures annually. After sitting around retired for a month or two, he went to work for a company with one client: the military. He’s now in his early fifties. Between his new job and his lifelong pension, he makes something like twenty times what I do on disability, and he still complains that he needs to buy lottery tickets to have any chance of a secure retirement.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:47 AM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


Another perspective:
Breathe easy, Americans. You (almost certainly) won’t retire into poverty:

"for the twentieth straight year, more than 70 percent of U.S. retirees tell Gallup they have enough money, not merely to survive or to get by, but to 'live comfortably.' ... 'You just wait,' say the retirement crisis coalition, which includes an odd alliance of the financial industry seeking to get Americans to purchase more of their products and progressives seeking for government to take over retirement income provision and push private savings to the sidelines. ... Are fewer Americans saving for retirement? Are they setting aside less of their income for old age? Have total retirement savings dropped? Are Americans retiring earlier? ... The answer to all of these questions is no, and emphatically so."

Does this article often cherry-pick data to support a specific point of view? Yes. But so does the original linked article. There are certainly problems with our retirement security system, but to suggest that it's somehow on the verge of collapse is a huge exaggeration.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:49 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


Folks, the "individual" 401k/403b program already exists, it is literally called the Individual Retirement Account

The average American worker pays little or no income tax, whether working or retired. So what good is a tax shelter?

How many people, even people on MeFi, really understand the difference between Roth and non-Roth contributions to an IRA or 401k?


410ks and IRAs are not really equivalent. For one thing you can invest up to something like $18k a year in a 401k vs $6k a year in a IRA. You have invest for a really long time to retire on an IRA at $6k a year or less, like almost literally as soon as you graduate high school you need to be funding that thing.

For point #2, not so. After $25k in Social Security income, you start to have to pay tax, and the relative tax rate vs the marginal income difference can be pretty high even if the actual tax paid isn't that much. I'm talking 50% on $3000, or $1500 in tax. For point #3, the actual answer is very dependent upon earned income per year, but for most the difference is academic and is who cares. For the people caught in point #2 it matters.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


Praemunire, you can’t just join a 501.c3; I tried. This was 25 years ago. City HR staff confirmed that I was basically screwed.
Aniola, many, many people in the military leave after several years, my son left after 6 years. As far as I can tell, he has no Soc Sec or equivalent contributions for that time.
posted by theora55 at 8:17 AM on June 28, 2021


Does this article often cherry-pick data to support a specific point of view? Yes. But so does the original linked article. There are certainly problems with our retirement security system, but to suggest that it's somehow on the verge of collapse is a huge exaggeration.

This is misunderstanding the complaint in the article. Seventy percent of the people might be in great shape. You can still worry about the lack of a safety net for the others. You can still be offended by the broken promises implicit in slashing pensions. You can still bemoan the inherent inefficiency in privately funded retirements or the uncertainty that comes from the decline of defined benefit plans.

The AEI doesn't care about these things: Over 20% of retirees in poverty would be fine for them, as long as it doesn't spur government action to improve their lot. State and municipal employees losing promised benefits is good because they don't want people to have faith in government.
posted by mark k at 8:44 AM on June 28, 2021 [13 favorites]


but also because the US will not pay retirement money to non-resident non-citizens who have contributed to the Social Security fund

(Apologies for the derail but a friend in Sweden is a non-resident non-citizen getting US social-security payments for the years of work done while in the US.)
posted by Bella Donna at 8:49 AM on June 28, 2021


People tell me I'm insane when I say that I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in 20+ years.

The problem is that I heard this from my parents and uncles and aunts growing up. They decided there was no use saving, no use planning. Now of course they're in their 70s/80s and huh yeah they have just Social Security.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 9:02 AM on June 28, 2021 [9 favorites]


If you find yourself typing "people are morons" multiple times a day, this might be an opportunity to at least reflect on how you are doing.. You okay?
I mind a park and pick up garbage and clean the outhouses a few times a week, believe me I have the "people are morons" moments. I don't think these are healthy moments, just an opinion. I've seen mindless vandalism, deliberate effort to smear human feces ("just because"), I'm not in the shallow end of the pool when it comes to moronic behaviour. And we have not even entered the realm of (however you wish to classify) truly cruel and hateful behaviour.

Trying to stay positive. Take care.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:19 AM on June 28, 2021 [14 favorites]


I guess your opinion of the retirement situation in the USA depends on whether you are in the 70% or 30%.

