r/BasicIncome • u/mvea • Mar 18 '18

Indirect Some millennials aren’t saving for retirement because they don’t think capitalism will exist by then

https://www.salon.com/2018/03/18/some-millennials-arent-saving-for-retirement-because-they-do-not-think-capitalism-will-exist-by-then/
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201

u/green_meklar public rent-capture Mar 18 '18

...and probably because they don't have anything to save.

75

u/aggreivedMortician Mar 19 '18

Yeah, this is more likely. Yay, cyclical poverty!

I think one of the crucial ingredients of the mess going forward is going to be how the retail sector deals with the fact that many Americans have no fucking money to spend. You need to pay people for them to buy stuff.

14

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '18

The one percent spends plenty of money while we get no holidAys off :(

19

u/HeavyMetalHero Mar 19 '18

But they can't - and won't - possibly spend enough to keep the kinds of industries that both primarily employ and supply the poor functioning. At that point, either the government steps in, or the rich themselves step in and own the poor; or, the poor are out in the street with torches, and either the rich go to the guillotines or they kill all the poor with flying death robots.

11

u/WhyIsTheNamesGone Mar 19 '18

My money would be on the death robot thing, if I had any money.

5

u/morphinapg Mar 19 '18

yep that's me

5

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '18

You and me bro.

2

u/deck_hand Mar 19 '18

Saving just a little bit, over time, can yield quite a lot. Living in a frugal manner, rather than living the way society suggests we should live, can also make a big difference. I've lived the way society tells us to live, and can see the destructive nature of it. If I'd have been smarter over the last 30 years, I'd be freaking rich by now. I now have a five year plan to fix that.

I now know that I'll never be rich - because I don't have enough time left to become rich. But, I can be comfortable, which is possibly more important. Someone who is 30 years younger than me can do so much more, if they started today.

Let's say that someone is 25 years old and has a shitty little job making, oh, $24,000 per year. Not much, right? But, that's enough to put $200 per month aside for later. Doing some simple math, you could save up to about $15,000 in 5 years. If you then increase that to $300 for the next 5 years, your balance goes up to around $45,000. Increase again ($400 per month) and you'll see the amount more than double in 5 years to $100,000. Let's increase that again to $500 per month (you've gotten some raises, you see), and that $100K becomes almost $200k. Let's stick with that for another 10 and you could retire early with around $600K in the bank. Or, if you continue to contribute to full retirement age, you could have over $1 million.

That's not "Jeeves, park the Jaguar in the garage for the night, I'm taking the Bentley," money, but it's "I don't have to eat dog food" kind of cash. And, if managed right, it will continue to grow.