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question everything

(47,264 posts)
Wed Jun 25, 2014, 04:00 PM Jun 2014

2030: The Year Retirement Ends

The retirement scenario everyone wants to avoid arrives in 2030. That’s when the largest demographic group in U.S. history, the baby boomers, will have nearly depleted the Social Security trust fund. It’s also when older Generation X-ers will begin moving out of work and into their golden years.

But these won’t be the years of leisure that recent generations have known. Consider a typical 2030 retiree–an educated Gen X woman, around 65, who has worked all her life at small and midsize companies. Those firms have created most of the new jobs in the economy for the past 50 years, but only 15% of them offer formal retirement plans. Our retiree has put away savings here and there, but she’s also part of the middle class, which took the biggest wealth hit during the financial crisis of 2008. That–along with the fact that average real wages have been virtually flat for three decades, even as living costs have risen–means she has minimal savings, even less than the $42,000 that today’s average retiree leaves work with.

(snip)

In all likelihood, then, she won’t actually be retired. Like many of her peers, our Gen X-er finds herself needing a part-time job; she shares her home and many living expenses with her son, a millennial who isn’t doing so well himself. More members of his generation live with Mom and Dad than any generation before, according to the Pew Research Center, in part because they came of age in the post-financial-crisis era, when wages were stagnant and unemployment high. (If you enter the workplace during such cycles, your income never catches up.) As he struggles to pay down student loans and save enough money to move out, there’s very little left over–which means he’s on course for an even less secure retirement than his mother.

(snip)

Controversially, many of the new approaches call for a greater role for government after three decades of pushing responsibility for retirement onto individuals. They include everything from President Obama’s MyRA plan, which would let some individuals save in a fund administered by the U.S. Treasury, to a spate of state-run programs. The most intriguing–and hotly debated–approach is taking shape in California, where state senator Kevin de León has pushed through a bill that aims to guarantee every Californian working in the private sector a living wage in retirement, a plan some experts say could become a new model for the nation.

(snip)

If there’s one place in America that best captures the complex mix of economic, social and demographic trends that play into the looming retirement crisis, it’s California. Like many other national stories, this one bubbled up early in the Golden State. Long before Detroit went bust, the state was in the news for its public-pension troubles, including massive bankruptcies in Stockton, Vallejo and San Bernardino. California is also emblematic of all the worrisome trends: it has more retirees, young people without benefits, poor people, immigrants and small and midsize businesses than most states. In other words, it checks all the boxes of groups most at risk of an insecure retirement.

(snip)

http://time.com/2899504/2030-the-year-retirement-ends/

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2030: The Year Retirement Ends (Original Post) question everything Jun 2014 OP
Reads like a scenario for privatization. upaloopa Jun 2014 #1

upaloopa

(11,417 posts)
1. Reads like a scenario for privatization.
Wed Jun 25, 2014, 04:40 PM
Jun 2014

Raise the cap. Also CA just had it's credit rating upgraded.
Yep them damned boomers again.
Too bad they were born when they were. They should have to suffer like the genX will!

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