When my daughter was deciding between job offers (she is in her mid 20s), I asked her about the benefits. She talked about the healthcare insurance options. I asked her what about retirment. 401k? Her response was I have plenty of time to think about that. My response to her response was that I failed her as a parent if she really believes that. I did my best to try to explain to her that the only person or entity, government included, that is watching out for her retirement is her! I am proud to say she took the job with the matching contributions to a 401k.
posted by AugustWest at 9:26 AM on June 28, 2021 [8 favorites]


Apologies for the derail but a friend in Sweden is a non-resident non-citizen getting US social-security payments for the years of work done while in the US.

Yeah it gets complicated. Sweden is one of the 30 or so countries that has an agreement with the US (so called Totalization Agreements) on social security payments. New Zealand is not one of them.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 9:29 AM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


Aniola, many, many people in the military leave after several years, my son left after 6 years. As far as I can tell, he has no Soc Sec or equivalent contributions for that time.

My parents were both in the military and left before 20 years. They mourned not staying in for 20 years. I have no idea whether or not their time counted toward social security.

But then my dad joined the post office and his time in the military partially counted toward his retirement from the post office. He is now retired from the post office.
posted by aniola at 9:32 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


(I'm confident he's not making the piles of money someone mentioned above, though.)
posted by aniola at 9:32 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


As far as I can tell, he has no Soc Sec or equivalent contributions for that time.

Active-duty military have paid into social security since the 50s.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:22 AM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


There are a lot of people in the public library system where I work who could have retired years (and in some cases over a decade) ago. Quite a few decided that the pandemic was a good time to finally call it a day, but there are at least three people in my department alone who could retire at any point and thus far have chosen not too. I'm one of the lucky ones, in that I'm paying into our pension plan, but even though my wife and I have a) not one red cent in debt, b) no kids and c) two respectable salaries, when I run the numbers ahead to my planned retirement date (I will retire the second I can) it still seems like it'll be a fairly close shave, financially-speaking, which makes me wonder about everyone else who does not fall into the above situations. I suspect that the retirement plan for a lot of middle class and above Canadians is to sell their house/condo at some point and live off the proceeds for the rest of their lives, because we're in the middle of a seemingly endless real estate bubble. Guess we'll see how that works out.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:26 AM on June 28, 2021 [4 favorites]


Almost no other threads on this site stress me out more than retirement threads. And I have (subject to the whims of the market and the usual future outlook warnings etc.) a potentially ok retirement path via a corporate pension, a 401k I've done ok on over 15 years or so, having some equity in a home which is appreciating, and either social-security or moving back to NZ (subject to the same issue MBO raised above).

But here is the real thing. I also worry about my kids and college, and medical insurance, and trying to help my kids in the future and all those other things parents worry about. Plus the climate just wiping out society as we know it. And I hate that I often do the math in my head that involves - so if relative X dies maybe I might get $Y in inheritance that I can use to maybe solve Z problem for retirement/kids education etc.

I'd be quite happy for taxes to go up to avoid having to worry about at least a good chunk of this (maybe not worry is too strong - but at least feel like there is a plan and a chance). I went and looked at my last year's tax returns, and my effective cumulative tax rate is about 26% (combining state and federal taxes divided by taxable income - ignoring sales taxes etc.). I don't know how much more a decent social safety net + a green new deal should or would cost me. But personally I'd rather pay a lot more tax to take care of some of this - like double digits more.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:29 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'm 46 years old, and there is no way I can retire in the sense of entirely stopping work and living off some combination of Social Security (assuming the Republicans haven't destroyed it by then), the tiny 403(b) I have, and the pitiful savings I've accumulated.

I'll be working until I die, and I think pretty much everyone who works and is my age or younger is in the same situation.


The situation is getting increasingly bi-modal. At the same time we have people who are planning financial independence from their extremely high pay, we have people who genuinely see no way of retiring.
posted by atrazine at 10:56 AM on June 28, 2021 [13 favorites]


Now that the Republican coalition has shifted from high-income voters to low-education voters, I wonder if there's any prospect of getting Social Security expansion via Secret Congress, i.e. something that flies below the political radar and doesn't turn into the usual partisan paralysis.
posted by russilwvong at 11:20 AM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


The Secret Congress article is horribilarious - no US Fed progress on anything with "awareness" campaigns? I exaggerate, but there’s a through-line.
posted by clew at 11:44 AM on June 28, 2021


The Secret Congress article actually makes me feel more optimistic about the American political process! It suggests that our impression of gridlock and paralysis is going to be worse than it actually is.
posted by russilwvong at 4:11 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
posted by blue_beetle at 6:14 PM on June 28, 2021 [6 favorites]


Reading this thread makes me want to just succumb to despair now.
posted by JHarris at 6:18 PM on June 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


That cure may be worse than the disease. Or may not, I haven't decided yet.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:20 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


>Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?<

Well played sir, well played (with help from Dickens)
.
posted by twidget at 6:42 PM on June 28, 2021


People tell me I'm insane when I say that I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in 20+ years. I honestly think with all of the crazy changes that keep happening in the world, the option will be taken away, or the money will, or both, or something. People will need to work until they die.

