Retirement is not an age, it’s a financial status.
You make it sound like it’s supposed to be that way?
I didn’t read it that way. It’s just a fact. If you had enough money saved/invested, you could reasonably retire today. If you don’t have anything saved, you can’t afford to retire at any age.
As the OP shows, even the pension system in the UK (or social security in the US) amounts to little more than a sick joke in comparison to the actual cost of living.
I know I’m not saying anything new, I’m just rephrasing the GP’s point in a particularly verbose way.
If you don’t have anything saved, you can’t afford to retire at any age.
But it’s not supposed to be that way.
even the pension system in the UK (or social security in the US) amounts to little more than a sick joke
BUT IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THAT WAY!
People usually don’t retire because they can but because they have to. Because they can’t work anymore. Framing it like retirement based on savings only is just an unchangeable fact of nature is just wrong.
But it’s not supposed to be that way.
You’re too focused on this, IMO. I can’t fix the injustice here all by my lonesome. What I can do is live beneath my means, save up the extra (and I’m fortunate to have extra after paying for the bare minimum), and have something beyond social security for my own retirement. That’s all any individual can do.
In a group? In the US, you can vote according to who you think will run Social Security better. But in practical terms, that’s a choice between bad and worse. I don’t like it any more than you do, but I don’t see a realistic alternative in the near future.
In the UK (or other countries)? Someone else will have to weigh in there.
This still refers to this shitty comment:
Retirement is not an age, it’s a financial status.
I’m not saying you should overthrow the system tomorrow, but those seemingly witty comments that just normalise how messed up the system is just don’t help.
Retirement is not a financial status. Stupid teenagers that listen to right wing podcasts may think such a remark seems smart, but it is stupid and wrong. Retirement is a necessity that stems directly from the fact that people just can’t work as well at 90 as they can at 35. It’s not a hard concept to grasp and the fact that society makes it hard to stop working after people worked a lifetime but can’t go on anymore isn’t some wisdom to understand, it’s just a neocon’s wet dream and should be described and treated as such.
It would be nice if everyone could be afforded some kind of retirement when they got older. You are correct, in general a 90 year old will be nowhere near productive as a 35 year old. But it would also be nice if people working full time didn’t need food stamps, and if the tax rates were higher, and a whole bunch of other stuff. But that’s not the world we’re living in.
I have to agree with OP here, right now it IS a financial status. It’s a luxury only afforded to those who have the wealth. The whole idea of “retirement” is fairly new. Even 100 years ago a 90 year old might move in with their kids, provide childcare for the grandkids, help out around the house, etc.
Just to reiterate I am on your side, retirement SHOULD be something afforded to everyone. That’s just not the world we’re living in.
Nah, that’s all you.
how?
when most people live paycheck to paycheck, and their biggest luxury is a bobba tea once a month, how the fuck can you do anything about retirement?
the system is set up to maximize human suffering for profit.
It simply stated the reality that retirement comes from having resource access without requiring employment. That’s what it is. Hearing judgement about what should be is you adding it.
it’s a mindset
That’s why the western world is racing towards fascism.
It’s either socialism or barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg put it.
The less sustainable this economic model becomes, especially now that the overexploited nations of the Global South start emancipating themselves and the fruits of imperialism become fewer and fewer, the more state mandated violence will have to be exerted upon us by the capitalist class to keep us from organizing against them.
There will be no retirement plans for most of us. We will die working. Those that will refuse to work themselves to death will be criminalized or slowly killed by the powers that be (existing as homeless is already virtually illegal). Those that are caught living in illegality will be put in prisons and will be loaned out to companies as prison labour (already legal in the US).
That is if we don’t die in another Great War just to resuscitate the powers of the empire over the Global South.
This is already happening. Every store in my vicinity has people who look like they should be spending time with their grandchildren doing menial service jobs.
they might be doing it because they are bored. a low key part time job is a choice some folks make just to get out of the house. don’t asssume it’s because they are broke.
a lot of people straight up die after they retire because they have no purpose in life anymore, leading to depression and deaths of despair. my dad died like 1.5 years after he retired because all he did was sit around, drink, and gamble.
my grandparents both volunteered and did odd jobs to keep active in retirement and lived until their early 80s thanks to that, they had plenty of money.
they might be doing it because they are bored
Both/And. Retirement is boring. Retirement when you’re broke is absolutely enervating. Menial employment kinda-sorta solves both problems. Although, its as much a pox on the employer as the employee. Elderly workers don’t tend to be the most motivated or the most energetic. And when you’re paying a pittance, they don’t want to bend over backwards for you, either.
my grandparents both volunteered and did odd jobs to keep active in retirement and lived until their early 80s thanks to that, they had plenty of money.
