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Will Your Retirement Efforts Achieve Escape Velocity?
Will Your Retirement Efforts Achieve Escape Velocity?
The concept of ‘retirement’, of enjoying decades of work-free leisure in your golden years, is a relatively new construct. It’s only been around for a few generations.
In fact, the current version of the relaxed, golfing/RV-touring/country club retirement lifestyle only came into being in the post-WW2 boom era — as Social Security, corporate & government pensions, cheap and plentiful energy, and extended lifespans made it possible for the masses.
But increasingly, it looks like the dream of retiring is fast falling out of reach for many of today’s Baby Boomers. Most will outlive their savings (if they have any at all).
And the retirement prospects look even worse for Generations X, the Millennials, and Gen Z.
A Bad Squeeze
While the US enjoyed a wave of unprecedented prosperity throughout the 20th century, the data clearly shows that halcyon era is ending.
Real wages (i.e., nominal $ earned divided by the inflation rate) for the average American worker have hardly budged since the mid-1960s:
Yet the cost of living has changed dramatically over the same time period. Note how the rate of increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) started accelerating in the late ’60s and never looked back:
Squeezed between stagnant wages and a rising living costs, perhaps it should be little surprise that so many Americans are having difficulty finding anything left over to save for retirement.
We’ve written about this extensively in our past reports, such as Let’s Stop Fooling Ourselves: Americans Can’t Afford The Future and The Great Retirement Con. But as a way of driving the point home, here are some quick sobering stats from the National Institute On Retirement Security:
- The median retirement account balance among all working US adults is $0. This is true even for the cohort closest to retirement age, those 55-64 years old.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal
Dear Sir/Madam:
I’m writing to you who control our government now — that is, the big corporations of the world. Let’s not pretend it is otherwise. Thanks to a system in which money buys elections, nearly all of our politicians are in your employ.
Thanks for wrecking everything.
If I were a Millennial, this might not surprise me or even be worthy of mention. They have grown up in the system as it exists now, and many of them are too cynical to fight. But I’m from Generation X, and we still thought we had a chance to make our own destinies. In recent years that’s become increasingly difficult.
The future my kids face will include a deteriorating national infrastructure, underfunded public schools full of stressed students and the traumatized poor, and a world of permanent wars started by my own country, mainly against people much worse off than ourselves. And worst of all, their future is jeopardized by your refusal to see that the Earth cannot take anymore plundering of resources.I’m going to be frank. I’m a member of the intellectual elite. I’m not working class and I’m not poor, but those distinctions aren’t what they used to be. My father worked his way out of Depression-era Oklahoma to become a professor at Harvard. I was given the best education money could buy, because that’s what my parents valued. I never got a D or F in my life, and when I got a few Cs (trigonometry nearly killed me), I heard about it from my mother and father–they thought they knew what it took to get ahead in the world. I have degrees from Smith College and Harvard University.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/05/letter-to-a-plutocrat-your-pipeline-made-me-a-criminal/#sthash.ydUlGRuZ.dpuf
