Sometimes these folks are parents of doctor children who have a boatload of debt and their own young children to think about and then have to literally fund their parents. Sometimes these parents are in poor health too. This comes up time to time in the FB Women’s group.
Regardless of where you stand on “Nanny states” or whether you feel empathy for people who did not save enough for retirement, a trip around the world will show that countries who do not have adequate social support for all of their citizens have higher crime and the wealthy in those countries need to expend considerable resources to protect their wealth from the have-nots. I would rather not have to live in a gated community with round the clock security guards to protect myself/my house. I would also rather all Americans have some basic social safety net, to include the basics of healthcare, affordable housing, and affordable healthy food–I see too many patients whose problems I can’t fix because they stem from a lack of basic social resources.
I do wonder if universal basic income would be a more efficient alternative to our insolvent Social Security and broken disability/Medicaid systems we have today, which not only fail to encourage responsibility, but actually punish people for working.
You hear pundits decrying the “Nanny State”, but maybe its my chosen career that’s led me to become very pro-Nanny State. Auto-enroll/Forced retirement savings, Auto-enroll basic state healthcare, automatic voter registration, soda tax, regulate & tax vices, and so on. Our society clings so fiercely to independence in every aspect of public life – why? Circumstances always point back to the majority of people thinking short-term and doing whatever feels good. Then someday we wind up paying more to mend it after the fact than we would have just offering basic social welfare programs in the first place. All these people who didn’t save for retirement, who will still be looking for paid work in their old age will most certainly vote.
I have empathy, but little sympathy for these two women. I dispute the notion that people are typically in this situation through no fault of their own.
One thing that is actually a fairly interesting answer to this that I find more and more compelling is Universal Basic Income. It sounds absolutely bonkers on first glance but it actually has very reasonable arguments from the left (obvious) and from the right. The conservative arguments for it are that we clearly are going to be giving money to some subset of the population so let’s stop making it piecemeal (medicaid, EBT, pell grants etc) and just value it as a monthly salary that you have to manage.
I don’t believe in absolving people of consequences, but the problem with retirement savings is that consequences for decisions made during the prime of life don’t become apparent until people are at a much more vulnerable stage.
I agree, with a caveat. The problem with Universal Basic Income is that some people are too mentally incapacitated or too foolish to properly manage their money. What good does it do to give such a person $$$$/month if they spend it on beer, cigarettes, and lotto tickets, or are swindled out of the money by scammers and other predators, and end up without enough leftover to pay for their groceries and rent? Either we have to be cold-heated and leave these people out on the street to die (which, let’s face it, isn’t going to happen – nor should it in the case of the mentally incapacitated), or we have to set up some sort of case manager system to protect these folks from themselves.
If you are mentally incapacitated then obviously no one is suggesting you receive money. Most people we would consider to be in that scenario have a guardian or a case manager already.
People like to question whether or not it’s a good idea to retire using the 4% rule when you have 25 years’ worth of expenses saved. But the fact is many, many people don’t even have one year’s expenses covered.
If you’re wondering if your $2.5 Million in retirement savings is adequate, or if you should wait until you’re closer to $3.33 million, recognize that you’re in better shape than at least 95% of potential retirees, and more than $2 Million ahead of the average.
Cheers!
-PoF
If you are mentally incapacitated then obviously no one is suggesting you receive money. Most people we would consider to be in that scenario have a guardian or a case manager already.
You’d be surprised at how many people falling into this category DON”T have anyone truly supervising them. A visit to any large city will show you that. Most of the long-term homeless have mental issues; that’s why they’re living on the streets. They’re marginally functional people, at best.
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