31% Of Americans Have No Retirement Savings At All (conversation, respects, grown up)
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If the other poster was referring to World Hunger Year (founded by Harry Chapin), she is misinformed. The charity has high BBB ratings. Google is your friend:
If the other poster was referring to World Hunger Year (founded by Harry Chapin), she is misinformed. The charity has high BBB ratings. Google is your friend:
I hadn't heard of that charity -- it was something else... it was so long ago, too.
Just looked it up -- he died two weeks after we got engaged -- 33 years ago July 16, 1981. I lost my Dad that January to a heart attack. We took losing Harry Chapin hard. I haven't been able to listen to his music since. Just takes me back to a really dark time....
True, and if on top of that your retirement vehicles were gutted by the recession, you are toast.
My retirement investments got a double whammy: First by the Gulf oil spill (the majority of it was in BP, which before Deepwater was $106/share and paying a handsome dividend four times a year; it bottomed out at $29/share and they suspended dividends entirely for almost 3 years afterward -- the highest it's ever crawled back up to has been about $54/share just this year and now with the Russian sanctions it's down in the mid-40s) and then by the recession in 08. Which just goes to show that no matter how much you have, it might not be enough if the 'right' combination of wrong things happen.
Maybe that's the whole point of the $1Mil articles: In order to save "enough", one has to save many times MORE than what would be "enough".
Um, no....it goes to show you that it's a horrible idea to have the bulk of your retirement savings in the stock of only one company. You violated the most important rule in investing....diversification.
Most people shouldn't own individual stocks at all. You need a mutual fund that owns a mix of stocks and bonds such as:
Vanguard STAR
Vanguard Balanced Index
Vanguard Wellington
Dodge & Cox Balanced
Oakmark Equity & Income
Mairs & Power Balanced
Any of the above funds will do quite nicely and can be held for decades, if not for a lifetime.
??? How much would you save if you earned minimum wage? How much do you expect minimum wage workers to save?
As stated a gazillion times, we expect you to earn more than minimum wage. If you've been working for min wage for decades, you've got some other serious emotional, physical, or psychological problem....as mentioned in a gazillion previous posts. We wish you would make the efforts to resolve said problem(s) instead of complaining about it incessantly on CD.
Last edited by mysticaltyger; 08-09-2014 at 07:53 PM..
so far the only factual link to credit score and type of person you may be is in the insurance industry studies
the ftc in its study and report to congress confirmed the low credit score group looked a bit funky in the size and number of claims.
number of claims could be explained since folks in better shape may tend not to report claims and eat them instead.
but that wasn't the issue. the issue was after studying millions of claims was that liability claims had no difference between high and low score , collision claims no difference
between the two.
the part that created the link was comprehensive claims ,meaning those with no witnesses had 2 to 3x the claims and the worst part was many times the claim amount in dollars then the high credit score folks.
that could be padded bills, insurance jobs on ones property and false claims.
that is why a big part of what you pay in auto insurance is determined by your credit score even if you are the most trust worthy person on earth.
right or wrong in making that connection employers carry that credit score over to the work place.
it may very well have no connection to honesty on the job and performance but with 47% of employers drawing reports there is a lot of weight put on those numbers, otherwise the employers wouldn't spend the money on them if they were not going to utilize that info .
So if a driver carries only the state-mandated coverage, and not comprehensive, how is their credit score relevant to the insurance premium they pay?
Um, no....it goes to show you that it's a horrible idea to have the bulk of your retirement savings in the stock of only one company. You violated the most important rule in investing....diversification.
Most people shouldn't own individual stocks at all. You need a mutual fund that owns a mix of stocks and bonds such as:
Vanguard STAR
Vanguard Balanced Index
Vanguard Wellington
Dodge & Cox Balanced
Oakmark Equity & Income
Mairs & Power Balanced
Any of the above funds will do quite nicely and can be held for decades, if not for a lifetime.
Not necessarily true. the same thing happened to me because I paid into the Deferred Compensation Plan
through work. It was managed by CitiBank. When the market tanked I was left w/a 6th of my account.
About what I had paid in. In order to recoupe that loss I would have had to come up w/around $600K to put back in to stop the bleeding. I didn't have it then & you know what I still don't have it. When you
invest make sure you pute you $ into CDs, bonds, savings pools, etc unless you can afford to lose the money.
Also the middle class is $25K-$99,999,999, & median net is $48K so I think minimum wage is never is never going to make it; especially since most of those jobs are not full time so the employer doesn't have to provide benefits.
I do know who Harry Chapin was, and I remember when he died. Very sad. But I read the link anyway and this is the first time I heard that he'd had a heart attack. I thought he'd died at the scene from injuries from the accident.
My husband started out answering phones at just over minimum wage, about $7.50 hr in 2003 with less than a year of college education. We had our first son by the age of 20, 4 kids by 25. We always maxed out the employer match on the 401K because we were told not to depend on social security. We live in the same house we bought when our income was 27K/yr. It's not fancy, but it's renovated and it's ours.
10 years later he was making almost 60k/year. In that 1 401K account, we just used the target retirement date and didn't really touch it or think too hard.
On that income for a family of 6, his account has over 200K in it and we've contributed nothing to it in over a year.
After leaving that job, we were also informed that his pension account will be worth about 2K per month at the age of 65, less if he takes it earlier (obviously that's not much considering inflation over the next 30+ years).
I wish I could go out and shake some of our peers. We started young, we saved without looking at it or ever seeing it happen and we're 32 now. It doesn't take a lot to be responsible for your future self.
He's changed jobs and is now making 6 figures and we're only contributing to an IRA this year so we can put more toward building our dream home next year. We won't have 4 fully funded college accounts for our kids, but we're hoping to be able to help them AND we will retire comfortably. It's just a matter of priorities. I didn't have a lot of crazy nights drinking with friends at 21, but I have peace of mind...and plenty of fun nights drinking with friends a few years late
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You violated the most important rule in investing....diversification.
