Retirement is not an age, it’s a financial status.
it’s a mindset
30 years? It’s happening right now!
no retirement savings, but at least they own the place they live
god help the next generation
My boomer mom inherited a house that was paid off and almost immediately did a reverse mortgage on it. 😔
To make necessary repairs to the house… right?..
Um… no.
While we need* property taxes, but it absolute hammers old people in some places.
Cheaper than renting still, but on a fixed income it hurts, and especially lately there have been very high tax increases due to inflation. But then the social security increases are comparatively small.
I know quite a few old people struggling and it seems like their plan was to own their home. But that turned out more expensive than expected with maintenance and taxes. Which has just led to cyclical reverse mortgages. So the banks win in the end and ensure no transfer of wealth
*It’s necessary under the current system to fund services, but if we took it from elsewhere (like the ICE of military budgets) we could greatly reduce that tax.
Easy, property tax deduction on first 50% median price and then ramp up the tax rate above 200% median and above.
A refund based on assessed median home value would tend to penalize new home buyers over existing home owners, even if the existing home owner has a house that would sell for higher. Property tax assessments rarely keep up with home valuation.
I don’t quite get what you’re saying. If median home is 300k and your home is 350k assessed, then you pay property tax on 200k. 500k? Then 350k. Up to 600k where it would phase out and increase instead. I don’t see how that penalizes new home or first time home buyers. It subsidizes new homes with low assessment, starter homes, and downsized homes for the elderly. It penalizes homes worth more than 2x median.
Yes once a new home is fully assessed it could cost more potentially than an older home, but a good property formula solves for much of that. Usually it’s based on square foot and materials, not age.
In most places in the US, the assessed value of homes that have been owned for more than a decade is significantly less than the market value of a home.
The property tax burden therefore falls more on new home buyers rather than existing home owners. Eliminating the tax on the first portion of assessed value would make this existing imbalance worse, especially if the same amount of tax needed to be raised.
It’s a tricky problem.
With comps, sq ft, materials, insured rebuild value, etc… I don’t see how it could be that hard or that unfair to assess. The biggest issue is actually gentrification causing unaffordability in older homes. Some people will lose, and have to move. If you have no income, but you also have a nice home, you gotta reverse mortgage or get relocation assistance.
It’s the normalisation process.
The same thing that happens every generation to the god-awful number of people who never had hope of retiring to begin with.
Probably something like this.
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.
Bold of you to assume that retirement age means anything or is some fixed time when one has to stop working, working becomes illegal or that the society is even stable enough to allow such a thing.
We’re all just going to keep on working until death.
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.
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?”
Don’t worry, climate collapse will render industrial agriculture extremely difficult in the current form and society will collapse from there. It’s really a tossup as to who gets it worse, but the whole world will be thrown into chaos and any retirement plan that you DO have will be obliterated and stolen by technocrats and before they too crash and burn.
I wish that it were any other way but every single time I see something about the climate, it is scientists discovering that things are actually happening sooner and worse than they thought. This has been happening for at least 15 years. What was once “2100 or beyond” became “by 2100” became “by the end of the century” became “around mid century” became “by 2050” became “it could happen any day. It may have already tipped over the edge”
I’m tired.
I expected more wetbulb temperatures happening everywhere by now. I no longer expect climate change alone to wipe us out.
Watch this summer in India. Idk exactly how el niño affects India but they have been getting record heat already. The el niño is going to be “record breaking” and the year was already going to be abnormally hot.
Last year, my co-workers were working in 40 degrees temperature, building a greenhouse for plants…
…I was also working on the actual production lines, which have no AC of course, as that would be too expensive.
Bold of you to assume capitalism survives the Gen X retirement 😅 when you go from families of 8+ children to 2 in one generation your existing pension mechanism and markets that require net contribution to function don’t compute.
Just keep an eye on the median age of most advanced populations that’s the clock lol
So am I dude… so am i…
Just learned there’s some island town in Virginia(?) that lost like 55% of its land mass to climate change and they voted 88% republican in the last election. Seems like most people will simply not understand, even after it’s too late they’ll blame the wrong thing.
Kinda blackpilling but it really does seem like a large swath of the population are more akin to cattle than actual humans.
Curious because as gen z the climate change end of the world has been moving back consistently for me until about covid. My first memories was 2010 then it got pushed to 2012 then 2016, 2018, 2025, 2030, to 2040 and last I heard right before covid it back down to 2035. Could just be I was surrounded by propaganda though.
Idk what you are referring to but maybe it is the point of no return that people have been talking about? Like we have until such time to act? But they also were trying to stay below 1.5°C but now it’s a pretty foregone conclusion that we will hit that this century. So now it’s 2°C.
We already hit 1.5 °C…
We have been bobbing just above and then going back to a little below for a little. We haven’t had a full year of 1.5°C global average. This year we will go over for good I think, though.
You’re looking at cultural hysteria 'end if the world’s, not the very real oncoming collapse of our biosphere.
Nutters always think the world is ending, and they e always got to push it back when their mental illness doesn’t come through.
But in this case, we have models that, as they are refined, show us just how hopeful the previous “worst case” projections were.
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.
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.
Same thing that happens to the people who have no savings now when they reach state retirement age. They simply can’t afford to, and have to continue working.
Unfortunately retirement is as much a financial state as it is an age.
A lot of them will work shit jobs until they keel over delivering Doordash or shouting “welcome to Walmart.”
Exactly the way the system was designed.
That shit already started.
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.
30 years? it’s happening already! But hey at least Israel has free education and free health coverage and they are killing all their neighbors and taking their homes on our dime. It’s not like the most powerful military in history is being cucked by israel!
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).
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.
🙄
