They Think the Government Will Take Care of Them

And if you believe that the government will take care of you, I have a bridge in New York for sale you may be interested in buying. Here's how much the average working boomer has saved for retirement - MarketWatch

Why bother to save? The government will take care of things. Or so the thinking of most boomers goes.

This post has been stuck in my drafts folder for too long. I almost deleted it, but the subject is very important. Can you retire? Will you do what is needed to retire? For most people I think the answer will be no. They can't give up the new car, the new house, the new kitchen, the new iPhone, whatever. Most people won't even stop drinking $7 coffee because "they're worth it," or something. And besides, the .gov will take care of everything.

The article covers a survey of 1000 working Americans on what they have saved (or don't have saved) for retirement.

Respondents who are still working, with a median age of 60, have average savings of around $112,000.

One quarter of those surveyed, and 30% of millennials, said they were planning to rely on “cryptocurrencies” to finance some of their golden years.

Yes, good luck with that. Meanwhile the crypto bubble continues to deflate.

Americans are always looking for the easy way out. The dot-com bubble of the 1990s, the "you can't lose money in real estate" insanity of 2006 or 2007, and now crypto currency. While crypto isn't as bad as it was, It is solidly in a bear market.

Probably the saddest part of the survey was that around 80% of people expected to see their living standards fall in retirement, while 10% feared they wouldn’t be able to retire at all.

For those who are young, the only answers are to save more, save earlier, and invest better—which usually means investing in long-term assets like stocks and keeping your costs low.

If you start when you're 18, invest 100 bucks a month and get historic rates of return, you will have something like 3 million bucks for retirement. And people always ask, "What is $3 million going to be worth when I retire?" The answer: Exactly the same, whether you have it or not. Oh, and if you wait until you're 30, it is nearly impossible to catch up.

But saving $100 per month in a mutual fund isn't exciting. You can't talk about it over the water cooler at work, or brag about it on F*c*book or whatever the kids are using these days. Crypto currencies are the new dot com stocks. In so many ways.

And of course if you wait until you're 60 to think about retiring, you're fucked. OK not really. But if you still have 20 years left on a 30 year mortgage, you just bought a new car, then you proabably aren't in a position to bank money for retirement. On the other hand, if you driving a solid-but older car, and just paid off your mortgage, then you should be able to save a lot of money in the next few years.

So people will be planing to make Social Security work for them. Really?

That brings me to the second item: Yet more information on how Social Security’s underlying investments are doing.

In a word: Badly. As usual.

The drive for "the easy way out" explains so much in American life today. Math and science are hard, so I will get a degree in underwater basket-weaving, or How to be an offended employee studies, and then when there are no jobs available it is someone else's fault.

And I can't count the number of people who smoked, ate lunch in restaurants everyday, had cable (back in the day), and could tell me with a straight face that they couldn't come up with $100 per month. Some of them spent more than that on beer. Today instead of cable they would have the highest of high speed internet, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Spotify, or whatever, and still tell me that they couldn't find $100 per month. Not to mention the new iPhone, an iPad, a kindle, a new car (newer than mine anyway) or whatever.