I'm not trying to downplay your fear or tell what to feel, but I do want to point out that convincing people social security/pensions are unsustainable is a tactic used by those seeking to undermine organized labor and public programs like social security. In other words, the people trying to concentrate more wealth for themselves want you to feel this way so you become hopeless and don't try to fight them when they take away pensions and try to cut/privatize social security.

Also, on an unrelated note that still speaks to concerns over caring for the elderly and retirees, one of the big components of Biden's infrastructure plan is massive funding for elder care to deal with problems related to elderly poverty. The "bipartisan compromise" he just endorsed gave up that part of the bill, but from I heard he still wants to include it in a separate measure through reconciliation.
posted by eagles123 at 7:20 PM on June 28, 2021 [13 favorites]


Praemunire, you can’t just join a 501.c3; I tried.

It's called a 457(b), and you absolutely, 100% can roll such contributions directly to an individual (traditional) IRA after you leave the sponsoring employer, regardless of who your next employer is. I've done it myself.
posted by praemunire at 8:43 PM on June 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


People tell me I'm insane when I say that I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in 20+ years.

I'm right in the middle of Gen X and I thought all of us just assumed from the start that retirement won't be an option. Maybe, maaaaaaaybe, my wife and I can manage a retirement, but I think the best we can realistically do is that she retires while I keep on working as long as I can. I'm a community college instructor--the job isn't physically demanding, and I get a nice long summer break, so I think I can keep it up quite a while. I hope. We had a math instructor drop dead at age 81 partway through the semester a couple of years ago. That's my plan, too.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:11 PM on June 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I'm currently in the position where "saving for my retirement" is an impossibility and I always have been.

I scrimp, save, put money away, and then something happens that needs it. Car breaks, whatever.

And since I have a child that's only made the saving idea even more impossible.

I spend almost 100% of my income, I put what I can in a savings account, and then it gets drained by unavoidable expenses.

I've put a whole 6% of my paycheck into my company's 403(b), and they match. But 10% of my pay means that in 10 years I'll have (checks notes) enough money to pay for one whole year of not working! Yay! If I can figure out exactly when I'm going to die I can stop working precisely one year before then!

I'm going to be working forever. Same as my mother, same as my father would be if he hadn't died of cancer when he was 50. Same as almost everyone else I know.

Retirement happens to rich people, not to me.
posted by sotonohito at 7:58 AM on June 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


But 10% of my pay means that in 10 years I'll have (checks notes) enough money to pay for one whole year of not working!

$e^{rt}$ starts working some real magic once t gets to 30 or 40.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:40 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


It's called a 457(b), and you absolutely, 100% can roll such contributions directly to an individual (traditional) IRA after you leave the sponsoring employer, regardless of who your next employer is. praemunire
Well, crap, wish I'd known, and I did ask. It was under 5,000, but, still.
posted by theora55 at 10:47 AM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in 20+ years.
I am firmly convinced that a lot of the anti-Boomer message is geared at eradicating Social Security. Do not let the Fucking Corporate-Owned Right destroy Social Security. That SOB Reagan started taxing Soc. Sec. and the Republicans want to come at it. Let's not let them. We can absolutely afford it If We Choose.
posted by theora55 at 10:51 AM on June 29, 2021 [10 favorites]


I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in 20+ years.

I truly DO NOT THINK that retirement will exist as an option for me in SEVEN years.
posted by Billiken at 11:44 AM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


$e^{rt}$ starts working some real magic once t gets to 30 or 40.

Investment accounts make — and lose — money and are generally not like personal savings accounts that accrue compound interest, to the best of my knowledge (though there are some guaranteed-return investment categories which behave like that, in exchange for significant limitations).
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:39 PM on June 29, 2021


Investment accounts make — and lose — money and are generally not like personal savings accounts that accrue compound interest

They are very much like compound interest because the difference in basis over a 30 year time period (yeah, GCU is not kidding) due to inflation/economic changes/dividends/splits/whatever is really high. You can get to the point where a few pennies in change in price can mean thousands of dollars in gains. An example would be VTSMX, worth $20 in 2003, now over $100.

A home is the same way, mortgage compared to rents, as long as the area is ok over that long a period.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:27 PM on June 29, 2021


sotonohito: Trying to save as an individual is a lot harder than pooling the risk with a pension fund, but if you're putting 10% of your gross income into an investment account, that's actually pretty good. Even if you only have 10 years until retirement, you can use it to supplement your Social Security income, spreading it over 10 or 15 years. If you have longer, of course, that's better.

