Keep doing that and you will be FINE.
I remember going thru the "too much or not enough" phase too. What I came to was saving 20% including matches, anything else left over out of the budget was OK to consume or donate now.
Median boomer retirement account $144,000
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Keep doing that and you will be FINE.
I remember going thru the "too much or not enough" phase too. What I came to was saving 20% including matches, anything else left over out of the budget was OK to consume or donate now.
All it takes is a bad year where you loss a years worth of income to realize that it's hard to save too much.
Lmao no way. What if you die at 43?
Spend money now while you're still living and can do whatever you want. You'll be kicking yourself if you find out you got a bad hip and been saving to golf every day and now you can barely stand.
If you think you're on the edge then you're already over it.
Fine what if you get a hip infection and are now in a wheelchair at 43. Gonna be thinking about that vacation hiking in South America you skipped out on to save for retirement I bet
Or the other side, wish I would have saved that $10k so I could afford better long term care later on. So much of this is "life is what you make of it".
Friends, wealth is not what you have, it is the absence of want.
I agree with you that any rational transaction accounts for such downside risks (even if the actual risks of them are pretty small for most people).
The way I look at it is you have two choices...
(1.) Go *hard* on working and saving now and buy years of your life back later where you can take an easy job and/or just retire early.
(2.) Enjoy it early, like you said, when you know you are healthy/not dead.
The answer for which is "best" varies from person to person. But leaning into #1 means less of #2 and vice versa, you are right. Which you want to pick is up to you. But there are going to be some trade-offs for you either way you choose.
No chance. If you end up at that long term care facility anyway. I'd much rather have the memories than money to pass on to my non-existent children (remember #LoveIsn'tReal).
Ah yes, the spend every dime you got and then some way of looking at life. Cause you never know you might die tomorrow and to hell with all those creditors then, LOL.
There's a difference between not going hard as you can on retirement saving and spending every last dime and getting loans because you might die tomorrow. Huge difference in fact.
I'm saying I'd rather use the money I have earned because I know I am living today than wait for this future of hopeful retirement. My "retirement age" is in the 2050's-2060's. Who ******* knows what the world will be like then?
That's the conundrum. Saving early in life allows the savings to grow immensely. In fact it is how we end up with the subject of this thread. The $144k median Boomer balance. Saving later in life is harder to make up for the time lost.
The US will be fine in 2050. 30 years ago was 1990. In my mind that was not long ago (my body says different). If I could go back and tell my young self something it would be to save more early on. I have done well in terms of saving but I could have bowed out 5 to 10 years earlier if I had really pegged it starting out.
I do maintain physical fitness as well as I want to be able to be active at the end. Maybe it won't work out but I am giving it my best shot.
There is a huge difference among long term care facilities based on your ability to pay. You may be young enough yet where you haven't visited many, but there is a huge difference and some of the ones I have witnessed, I would rather be gone than have to move into.
Not sure how my story about standard of living going up in the 60's and 70's, the time period we were talking about. That you keep saying basically was horrible, is somehow even in the same idea about your grandmother, born in 1927 having to become a nurse, not a doctor.
No where in this entire thread is anyone talking about lack of opportunity due to color of your skin or your sex, but YOU.
When we allow corps to take their jobs to Mexico, and take a deduction off building a new plant there off their taxes here in the US, we have a problem.
So lets try to stay on topic shall we. If you want to talk about equal rights and discrimination, that start a new topic and discuss it there.
All 4 grandparents and both parents are dead. My genes aren't good when it comes to longevity. Only one of the 4 grand parents lived long enough to be in a longterm care home and they were in one for only a few years before he passed. Both parents passed before 60.
I won't ever make it to a long term care facility. I almost guarantee it.
You made the point that 1950s and 1960s America was a great time for the middle class, mostly due to strong unions protecting the interests of their members.
I refuted that claim -- productivity growth was unusually high and has never been repeated, international competition was moribund and recovering from the war, and the prosperity that you and your family felt as White people in Iowa was not as broadly shared as you like to imagine. In fact, the high wages paid to White men of the time were directly related to the scarcity of labor created by discrimination against women (including of my grandmother), minorities, and by restricting immigration into the United States.
Unions played a strong role in that White middle class prosperity but also a strong one in that same discriminatory process to suppress labor supply.
You say the economy of that era has a lot to teach us yet ignore its foundations (including unions) were built on discrimination and intimidation. You just refuse to discuss this point because it is devastating to your, "Look to the past, there are answers there, go back to that!" version of toxic nostalgia that we all need to leave behind.
Owners of capital and labor should be allowed to do what they think is in their best interests. We should not even be taxing corporations at all really.
When you say "unions are the answer" and "we need an economy more like the one my parents and grandparents had when I was growing up, before Reagan," then you are bringing up the topics of equal rights and discrimination. Like it or not. You might not like that, but the "golden hue" of the 1950s and 1960s for the White middle class is inextricably related to the rampant discrimination and intimidation of the same era.
Discrimination was/is not just political and social. It is economic, as well.
I bring up my grandmother because she was one of the victims of this system -- she was shut out of the career her intellect deserved. Saying it was good for your White and male relatives growing up does not prove it was good for everybody.
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Lots of intelligent people do not get to become doctors today even though they want to. Blame the AMA. They restrict the number of doctors.
WTF are you saying that Corporations should not be taxed? Someone has to pay for the infrastructure that corporations need to do business.
Well, you and I do agree about the AMA then.
Do you not believe my grandmother's stories about growing up? About her wanting to be a doctor, being academically gifted, yet her parents discouraging it for sexist reasons and medical schools being "women need not apply" much the time?
Her father/my great-grandfather only consented to her going to nursing school because, to him, it was a good place for her to find a husband. For her, it was the closet thing she had to living out the dream that she had but would never realize.
I am surprised you of all people would try to avoid or minimize the role discrimination had in people's lives back then. Women were discouraged from pursuing a higher education and professional careers, which made it easier on men.
You cannot write that out of the economic history of the postwar world.
If you want them to pay for using infrastructure, then you should advocate either (1.) direct user fees, such as tolls on highways and bridges or (2.) just privatize the infrastructure and let the owners interact with the market to set the price.
Pipelines and railroads are "infrastructure" and almost entirely privately-owned.
Makes a big difference when you say live life now when you expect to be gone by 60.
Saving later denies yourself the long term benefits of compound interest.
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