I mean, “plenty of money” is sort of a YMMV situation. I’ve got two in-laws both with less than a million in savings. One lives frugally to the point of a asceticism while the other just seems content to YOLO until he’s down to whatever SS has to offer. Idk how much money they’re going to need in another ten years. Nevermind another twenty. But they’re both in an inflationary vice that keeps squeezing tighter with every year.
My own surviving parent spends her more generous retirement savings endlessly fixing up the four bedroom house she refuses to sell, in between routine visits to the doctor to find a cure for being old. She might actually benefit from getting out of the house to do some bullshit retail work, except she’s more of a management-type personality than a worker bee. I’m not worried about her finances nearly as much her mental health. But I could see a future in which she’s suckered out of a big part of her fortune, simply because someone on the TV sold her on it in a moment of weakness.
🙄
oh it’s gonna be a lot sooner than 30 years.
The vast majority of genx have had their retirement savings raided over and over again. 2000, 2009, covid, now - each saw people raiding their retirement to make ends meet short term. It used to work in a 'well, we pull funds out of this now but we’ll be more diligent saving when times are good - "
the good times for most folks rarely came back. I know people in their late 40s and 50s who have basically nothing, and with little hope to keep their head above water, much less pour massive amounts of their income into making up for lost savings.
The great part is that they’ll be blamed for it after all the shit they had stolen from them.
What’s a “retirement age”? That’s what’s gonna happen.
Probably something like this.
Inspiring?? 😭 AAAGH!!
Okay but honestly the expression on his face kinda looks like he’s one of those people that chooses to work because he prefers “working” & being out in the world seeing lots of people every day & feeling useful rather than sitting at home doing nothing.
but 103 years old?! At Walmart?! AAAGH!
Maybe it’s inspiring… to behead some people that make that a reality.
I wish Luigi had been undetectable, had never been caught, and was still a free man as a superhero running around the world repeating his heroic deed to all nefarious people who deserve it.
Welcome to the future of America!
Welcome to the
futurepresent of America!
Disgusting. Contrast this with a similar story in the news of a 103 year old Italian.
The US treats its most elderly citizens as meat for the slaughter. In the future, when dystopian fiction writers reach for metaphors about true evil, they won’t write retellings of german nazis or things like the Sith, it’ll all be based on the late American empire.
Long term, I predict a violent revolution of the young overthrowing the tyranny of the old.
Aging societies tend to divert resources from the young to the old. People vote for their own interests. When retirees outnumber parents, more money goes to retirees and less to kids. This lowers the birth rate even more and continues the spiral. In increasingly aging societies, young people face the prospect of having to pay a lifetime of ruinously high taxes (far higher than their elders did) to pay for the retirements of the old that outnumber them. And they’ll do this knowing that they themselves will never have a retirement of anywhere near the quality of the retirements they’re being taxed to death to fund.
Long term, we’re entering a very dangerous situation in developed countries. We have a trifecta of three dangerous conditions:
- The young will be ruinously taxed to fund retirements of existing elderly, a retirement far more generous than they will ever receive.
- The young will be completely shut out of political power due to being outnumbered by the old.
- The young are the only ones actually capable of fighting in a war.
These are the conditions that historically brew revolutions. People take up arms typically when they see no hope for the future or feel they have nothing to lose. The young may not be able to outvote the old. But they certainly can outshoot the old.
As someone on the downswing of this seesaw, I welcome a rebalancing.
I think a big issue for working class folks who can even afford to prep for retirement is we don’t know how much we’ll need. And basically the fewer rights and social safety nets you have, the more money you need to attempt to insulate yourself from the ravages of capitalism.
If we had more socialist policies to keep everyone relatively comfortable even the poor, then working people wouldn’t have to be so mercenary about building their nest egg (which will never be big enough to be totally safe anyway).
The same thing that happens every generation to the god-awful number of people who never had hope of retiring to begin with.
Bold of you to assume any of us will be able to “retire”
That may be bold but the idea that there will be a thirty year wait for that to happen is simply childish.
It’ll look like a lot of old people working themselves to death, or dying on the street AND future conservative politicians pointing backwards and saying “This is all because you voted for {insert socialist or left leading etc government here} but if we had have conserved X, Y, and Z like we said back then this wouldn’t have happened. Only my conservative/far right or variant of nazi party can get us out of this trouble.”
It’s what they’ve been doing for decades, and the fucking idiots keep on believing that bullshit decade after decade.
