Category: The Rave Board
Sort of combination Rave & News & Views, but an article yesterday made me glad I work outside the home & never opted for stay at home motherhood. The more you work the more you have to retire.
Seems many baby boomers, those born between '45 & '60, will be running into difficulties on retiring. Seems not contributing soon enough, gambling on stocks that did poorly, & retiring too early will be contributing to this age group's retirement financial woes. One poor guy in Vero Beach, Florida, has only $5000 in a retirement account at age 60. He recently lost his job.
Now I won't say how much I have saved, but it's more than $5000 & I have awhile to go before 60. I'm going to try to work until I'm pushed out the door or carried out dead. Many jobs now have more automation & aren't the intensive manual labor they used to be, & both parents retired at a mandatory 65 for one, the other in his early '70's. Father in law is in his 60's & still consulting & traveling. I hope I can last this long too.
Well the stay at home parent thing is certainly a hot topic.
However, I will say this: the generation I feel sorry for is my father's. They lived in a different era than we do, and the 1950s were padded with regulations which supported and stabilized a middle class, something we haven't had since my teen years.
In other words, they were fed one illusion and subsequently downsized / handed another.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, with no illusions about any of this: Social security run out? Probably, for any number of reasons, poor management and backlash being two likely culprits.
Frankly, I do not expect to retire. At 40 I have sparse little in the retirement account, not because I'm a big spender, but because of circumstances which have happened to me over the years. That being said, anyone who as a teenager watched their friends' parents get downsized out of the work place, and has seen their own parents struggling, can't possibly live with any illusions at all of a so-called safety net. So, while we're doing our damnedest to blow the place up as fast as we can, at least people my age know it. I won't be surprised if my job gets outsourced, or company takeovers happen and a bunch of us get ousted.
We expect no better. They did, and lived in an era where they could.
After all, now, all a CEO needs to do is create a short-term profit in the company by laying off forty thousand workers, (AT&T 1996 anyone?), bonus out, go work somewhere else, and he is accountable to precisely noone. With these sorts of wild animals running around, there is no safety net of any kind for working people, or at least there won't be. The good thing is, at least I know I'm among wild animals and don't expect them to behave like humans.
So my generation and younger has the advantage this way. Anyone older who escaped with a retirement intact that wasn't sacked deserves their well-earned rest. The rest of those people, I truly feel sorry for.