Lately i'm feeling like a fatted pig -- reading social security articles
Being laid off at 63 had its upside. After 30 years of combining corporate career and parenting, i welcomed the rest.
I’m at the tail end of the boomers but think of myself as the beginning of GenX, based on music preferences and a few culture cues. I’ve paid a lot of social security and income taxes over the decades, as a salaried worker, and i saved. Helped out relatives and friends when they weren’t doing as well many times over the years — not with tens and twenties but with gifts of weekly groceries or a used car or health insurance or a place to live. Was glad to pay the extra tax that helped fund health care for others.
I tracked my mythical future in an online self-planning tool (now cancelled) — I’d have enough with social security and 401k investments to be able to retire in a pretty nice house with a pretty nice view, with a backyard full of birds attracted to my tall trees and to the pond behind the property. Now I am not confident. I can tell by the dozens of breathless social security articles appearing lately. They talk about capping benefits at $50K, but for someone forced to start taking it at 64 (after a layoff) that actually means $40K, but because they also intend to fiddle with CPI increases, the cap will keep cutting deeper. Meanwhile, everything is increasing: insurance premiums (medical and home), property taxes, food, utilities. I’m not so confident of keeping this pretty nice house with a pretty nice view in the long run.
I can see the future. The 0.1% is looking to find growth markets, and there’s nothing left to take from the workers and working class. But a very large class of retirees who handed over 7% of their income for the entire lives to social security also put 10% into their retirement accounts. The accumulated wealth of boomer retirees is the one remaining fatted pig, and it can be transformed into some growth markets for the 0.1%, if they can only crack open those retirement piggy banks. Retirees who can’t afford their homes will find a smaller place, pay rent until they run out of savings — maybe fill up those high rise condos that the 0.1% have been building everywhere in the big cities. Plus there’s a giant windfall for the 0.1% when what is left of social security gets privatized, especially if new ‘individual social security’ investments can go into private equity, whose owners have been ‘looking for the exits’.
But at least Peter Thiel’s $5 billion Roth IRA will be safe.
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