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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

If you think current retirees have it bad, wait until it’s our turn. I’d be extremely surprised if the currently working generation will be getting any pension at all (in every country that has such a system) and if the retirement age to draw a pension isn’t raised to a ridiculous age. The amounts we pay in now for the most part are used to pay for current retirees, not to accumulate for our retirement. It’s a major problem everywhere which is further exacerbated with the fact that it takes more working people than retirees to support the system and that’s not the way it’s currently going. I’m privileged enough that I can save and invest significant amounts of money that I’ll actually be able to afford retiring and just see my mandatory contributions as lost/cost of doing business but that’s far from universal. Most people don’t think about retirement/can’t save anything and hope it will all work out. It probably won’t.

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> I can save and invest significant amounts of money

Saving/Investing has become harder as time goes on. I heard about how my grand parents' parents could put their money in the bank or something and compound interest would take care of things. Now with 0% interest everywhere, people rush to gamble in stocks or real-estate. As time goes on, it becomes harder to even hold the values of what you have.

> Saving/Investing has become harder as time goes on. I heard about how my grand parents' parents

Yeah that’s for sure. All these stories about people who were cashiers or factory workers and who bought their houses… Not happening anymore.

You can invest in index funds and it seems to be the only way to keep up, unless you know what you’re doing and can pick stocks (you and 99.99% of the people on the planet can’t)

I’m not even sure about index funds. If you put money in at the bottom of the market last March, that money has almost doubled while we are still in the middle of a pandemic.

I put some money into my vanguard Roth IRA and I can not pay almost double for an index fund this year than what I paid last year.

Am I irrational?

> Am I irrational?

Time will tell. But over the last 100 years you would not have come out ahead unless you are close to retirement already.

What are you referring to here? Assuming s&p500, I've calculated an average of 10% increase over any 10 year interval (of course not ending in a crash).

If you’re playing the long game, I would say it doesn’t really matter. It might crash soon but recover by the time you actually need it or it will keep going until you need it. Since these indices represent the whole market and it tanks, you won’t be worse off than most other investors/funds/pensions either way. That’s how I see it.

But I’d you’re looking for a shirt term gain then it’s very different.

That's how I look at it as well. And if it tanks and never recovers, then it seems to me that would also mean society has completely collapsed and there really isn't much any individual could do about it anyway.

I'm unsure of what you're trying to say here. Are you implying that you're not able to buy the same # of shares of an index fund as you were last year?

WRT the market doubling, there has been a lot of different reasons for it, QE increasing money supply that has been plowed into the stock market inflating values, top performers generally doing better relatively to society, and higher income individuals and families generally weathering the pandemic much better than low-income individuals and families.

This is all to say that market performance is not tied to the pandemic in any particular way (in this case). Back to your other statement of not being able to purchase the same # of shares (if that was your point), it doesn't matter the # of shares you can buy per year, only the value of shares purchasable. The thread above you isn't calculating the # of shares increasing by 5% year, just the value of total shares . I care that the total value of my investments increases because that's what eventually matters when I start withdrawing, the # of shares I have could increase, but that wouldn't matter if the total value stays the same or decreases.

> Yeah that’s for sure. All these stories about people who were cashiers or factory workers and who bought their houses… Not happening anymore.

i also don't think that situation was a realistic mean to begin with. The one time in history where this was possible was in the US straight after world war two. A period when th e rest of the industrial world was blown to smithereens.

For most of the world, that period did not happen. For instance, my grandparents had substantial less wealth then my parents (who where born in the late 60's)

When interest rates were high in the 1980s my Grandmother and her brother bought a house by purchasing savings bonds. She worked part time and already owned two houses. It was much easier as far as I can tell.

On the flip side, my Grandpa made a decent living as a press-brake operator. My grandma was incredibly frugal as well, reusing the same transformers themed ziplock bags for almost twenty years and hanging her paper towels under the sink to re-use for later.

Could be. But one thing that was pointed out to me is that once our generation gets closer to retirement age, the governments will be more willing to address our concerns. Probably at the price of making the next generation's retirement plans even more dubious.

The change in attitude is due to the fact that older people are more likely to vote and that politicians and their friends also tend to be in the past-middle age-but-not-retired-yet age bracket.

Governments already don't care about current retirees, why would they care about us? Old voters currently vote by the left/right side already and not by "who gives me more" (atleast in my small EU country, and many others).

Extremely different in my country, Poland.

Humans have this amazing tendency to wait until the last minute to implement much more constraining solutions at the last minute than what would have been necessary if we did it in time. To wit: climate change. We’ve known about it for 40–50 years but only now are we seriously considering what we can start doing so that in ten years we actually start doing it, right before all hell breaks loose.

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme

I am planing my retirement as if Social Security is not going to be there. Of course, it will be there - in some form - but not nearly at a level where I just won't have to think about money, which is my goal.

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