The basic idea with retirement savings (whether done individually or collectively) is that you're building up a pool of capital, lending it to businesses that need capital, and getting paid (as interest or dividends). Someone who builds rental apartments, for example, needs to buy the land and materials, and needs to pay the workers up front, before they start getting any rental income. So they need to get capital from somewhere, like you, and then they can pay you from the rental income.

So your pool of retirement savings is actually growing in two ways, (a) from your contributions and (b) from capital income. The longer you have, the more important the capital income becomes.

The tough part with saving and investing like this as an individual (as opposed to collectively, through Social Security or a pension fund) is that you don't know how long your savings need to last. So to be safe you need to save a huge amount, which for most people is impossible. But if you have some retirement savings, that's still helpful.
posted by russilwvong at 7:54 PM on June 29, 2021 [3 favorites]


Investment accounts make — and lose — money and are generally not like personal savings accounts that accrue compound interest

Returns still compound. They wobble around a lot, but you still end up with data you can reasonably regress to some log(accountbalance)=rt.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:29 PM on June 29, 2021


My main worries about retirement these days are less about the state of my finances than they are about whether or not there will still be a society to retire to by that point.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:23 AM on June 30, 2021 [5 favorites]


Returns still compound

Up until the point at which there is a market crisis or crash, at which point those returns not only evaporate very quickly, but any "compounded" wealth from gains, splits, and dividends, etc. also disappear and do not return nearly as fast — as some learned the hard way, after the last crash.

All of which is to say, risk is a very real difference between an investment and savings account, and people should know that a simple $e^{rt}$ curve is not assured, before they go in. You can lose a lot of money quickly with investments, while — short of historically infrequent bank runs (much less frequent than market swings, at least in the US) — savings accounts are federally insured and relatively stable, if low-earning.

you can reasonably regress to some log(accountbalance)=rt

I'd agree that the math shows that markets can beat inflation over the very long-term, but perhaps they fit regression curves only over time spans longer than might be useful to the majority of individuals who need income after leaving the workforce, and there have been "events" that can cause a lot of hurt, and that as a result I don't think that it is helpful or correct to necessarily reduce this to a simple formula.

For most retail investors, if you're lucky and can cash out at the right time, you may indeed get returns to allow you to retire comfortably. Not all retirees lucky enough to have a lifetime to invest were able to do so after 2008, for instance — and that can't all be blamed on having the wrong portfolio balance, because many financial instruments were propped up on bad data and poor or no government regulation, which had larger knock-on effects at a global level.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:08 PM on June 30, 2021


They sucked his brains out!: it's true that equities are risky. The usual advice is to think of a pyramid, with low-risk investments (like treasury bills) at the bottom and high-risk investments (like marijuana or crypto) at the top. You want to have most of your money in the lower-risk part of the pyramid, with less and less as you go up the pyramid.

Because equities are volatile, bouncing up and down, investors aren't willing to pay as much for them as for fixed-income investments. So over the long term (10 years or more), the returns should be higher.

Right now Robert Shiller thinks that investors are complacent, so equities are even more expensive and risky than usual.

The Card Cheat: My main worries about retirement these days are less about the state of my finances than they are about whether or not there will still be a society to retire to by that point.

The rule is, hope for the best, plan for the worst. When it comes to saving for retirement, "there's a zombie apocalypse and money becomes worthless paper" is actually the best case - it means you don't need to defer consumption at all.

So if you're planning for the worst case, you should assume that society will avoid the apocalyptic scenarios and you'll live a long time.
posted by russilwvong at 1:59 PM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


Oh, I'm pumping as much money as I can into my pension and other investments. Retiring as early as possible is the best revenge on the working world.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:49 PM on June 30, 2021


CheeseDigestsAll :
53% of the Capitol rioters were millennials. Age has little to do with guns and Jesus.
Is there a source for this? I don’t ask to derail the discussion nor to perpetuate the preceding argument, but I’m unable to find evidence for that exact percentage.
posted by EmperorOozy at 5:04 PM on June 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


This analysis of known Capitol Hill rioters, published in the Atlantic, says that 54% were between 25 and 44.
posted by russilwvong at 5:14 PM on June 30, 2021 [4 favorites]


All of which is to say, risk is a very real difference between an investment and savings account, and people should know that a simple $e^{rt}$ curve is not assured, before they go in.

Yeah there is a difference: they generally don't tell you with savings accounts that they aren't going to surpass inflation, so you are losing small amounts of money every day. Most who have a savings account can deal with this even if they know about it, but just understand that risk comes in many shapes and forms and savings accounts that compound interest are not without risk.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:26 AM on July 1, 2021 [2 favorites]


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