31% Of Americans Have No Retirement Savings At All (fighting, best, smart)
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Yes, I am suggesting that most of them are not real world solutions.
Vocational training/go back to school to do what? How much will it cost? How long will it take? How will the person support themselves and their families while they train/go to school? What happens when the training doesn't produce a job? What happens when a person tries a new field, the new field doesn't work out, and they can't go back to their old job as a result?
Of course people should try to make their lives better. What I object to is when poor people are classified as lazy or irresponsible simply because they don't make enough money.
Bingo.
If you have a senior who is barely making ends meet on their monthly SS payment, where is the money going to come from to pay for any kind of vocational training or schooling? I don't know of anyplace that offers vocational training for free. But let's say that a hypothetical senior manages to scrape together enough money to pay for a computer course offered by the local community college. So now he/she has learned a new skill, let's say to use Excel proficiently. They will still have no experience in that sort of work unless someone is willing to hire them. Which brings us back to the fact that jobs (other than minimum wage McJobs) are hard to come by nowadays even if you have good qualifications and experience... no matter what the person's age but it is harder for seniors.
I'm with those who feel that family planning and financial planning go hand in hand.
I see 30something two-salary couples who are both still in serious debt with student loans, credit card debt, mortgage payments, car loans or lease payments... deciding to start a family "because the biological clock is ticking" or "because they don't want to be OLD grandparents" (I seriously heard someone say this and was mindboggled). No matter that the wife will have to either stop working to raise the kid(s) OR pay someone for daycare. No matter that their total indebtness is well into six figures and the one-salary result of childbearing won't even approach $100K/yr. No matter that their financial plan during the expensive childrearing years is to "take vacations closer to home instead, for a while". No matter that they have NO plan in place to fund the offspring's college education (I can only assume that THEY assume the kids "can just take out student loans, like we did").
IMHO the problem is that most people have no real grasp of how much it costs to raise a child nowadays. Even if they read articles etc, they probably think "oh, we can get by for less than that." Maybe they can, but they are betting their financial future on it, with odds no better than they'd get at Vegas.
Some of the comments in this thread simply amaze me. I am beginning to think that a lot of people could not survived being African American during the Jim Crow era etc etc etc. Many of us in our sixties and beyond came up in and did what was necessary. Yes I am well off now and have pensions and substantial savings and have retired in NC. Which for me is symbolic as my mom was born into a dirt poor family in the South in in the early 20th century and lived in a tiny dirt floor dwelling with no indoor plumbing. Didn't finish high school but did what she needed to do. My dad worked multiple jobs and was more fortunate being born in the North but oh yeah if you thing he had it easier than some of you complaining today think again. I remember him working multiple jobs as many of us did early in our lives( I had five at one time and was married) so as to save the money to do what we wanted and the need to move ahead. My relatives the same drill many grew up dirt poor and all have retired comfortably by working hard and doing what they need to do. No one promised you a Rose Garden and if they did go see your parents and ask to write the promised check. Other wise get with a program to improve your life now and down the road. There will be body slams and many in this forum have experienced them and for better or worse they did all the could to bounce back and that is the moral of the story. It is on you to do what you can to the best extent that you can. The game ain't over until the pull your eye lids down so keep on pushing and clawing and doing what you can or accept the consequences of not having done so.
In general, I agree. But broke people have a way of making their problems everyone else's, if not in your personal life, then at the voting booth.
Ha, Mystie -- you don't need to tell me that. I live in a city that votes in every single cockamamie parcel tax it can, because the city population is 60% renters. And "renters don't pay parcel taxes".
Then they wonder and yell about their rent going up every year.
People without work place savings plans have much more limited pre-tax savings options and could have a boat load in taxable accounts that don't get picked up in data reports as being retirement accounts. Some would prefer to save and invest that way especially if their workplace options suck. IRA's only get you so far.
Exactly so if you have a years income in taxable accounts when you hit retirement..... The reality is that now that we our working on seven years retired we have no retirement account, none. What we have our varying accounts some that if drawn from would create a tax event and others that wouldn't. The nature and rate of taxation would vary by the account status and type of investment. You can call them what they want but we are past 59 1/2 and retired.
well considering 50% of the country pays no income tax for decades and has no savings i would say whats different now?
but those numbers greatly dilute those who do .
the bls has the breakdown of the numbers.
What a freaking msleading chart. Families in the bottom income quintile have a median net worth of $9K and a mean net worth of $64K.
The average dummy sees this and thinks, wow, the poor are really rich.
Except that the bottom income quintile includes a lot of people who aren't really poor, and the next quintile includes a lot of people who are always struggling.
How can this be? Government statistics count ANNUAL incomes, which often are volatile and thus are not good indicators of a person's lifestyle or standard of living. I worked for a guy who is now a millionaire. His business is inherently and specifically cyclical. It is so specifically cyclical that he structures his income and expenses to alternate years of mid-six-figure income with years of four-figure income. (BTW there is a loophole - er feature - of state law that affords him a large property tax credit in his low-income years; I've saved him a bunch of money with that tip.)
So 50 percent of the time he will be in the bottom income quintile, yet have a million-dollar net worth.
So much for the usefulness of government statistics!
The bottom quintile includes some people - as in the above example - with middle class lifestyles and temporarily low incomes. It includes a lot more older and disabled people who accumulated net worth in earlier years when they were working and had middle class incomes. The elderly 'poor' and the non-elderly 'poor' are dissimilar.
Ha, Mystie -- you don't need to tell me that. I live in a city that votes in every single cockamamie parcel tax it can, because the city population is 60% renters. And "renters don't pay parcel taxes".
Then they wonder and yell about their rent going up every year.
??? The logical way to test the validity of your presumption is to compare voting results in owner-occupied neighborhoods and in renter neighborhoods. In most cities, renters and owners are sufficiently segregated to make such a comparison feasible. Homeowners in CA have enjoyed for 30+ years the advantages of Prop 13 - advantages renters can never lock in the way homeowners do.
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