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Comment by tankenmate | Hacker News Reader

There is a solution for retirement for not-so-rich people, it's called tax free, mandatory, funded, and benefactor owned superannuation. It forces everyone to contribute to their own retirement. It stops companies or governments from dipping into the "pot". It's tax free and so allows proper growth not only for the funds in question, but also allows for growth in the economy. Obviously there are some corner cases but these can be accounted for fairly easily. In short it is good for just about everybody.

The more countries that adopt this the better.

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The downside in Australia is that the great majority of less-financially-oriented people put their money into 'super schemes' which are designed to swindle you and on average give you a worse return for your money than just leaving it in a bank (without even accounting for the excessive fees and charges).

True, most managed funds are a rip off. I remember many eons ago in my first job out of school, I worked at a factory. The company selected super fund sent some peons out to brief us about our fund, but we just shredded them by asking common sense questions. The peons were obviously PR people who had no idea about investment and were hoping that some four colour glossies would keep us happy.

We have that here for a long time now and my idea of this is basically a Ponzi scheme. When you start having old people live longer, retire earlier and not enough young people to support the system, it all collapses. Our own system is already in really bad shape and the government had to increase the minimum age at which you can retire in order to adjust things.

How is superannuation (I'm assuming you mean the Australian version) a Ponzi scheme? People have to put their own money into Super plus employers make a mandatory contribution. Super is different to retirement benefits (which are tax payer funded) and really the only thing saving the system from collapse.

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