C
Cut-Throat
Guest
Primarily for the same reasons others have posted here. Most of the Boomers have not saved for retirmement, so they can't
From the Retirement from Hell articles that Nord posted in another thread.
Bernstein commenting on Social Security and the coming problems.
From the Retirement from Hell articles that Nord posted in another thread.
Bernstein commenting on Social Security and the coming problems.
The solution, then, is for folks to retire later. We've already started down that road by raising the retirement age for future retirees to sixty-seven. Unfortunately, we have a ways to go. In order to keep the current worker-to-retiree ratio at 3:1, Arnott and Casscells estimate that the retirement age will gradually have to be raised to seventy-three. Of course, the government need take no action; politically, it will prove far simpler to let poor asset-class returns and low savings force older Americans to postpone their retirements. In the past few years, millions rudely awakened to the fact that they weren't going to retire at forty. Over the next few decades, most of the remainder will discover they won't be doing so at sixty-five, either.
That's the bad news. The good news is that this analysis pertains only to society at large; if you're reading this article, you are likely saving more than average. To the extent that you do, you'll be able to retire that much earlier than seventy-three. The really good news is that your cohorts are saving so pitifully little that this will be relatively easy to do.
The above applies only to the Boomers. The X-ers, and those coming after, will have a much harder time of it. If you are currently under forty, you will shortly be traumatized by the sight of large numbers of your parents' generation subsisting on cat food, and your generation will begin to save prodigiously. In such an environment, it will be very difficult to gain a comparative advantage over your peers.