I’m over 60 and I invested about a fourth of my savings into a Franchise which will provide an income pretty much forever. I never did plan on SS being my retirement.
Yes, I am a pilot but not a pilot who earns her living by flying - I’m not licensed to do it professionally.
35 years ago I learned to type very fast and accurately under the theory that someone would always need typists and it would make a good fallback for whatever else I did. And for about 25 years it worked very well (hey, I was able to pay for flying lessons, right?)
And then automation kicked in…
Typists are simply not in demand anymore. Lots more people do their own typing. There are all those text-to-speech programs. When typing is needed, such converting audio to written transcripts, the file can be e-mailed to a third world country with miniscule wages, done there, and then e-mailed back.
I have not made my living by that skill for most of a decade, and not for lack of seeking jobs in that category. Professional typists are going the way of ditch-diggers and buggy-whip makers.
A lot of traditionally non-glamorous but secure fallback job skills are now outmoded thanks to computers, the internet, and automation.
We can’t even push old people out on ice floes anymore thanks to global warming. They thought of everything!
I know there are no new things under the sun (or at least we like to think this is true), but we are definitely bombarded with different messages now than in the past. Because we live in a different media world.
Granted, I was not alive during the Golden Age of TV. Perhaps you were. Do you recall seeing retirement planning advertisements on primetime television back when you were a kid? Do you think your grandparents had “traveling the world” on their bucket list? Who was their version of Dennis Hopper telling them they are too cool for bingo night and shuffleboard?
If marketing generates anxiety, it also creates expectations. You can’t have one without the other (“If I can’t afford to take my wife out to eat three times a week, then I won’t be as cool as Dennis Hopper!!”) And if no one believed retirement is about YOLO’ing it up, we wouldn’t see those commercials. Someone must be buying the fantasy they are selling.
Agreed (although raising the cap could do it too).
The two things that amaze name about SS are :
- People who forget about the non-retirement benefits it provides (30% of all payments).
- The number of people who think it will or must provide a complete retirement income.
In reality, SS is intended to supplement other retirement income. At the max it provides something like $30K per year but is usually more like $15K.
Perhaps I never did grasp the subtleties of how government borrowing is different from personal or corporate debt. The point I kept making was the same fundamental principle applies in both cases. You can’t overborrow, and there are real consequences to overborrowing: real pain and real financial ruin.
Even if you are the greatest nation in the world.
So “government debt” is different except the part where it’s real debt, where a creditor comes calling, where you can’t overborrow limitlessly, where you can fail to pay your creditors in value they expected when they loaned you the money, where real consequence accrues because you borrowed too much money, and where it really catches up to you.
In the case at hand here, the boomers will press the public coffer to carry them. There is no money in the coffer, so their costs will be carried with increased debt. The piper will come calling before the next generation can do the same because government debt is subject to exactly the same general fundamentals as any other debt, and there’s no magic money fairy.
But we are also far more immune to them. When I was a kid we couldn’t fast forward through the ads.
First, as I mentioned, lots more people were covered by pensions, and so didn’t have to worry about it. The first five or six years I worked I had a pension and no 401K (which didn’t exist yet.) I did see lots of ads for annuities and insurance.
In a more rustic time, the retirement type ads I recall had more to do with fishing than beaches - but air travel was not so common back then.
Marketing works more subtly than that. They don’t expect anyone to think they will have that kind of life, but they do expect people to think they’ll have a better life. You won’t score the Swedish Bikini Team, but you might score that blonde at the bar.
If you want an insidious campaign, try the retirement calculators, which seem super mathematical and scientific, but which give a stronger marketing message than the kinds of ads you mention. I play with them to figure out the underlying formulas and assumptions that they are using, but most people are just going to buy what they say.
I’ve been at the max for a long time. While it isn’t going to come near paying for everything, when I actually added everything together it makes a really good start - definitely nothing to sneeze at. And of course you don’t have to worry about using it up.
I cashed out my pension when I had a chance to and put it in an annuity with the kind of survivor benefits most useful to my situation. I had joked that my pension might buy me a cup of coffee a week or so, since I left that job 16 years ago, but it turned out to have been a lot more than I expected.
Like you, Voyager, I am in my 60s and lucky to have saved and taken good advantage of 401ks. I am sometimes tempted to think we face a demographic disaster for lack of savings but I mostly think it is all a perverse type of marketing.
I don’t think boomers are really any worse off than their parents. The web sites listed in the OP, InfoWars and Forbes, are both agenda driven and far from objective. They make it seem bad, along with all the financial sites luring you with fancy calculators and marketing for investments but the reality is that most muddle through - just as we always have. As has been pointed out, SS meets it’s goal and at least keeps our elders from abject poverty. A long way from the European model but better than 19th or early 20th century American of county poorhouses where many elders lived out there days.
