I don’t really think you or anyone else can guarantee that - you can leave instructions regarding what medical care you do or don’t want ( DNR, no tube feeding, etc) but people can live for a long time needing a lot of physical care but not much medical care. My father lived nearly twenty years after a stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to take care of himself - he had a DNR and so forth so that medical care would have been withheld under certain circumstances but had my mother not been around he would have ended up in a nursing home. You can’t really sign an advanced directive that you should continue to live in your home independently even if you are no longer capable of feeding yourself or bathing or if you can’t be trusted not to set the house on fire but are physically healthy - I mean , you could sign one, but no one will follow it.
I don’t have a good answer for that, it feels like more than where I currently stand (at, roughly) a million each, 10 years before retirement.
(And I firmly believe the medical industry is stacked to consume that nest egg, because it’s a massive source of revenue for shareholders)
I disagree. Neither my wife nor I wish to spend the last 10 years of our lives like her mom did - and she did not exhaust her resources in doing so. If it happens to one of us when we both are alive, the other will put them out of their misery. If it happens to the last survivor, 2 of our kids will do us that favor. The pills are in the sock drawer.
We have put each of our dogs down before they dropped dead. We intend to provide as much consideration to our most loved humans.
I’m MUCH more comfortable depending on those very few people who are very much the closest to us, than in SS, the government, the medical community, or anyone/thing else.
That’s a whole nother topic. So much of ‘final care’ is much more thought out and subtle than I ever suspected. ‘Died quietly in their sleep’ was code for a terminal prognosis and the pain medication given in just enough of a dose to speed passing. A terminal prognosis in another case had family waiting until the ‘right staff members’ were on-shift at the hospital before the patient…died peacefully in their sleep.
I understand that and I don’t want that to happen to me either - but even though I have one kid who I am pretty sure will give me the pills under certain circumstances, I can only be “pretty sure” because it’s impossible to be certain until the time comes. The other kid absolutely will not do it and if he knows about the plan will try to stop it - he might agree/do it if I was terminally ill and was going to die after suffering for a while , but that’s a very different situation than if I have dementia and can feed myself but the concern is that I will leave the house and wander around and get lost and then injure myself somehow.
I don’t consider myself rich, but I’m definitely comfortable. We are in our low 60s, and in reasonably good health. In order to not be too specific, suffice it to say our overall wealth is WAY under $5 million. I’m probably going to work until I’m 67 - I have never earned $200k. When I retire, I will nearly be able to equal my take home pay from SS/pension/401k - without touching the majority of our assets. We own our house and cars, and don’t plan on becoming world travelers, buying vacation homes, etc.
So - am I rich? Because A LOT of people are more well off than we. And I would not begrudge a reduction of my SS benefits, or a substantial tax on any estate I leave.
In 5 years when I retire, I suspect our wealth will be considerably higher. That is how compound interest works.
IMO, folk in my situation have experienced considerable success in our system, and could well stand taking less in SS than they are currently promised. IMO, folk in my situation who feel otherwise impress me as “greedy.” Folk are certainly free to feel differently.
Memory care units are full of people who said this ten or twenty years earlier.
…and failed to anticipate such developments and take appropriate precautions.
Which under current law risks somebody landing in jail for murder.
The laws need changing. But they haven’t, most places, been changed yet.
Therefore I’ll have to try to manage for myself; which risks misjudging the time, and finding myself incapable.
Yeppers. I am fortunate to have a few very close family members who will assume that risk for me - as I will for them. But, I’m confident that with appropriate precautions any real risk is exceedingly minimal.
I didn’t make a claim that it would. Listening to actuarial professionals and policy experts and enacting their advice through legislation would help though. My comment about pennies and bills was simply another example of saving money by listening to experts, even though grumpy old pharts don’t like it.
What about people who want to travel the world or own vacation homes? If they work all their lives and SS gives them the extra money to allow them to live a little richer, that doesn’t bother me.
This. Very much this.
Social Security is a government service. We don’t means test other government services, like police, fire, highways, and education. (And here in Canada, the same applies to CPP and Medicare.)
As soon as it’s not something that is universally available to all citizens, the knives come out.
Obviously, people are free to differ. But when I assess the goals of SS, preventing poverty among the aged is FAR higher in my ranking than assisting wealthy retirees.
No they found that it’s almost impossible to kill yourself or have someone kill you, no matter what kind of legal arrangements you make.
Not sure what you claim to cite, or who “they” are. And I have no idea what you mean by “it’s almost impossible to kill yourself.”
IME, it is far from common for authorities to perform autopsies on aged people with known medical conditions who pass in their sleep.
Of course, but can’t we do both? The wealthy retirees, (myself in a few years) paid in and planned to use their Social Security retirement benefits. I don’t need to get rich from the benefits, and I don’t care if they would disproportionately assist the less fortunate. But I don’t consider myself greed because I want something back for retirement income after 45 years of paying in. If we need to do things to “prevent poverty among the aged,” then let’s do so. We can afford to pay the bottom half more by raising the cap on payments, or raising the amount of the tax, or probably several other things. Cutting benefits for those at the high end would also work (at least a little), but it doesn’t seem “fair” to me.
Agree completely.
Cutting the benefits at the top is almost tailor-made to destroy the current consensus in favor of SS. Increasing the progressivity or expanding the tax rate or the SS max is much less obviously a move that’s proverbially waving the red flag in front of the proverbial bull.
Middle- and working-class US conservatives are remarkably amenable to arguments that’s what bad for highly-paid conservatives is bad for them too. And those highly-paid conservatives own an awful lot of loud amplifiers to get their point out to the less fortunate conservative masses.
This is a dire problem with so obvious a solution (raise the cap on income for S.S. contributors to $200,000 or $400,000 or whatever) that I can’t even regard it as a problem, much less a dire one.
Yeah. Medicare has no cap at all, and we have learned to live with it.