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Comment by RickJWagner | Hacker News Reader

There is a strong need for financial education.

There is a small minority of Americans who won't have any retirement savings due to catastrophic illness, or a lifetime of inability to get a good paying job, or some other factor. But this number should be very small. Everybody else should be able to accumlate money for retirement.

To save for retirement takes discipline and means forgoing things today to save for tomorrow. The benefits of saving for retirement must be indelibly impressed into people's minds for this to happen.

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There’s a stronger need for CEOs to stop acting like mafia members and demanding 500 times what a standard employee earns. If you fleece the poorest, naturally you’re going to have people with no savings. CEOs will naturally pat themselves on the back and say “I deserve this”, but do their employees deserve to be living on the streets post retirement? It seems like people are no longer anything but a commodity to be used until broken and then discarded.

I don't think that small minority is as small as you might think. Life is full of uninsurable disasters.

The "good" news is that there are only a few years of retirement you really want to hang around for anyway (as opposed to a slow miserable death of dementia and other diseases). Seven years, for example. (67 to 75)

When I run out of money, I'm out.

It was and still is shocking to me that this isn't taught in school.

Is it really more education or a lack of impulse control to go out and buy the latest greatest phone every two years?!

Do you have a family Barney? I find the run rate costs of raising a family are astounding even with a very healthy two incomes. It doesn’t shock me that most households barely scrape by at the end of the month without any reserves to save.

Out of curiosity, and I don't have a family, what are your costs?

I suspect you can support a family pretty cheapily. The problem is everyone wants to "do everything possible" for their kids -- pay for the best child care, the best schools (or housing in a good school district), clothes and phones to keep up with the Jones' kids, $500k to bribe your way into USC, college tuition, etc. Yes, that all adds up, but I suspect you can also allocate an appropriate percentage of your income to retirement and just pay less for some of those things.

Adding our kid to our health insurance (through employer) added $300 a month. Trying to be responsible and saving for college adds $100 a month.

Kid is too young to stay at home by himself and we don't live by family. So we pay for before/after care (school hours are from 9-3:30). This is astonishingly $600 a month, a relatively cheap option around here (there's cheaper but not by much).

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