I have spent over 50 years visiting 3 generations of family who retired to rural Florida. Some had generous pensions and built new retirement homes on the golf course and others live in $20k ‘park model’ mobile homes. Some live large and travel, others live on $600 in SS and do odd jobs or airport pickups for neighbors who can no longer drive.
Oddly, those who are well off seem to die in nursing homes, waiting for the kids to visit while the poor live out their last days with family.
I suggest the government develop a new, nutritionally-packed ration made from "high-energy plankton.
Yeah, I’m one of them, too.
Still a military draft when I turned 18, pre-lottery.
I noticed that the Navy I served in was pretty much split between liberal and conservative, hick and slicker (I was part each, I guess).
20+ years later, as I was preparing to retire, I noticed that the shift had been much more to the conservative and hick side, and the diversity of the discussions and debate had harshened somewhat.
This was both in the officer and enlisted ranks.
Ten years later, I entered government service again. Foreign Service, arguably more liberal than the military. Sold my home, left for overseas (again) cleared debt, served in some tough spots, bought another home, I will retire for good this year. In a place that still believes the government has a responsibility to all its citizens-even foreign residents.
Not sure where this is going, but I believe it all pertains to what we percieve as “entitlements” and “safety net”.
Since 1975 there has been no “national service” requirement, and the notion of service itself has deteriorated.
Perhaps this may, in some small fashion, explain the decline in infrastructure, public services and civility, even.
At any rate, early on, I realized that I at least needed the minimal military retirement I had EARNED, and sometime in the future, SS might match that (it just about will), then the additional pension from the FS and 401k disbursements, I should be good for life, no?
The wife has been treated for cancer over the past two years.
We are scared stiff, no kids, no parents, nothing but a house in a nice climate.
Sorry for the whinge, thought another perspective was needed here. 
My retirement plan is to die early. Sigh.
I plan to work until I am 75, then die and call that retirement.
Good work bahimes, enjoy yourself.
Mostly because ponzi schemes are a con. The fact that current payees are paying for the benefits of current beneficiaries doesn’t make it a ponzi scheme no matter what the demographics look like.
Unfortunately that is the plan of way too many people. I can’t tell you how many people I have heard say “I will work until I die” Well you may be rendered incapable of working well before you die.
What is far more likely to happen (IMO) is that people will look at their social security payments and figure out tha they can live reasonably comfortable lives in a developing third world countries in Southeast Asia and other places with ridiculously low cost of living and a lot of respect for the elderly. You can live comfortably (relative to the locals) for what you get on social security.
Has any group as a whole saved up enough for retirement?
That’s the problem with increasing life expectancy - if you still expect to retire at the same age but want to live longer afterwards, you need more money. This problem will get worse with time as long as there isn’t an increase in the financial prosperity of generation or a downward trend in the simple costs of living, neither of which is likely.
What’s more interesting is that the idea of retirement, as in “being productive enough during one’s working adult lifetime that one can afford to spend X amount of time at the end of their life not producing while still surviving” is a relatively recent occurrence. It is not a fact of life nor of economics in any way, and it’s quite possible that it will disappear for a sizable group of people who, had they been part of previous generations, may have enjoyed it.
The nest egg is a 20th century phenomenon.
Assuming its THERE, my husband and I are both maxed out - so we’d have a combined SS income of $50k. It isn’t a Winter Home in Palm Beach and Summers at the Lake territory, but we could live, pay for supplemental insurance, and not have to eat cat food.
One issue for me is a lot of my co workers are baby boomers, but poor retirement planning for some means they are not retiring as frequently as I had hoped. People hold out for each labor contract to see if it will benefit or hinder their pensions. Anything that causes them to retire in droves will also affect me, even though my seniority will be catapulted forward. I’m trying to save for retirement now, in my thirties because I cant predict what social security or our pensions will be like three decades from now. Since I currently have the means, I’m making the most out of the most reliable asset I have to build my retirement- time.
As for multigenerational households, some people will just have to get used to sharing space with family. That means some Millenials will have to…gasp…take care of their parents. That or ritualistically pushing their wheelchair bound asses into a quarry somewhere 
Trust me - in 30 years time you will be very glad you followed this strategy. No matter what happens to SS or your pension. More money is better than less.
You know, I’ve longed believed that if an entire generation HAD saved up enough for them all to retire at 65 and live middle to upper class lives the politicians, not being able to handle that much money locked away in the hands of the “masses”, would have found some way to tax it or otherwise snatch it up.
I’ve been planning to work to at least 70 since I was in my 20’s. Maybe 75. Because, as much as working that long might suck, it wouldn’t suck nearly as bad as retiring at 65, running out of money, then having to go back to work at 85 or something just to keep from being homeless and starving.