The media isn’t innocent and destruction of culture and education doesn’t help either.
Downvoted for self censorship
There used to be stories about grandma eating cat food to get by. So probably something like that.
I think she just had a taste for it.
My retirement is wandering out into the deadly heat wave so my children don’t waste water on me
So the Fallout (1997) experience?
I see a couple of possibilities:
They’re not going to retire. As they age, if they don’t land on a lifelong career and progress the ladder at least a little bit, they’ll get to work in physically demanding jobs which will destroy their body and they’ll die before traditional retirement ages, or just at where older gens would retire. If they do land into some kind of lifelong career, they’ll just work till they die. Think: 85 year old programmers looking up how for loops work again…Another fun possibility is that they will retire after having started saving at a later date but having no children.
Another one is having small savings and moving to poor countries, Africa may see an influx of such persons once South East Asian countries stop letting them in.
Still time for revolutions and complete changes of systems following armed revolts or wars though…
many possibilities ahead.once South East Asian countries stop letting them in
Why would SEA countries stop letting tourists in?
If they don’t want people living long term on tourist visas, just copy Japan’s model and say no if someone is obviously doing visa runs.
They were talking about immigrants, not tourists.
Yeah that first one is what it was like before social safety nets and pensions were a thing for those who didn’t have kids that could support them. It was enough of a problem to cause things to be changed
I’m 50; when I started my career pretty much everyone a little older than me had pensions and I arrived right as the pensions were being phased out. It was a running joke when they would talk about pensions and I would say “what’s a pension?”
So my age group will be retiring in 15 years, not 30 years. Almost everyone I know my age has a meager 401k and nothing else.
The streets are going to be flooded with people too old to work and no retirement income in much less than 30 years…
56 here, I’m in the UK. I have 4 separate ‘private pensions’, from the four different companies I’ve worked for, adding up to fuck all. Basically I’m going to have to work until I’m 67 in order to collect my state pension of £1,049.22 a month. This will allow me to survive on cold baked beans out of a tin, before I freeze to death because I can’t afford to turn on the heating.
Why do those private pensions not amount to anything?
I didn’t get the benefit of a final salary pension. I have also not worked long enough at any particular company to really benefit from a big pot. The longest I’ve worked for one company is ten years, I think the company was paying in as little as possible. When I looked at a forecast for the pay out from that one, it was about £100 a month.
You should consolidate those 4 pensions into one pot and take more control of it. There’s an extremely high chance that the employer provided pension is performing poorly and not growing as fast as it could be. They pick the lowest risk by default so growth is massively stunted.
It’s pretty easy to open an account on something like vanguard and transfer those pensions in, you can then have control over how that money is invested - usually they make you pick a “risk factor” where highest risk has highest potential growth and lowest has lowest potential for crashing, but the TL;DR is over a 15 year period even if there’s a crash you’ll come out on top because it averages out.
Essentially what I’m saying is pool your pensions together and pick the highest risk factor for the next 8-10 years, it’s a bit of a gamble but it’s a better chance of that pot growing into something actually useful than you have right now.
Because a lot of pension plans are very disappointing. They for example offer a ‘guaranteed’ minimum intrest of up to 2 % per year, but don’t forget the ‘management costs’ they charge. That’s very very low compared to regular inflation. Pension funds exist to make pension fund managers, traders and banks rich (now, not later) and so that the government can point at them and say “it was your own responsibility!” instead of offering ALL weak and old people enough to cover basic needs. And that’s to “motivate” as many people as possible to work as much as possible. If relatively young right now: you’re probably better off putting money away in time deposits with higher guaranteed intrest than putting it in pension funds. Or ETF/random stock picking for those who feel lucky. The state subsidies to choose pension fund instead of time deposit or direct market investments is in many cases also misleading: you get tax cuts when depositing into the pension funds, but you get taxed when you get paid out at pension age. All differs a lot in different countries, but the core of it is pretty similar all over I think.
The pensions in the US for the generation before me were “Defined Benefit” pensions. What that meant typically is that if you worked X number of years you could retire with Y percentage of your salary. Both my grandfather and father retired that way.
Private corporations all switched to 401ks and colluded with all kinds of propagandists to convince the workers that they would be better at investing their own retirement money themselves, ya know, because they were all savvy investors.
Just based on the Google search I just did 15 seconds ago a “private pension” in the UK is the same tax-sheltered retirement savings account that gets funneled to the markets as a 401k is here in The States.
So yup, you got screwed too.
I hope they’re at least Branston
“You guys are getting 401ks?”
