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... Most of my co-workers have children who are now young adults.... Telework and alternate work schedules are available to provide more time at home. And they make it a priority for at least one parent to be available to take their child to after school activities and attend sports events.
I see the exact same thing in my office. Whether both spouses work, or not, they are essentially a corporation whose charter is the raising and tutelage of their children. Judging from water-cooler conversation, all of these kids excel in sports, music, drama or whatnot. I can't speak to the implications of having one stay-at-home parent, vs. both parents working. But I can definitely say that what seems to suffer is social-life outside of kids and outside of work.
As a child-free person, I bemoan "losing" my coworkers to their family-concerns. Gone is the day of men going drinking after work, or spending weekends together, while the women tend to the children.
I also notice that many of the now-adult children aren't doing as well as their parents. Sometimes this stems from unwise or inauspicious choices, but other times there are factors beyond our immediate purview. This is a constant reminder that the generation now on the cusp of retirement has fared better than the following generation... and here I'm speaking not of disadvantaged persons, but of established white-collar professionals. So again the point is, that there's no retirement-crisis for today's retirees. The future is less-certain.
jane_sm1th73 also makes an excellent point. Suppose that we can save 100% of our salaries, sleeping on the office-floor and subsisting on mooched donuts. Maybe. But even then, our ultimate prospects in retirement depend so vastly more on our prowess as investors, than on our self-discipline as savers. Zero percent annual return on a billion dollars is still zero!
My quote is from immediateannuities.com and is for an immediate annuity where you give the money to an insurance company (not refundable) and they pay you an income for life. The number is much higher (about what you said) for self-managed withdrawals. The reason for the difference is that, with an annuity, people who die young help pay for people who live a long time.
OOPSIE, Larry - apologies, I oughta have heeded your previous posts better! Thank you for the clarification! Best, Jane
So now, are we supposed to penalize those who prepared well for retirement, in order to provide security for those who did not? There are alternatives, but they require more personal involvement, and a media-saturated "cocooned" culture isn't going to offer them spontaneously.
I'm in my mid-sixties, never-married and childless, but I'm not facing "the ride downhill" alone. Both my parents grew up in large, struggling families, and my Dad's determination to continue a family farm didn't leave much time for a social life. But a number of the gaps in my development were filled in by unmarried uncles, aunts and other relatives (Several were educators, and some of those, BTW, were attracted to their own sex, but they were more discreet, subtle, and responsible in their conduct).
And although my parents didn't fully grasp the implications, contacts within "the aggie network" provided some additional rounding out for my brother and myself; our family hosted exchange students and occasionally. members of other farm families working or studying locally.
At some point around when I attained age 40, it finally became apparent that I wasn't cut out for a steady 9-to-5 in the subjugated corporate world. I was still pursuing continuing education at the U of Scranton -- a Jesuit school (though I'm not Catholic) in an urbanized setting, and a far cry from my undergrad days at Happy Valley (Penn State). So I found myself a couple of new friends in the world of global, legal immigration, and some of them are still with me. My one brother also married into a European family with lower-level diplomatic/foreign service experience.
Life is what you make it, and the relaxation of some of our more-rigid psychosexual hang-ups has broadened the possibilities. But you have to go out there and look around; once you do, the rest tends to take care of itself.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 01-01-2016 at 10:51 AM..
My perception after working 30 plus years in the same engineering office has been very different. Most of my co-workers have children who are now young adults. Where my co-worker has a spouse who also has a career, their children are much more likely to succeed in school and complete college with a employable degree. These couples seem to be more concerned about their children's education, can afford private schools or to live in a good school district, can provide quality after school programs and support participation in sports and other activities, etc. None of the couples work 13 hour days except on rare occasions although they may travel as part of their job once or twice a month. Telework and alternate work schedules are available to provide more time at home. And they make it a priority for at least one parent to be available to take their child to after school activities and attend sports events.
