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My advice is save like you will not be getting it.
Of course, that's great. And then SS will be a bonus. Millennials will get it as long as we all vote out politicians who threaten to gut it.
Oh, and here's another proposal: keep increasing initial benefits after 70. Right now everyone over 70 takes SS, even if working. But if the benefits kept increasing, maybe 5% in real terms, many would put it off. Many until death.
Last edited by pvande55; 11-16-2018 at 07:36 PM..
Reason: Add paragraph
If I were a retiring boomer, I'd want cuts now while I'm still relatively young to make sure the system doesn't collapse on me when I'm in my 80's....allow me to get adjusted and whatnot.
At some point people will learn the very hard way that nobody works for free. Dialysis, oxygen, enzymes, medicine...it all costs money. Nobody killed anyone, but nobody HAS to take a Medicare patient either. Especially really old ones with no more voice or fight in them. It will almost as easy to ignore the very old as it was to ignore a massive forecasted deficit and leave it Xers to fix despite the fraction of the size.
It's not my problem.
The Boomers are big. Facilities will need to be built for them. If not enough of them have money...who's going to do that? Who will build a bunch of big facilities when the next generation, the Xers, is tiny in comparison and companies will be saddled with surplus facilities if they expand.
I don't know how it will happen, but I am willing to predict that we'll end up with fewer Boomers. It reminds me of a passage from a much hated book. It was about two trains, both thinking they were superior and should have priority in going through a tunnel. Neither would give way to the other. In the end, neither did.
"As the tunnel came closer, they saw, at the edge of the sky far to the south, in a void of space and rock, a spot of living fire twisting in the wind. They did not know what it was and did not care to learn.
It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them."
That tunnel is social security and medicare. If I were a Millennial, I'd plan a different route. When this thing explodes, nobody's going to be jumping up and down to get it reassembled in the same manner again.
Saving Social Security comes down to two choices. We can cut the benefits of those who have already paid an enormous price to fix Social Security once, or we can ask workers who don’t believe that they will ever get paid to contribute more.
Author’s note: Readers are going to ask about increasing the cap on taxable wages. I suspect that some change in the tax base is unavoidable, but (1) Eliminating the cap doesn’t fix the problem. It does not even officially kick the can anymore. (2) The policy introduces structural changes to the program which will over time crash the program. This solution appeals to the people who wish to throw other people’s money at the problem. I am happy to take questions in the comments.
It's set up as a perpetual system and there's no reason that it would end unless the payers stop paying or the country dies.
Yea, right. I had the option for many years; problem is, living paycheck to paycheck, I had zero dollars to invest. Between two of us, one salary, and huge expenses moving around from job to job, it was impossible. How many companies offered me a 401K during my working time? As a consultant, Zero. As a full time employee, three. Two companies had 5-year plans you had to be there before becoming eligible. One company was bought by a competitor 4 years in, and was shut down. The second company 'eliminated' my position at 4.5 years because I was one of the higher earners. I would have saved with that one, except job was hundreds of miles from home, and I had to rent an expensive apt to work there, which cost 2/3 of my 'discretionary' income. The last company paid well, and had a 401K from year two, and I maxed it out once we had a financial cushion built up. It was only for 6 years before I had enough, and retired.
Life is not always as simple as it seems.
Everything you wrote speaks to personal choices. One salary? Why didn't your wife work? After any of your moves, there weren't any other companies in the local area that offered better opportunities? What about second jobs or part time business?
Life isn't even at all. We have to maximize all of our options.
No, Millennials will not get Social Security. Millennials should not have to pay into it now because it won't be around when Millenials need it. I've been upset about getting social security deductions since I started working. I'm in my mid-30s and an early Millennial.
Social Security has been unsustainable for a long time. In the 1980s, my Boomer mother didn't expect Social Security to be around for when she needed to collect, and she has started to collect.
No, Millennials will not get Social Security. Millennials should not have to pay into it now because it won't be around when Millenials need it. I've been upset about getting social security deductions since I started working. I'm in my mid-30s and an early Millennial.
Social Security has been unsustainable for a long time. In the 1980s, my Boomer mother didn't expect Social Security to be around for when she needed to collect, and she has started to collect.
So your mother thought the same thing decades ago that you think now.
How did it work out for her??
What always sticks out in these Social Security threads is how many people have no understanding on how the system works. It's a pay as you go system, not one where there's a drawer somewhere in which your payments are stashed.
Social Security seems to be working ok for my mom if she has managed to start collecting. It is unknown if it will be around until she dies.
The only way it won't be around is if we stop collecting the payroll (and other) taxes which support it. So far as I am aware, there is not one single member of Congress supporting this idea.
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