Where the mother is a SAHM, it seems to be more of a mixed bag as to whether the child does well in school or gets in trouble. The women often coddle their children and the husband is frustrated by this but helpless to do anything about it. Several of my co-workers in that situation have 30 year old kids still at home or daughters with their own children but no husband or job to support the grandchildren. The career mothers tend to have higher expectations of their children which makes a difference. You could argue that doing well in school is not the only measure of a successful life but their young adult children appear to be well adjusted and have both a career and outside interests.
I can attest to this. My kids did their own homework. No help was needed from us parents. We did read to the younger kids at night. No 13 hours except from a start up, but there was always a nanny at home to take care of them. They didn't come home to an empty house either. I also got lucky, was able to work at home most of the time they were born, almost 60-70%. They did turn out well, top students without much tutoring and help, very independent, the only thing was lacking and I must admit was transportation to activities that were not related to school. Because they can walk home or take the bus to get home. That was a priority when we decided where to live.
i have been an investor for 27 years and never knew a time stocks were not risky and it appeared to be a sucky time to invest .
when rates were higher on savings , interest on our mortgages , credit cards and auto loans ate it up many times over .
with the average american already 16k in debt on their credit cards and 76% of the country has no savings and lives paycheck to paycheck , lower rates put far more money back in to american pockets .
AS SOON AS RATES NORMALIZE YOU WILL HEAR EVERYONE COMPLAINING HOW INTEREST PAYMENTS ON HOMES AND CARS ARE KILLING THEM . HIGHER RATES AND HIGHER INFLATION ARE USUALLY JOINED AT THE HIP .
Last edited by mathjak107; 01-01-2016 at 12:30 PM..
i have been an investor for 27 years and never knew a time stocks were not risky and it appeared to be a sucky time to invest .
when rates were higher on savings , interest on our mortgages , credit cards and auto loans ate it up many times over .
with the average american already 16k in debt on their credit cards and 75% of the country has no savings and lives paycheck to paycheck , lower rates put far more money back in to american pockets .
We have been on the road for ten days now in a variety of settings. If I had conversations with the various strangers we had contact with it would have been as far flung as our discussions in here:
. We are very different with some of us having over lap and others are night and day different.
yep , we are not representative of the masses in the country .
they have no savings to speak of and over 76% of american's live pay check to pay check . they get no advantage when it come to higher rates on savings since they have little or no savings . .
all their money in their pocket comes from savings on debt service so we can complain about low rates on savings all we want . low rates on savings isn't the issue as much as incomes and debt service.
most of us who do have savings want and need our money to work for us so a savings account is not our playing field of choice . most of us did very well in bonds and equity's over most years .
there is a small niche of folks who are gun shy of investing and do have resource's but not enough that the policy of the country should revolve around the fact they are gun shy. .
those same gun shy folks will be the same ones complaining again when mortgages and cars cost them a lot more along with higher inflation which goes with higher rates .
Last edited by mathjak107; 01-01-2016 at 12:32 PM..
So now, are we supposed to penalize those who prepared well for retirement, in order to provide security for those who did not? There are alternatives, but they require more personal involvement, and a media-saturated "cocooned" culture isn't going to offer them spontaneously.
There is no call in this thread to penalize those who've done well, whether as individual investors or as participants in a defined-benefit pension. Rather, the point is that as private investment becomes of necessity more central to our lives, it is not merely the profligate and the short-sighted who will fail, but also many who are careful and frugal – because they're not good at investing.
I don't think that it requires much education, parental tutelage or personal verve to be a good saver. But it requires all of these things – or a suitable surrogate – to consistently be a good investor. That is the fear and the sobering thought going forward.
As Mathjak says, there was never any extensive period in history when investment was "safe", when it was golden streams of dividends and relentless ascendancy of asset-prices. Panics, collapses and stagnation were not aberrations; they were - and are - the norm. But what's different now, is that Joe and Jane Doe have to be investors. Investment isn't just for the aristocrats and the merchants and the plutocrats. Investment is essential for us all. But most of us aren't any good at it.
decades ago none of us read food labels either . we knew nothing about how to even understand them . we all had to take an interest , learn the basics and now most of us check and understand every label because we had to learn .
there are now robo sites that for a tiny fee can take care of your investments for you .
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