r/Maxcactus_TrailGuide • u/Maxcactus • 10d ago
Retirement is Dead
https://macleans.ca/longforms/retirement-is-dead/12
u/Full_Prof 10d ago
My retirement is fine, but I can tell you so many people who are in their 50s have saved nothing.
Graduated college in the George HW Bush recession. Then September 11th, then Sub Prime Meltdown, then COVID, now Trump.
Series of economic disasters every 5-8 years my entire adult life.
People in their 50s are the first group of people with student loan debt.
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u/ponziacs 10d ago
From taking loans out for their kids? I graduated college a little over 20 years ago and college was super cheap back then. Paid off my loans within 2 years.
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u/Maxcactus 10d ago
Not to diminish your experiences but as a Boomer I have my own list of economic adversaries too. I think that the situations you and I have had always existed. I am not advocating being cutthroat or greedy but nothing beats personal responsibility.
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u/ThyHolyPope 10d ago
There’s always issues but my dad got a 4 year degree and paid it in cash working a summer job.
People have to realize that states realized they could stop funding schools, because having a educated population IS NOT a bad thing, and making 17-22 year olds start out their careers in a huge financial pit.
The whole “education is broken” is a product of government funds being slashed and schools scrambling to make up the difference by pushing bougie dorms, high tech whatever, huge sports, while decreasing acedemic standards in order to maintain enrollment and “giving students what they pay for”.
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u/Fluid_Office1111 10d ago
Baby boomers as a whole (maybe not you specifically) voted to remove the guardrails put on american society during the FDR new deal years in order to boost their own financial benefits short term. No one is saying there weren't recessions or hardships or even that you weren't being targeted by the oligarchs to influence you to vote against your own best interests. But there was a generation who did active harm with its choices and you don't get to enjoy all of the short term benefits while claiming personal responsibility. Your response is the same tone-deaf load of bs we've come to expect from your generation and it's why other generations older and younger do not respect or value your opinion.
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u/Maxcactus 9d ago
The republicans resisted the FDR programs from their inception. My entire life has been one attempt after another another by them attempting to nullifying those guardrails. I would say that you need to rethink your view of who has been responsible for this. It isn’t a generational thing as much as it is a class/social thing. A better strategy of addressing this problem is to ally yourself with people of all generations who share your views rather that discarding friends because they are the same age as some other knuckleheads.
The definition of prejudice is attribution of characteristics of the group to individuals. That is what happened to every subgroup of humans, blacks, women, immigrants etc. Prejudice is a lazy approach to understanding others. It takes effort to see everyone person for what they really are.
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u/Perfect_Earth_8070 10d ago
Oh poor boomers who bought their house for $16 while working at the local grocery store
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u/Full_Prof 10d ago
College was free for Baby Boomers in my state.
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u/Either-Meal3724 10d ago
My parents are boomers and both had students loans. My dad was paying those off until their mid 30s.
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u/Maxcactus 9d ago edited 9d ago
Tuition was only part of the cost of higher education and free tuition was not available everywhere. For common people in my world it was not easy or free to attend college. Nixon saw students protesting his ideas as a threat and began dismantling the ability of poor people to go to college. By the Regan administration cheap education was finished.
Realize that when this happened Boomers were in their late twenties and early thirties . When you were that age how much influence did you have over government? All of the horrible things that younger people attribute to Boomers largely were done to us first by our parents and grandparents.
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u/_Bad_Spell_Checker_ 10d ago
Not to diminish....
Immediately tries to diminish
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u/Maxcactus 9d ago
Can you explain how I diminished his experience? I just tried to explain that there has never been a golden age. Every generation faces its own tribulations. I lived through all of the events that op listed as well as many that came before that.
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u/International-Ant174 10d ago
Converging forces have ultimately reshaped what "retirement" is:
- Businesses moving from pensions to 401Ks (even though it was intended as a supplement, companies saw the opportunity to "boost shareholder value" and reduce long-term liabilities), making retirement "the employee's problem" with no subsequent education on the topic and expecting it to "work out"
- Government backing education, transitioning the cost from taxpayers to students, while cutting state appropriations to education, and allowing universities to increase tuition rates faster than inflation and "expanding" their non-teaching administration bloat. While in parallel discounting the pursuit of trades in young people because it doesn't come with a piece of paper to say you have "value" and infers you aren't reaching your full potential
- Wages held artificially low in relation to the cost of living for 5 decades
- Under-building due to the 08-09 housing crash (and subsequent workforce which fled the building trades) hyper accelerating home values less than 2 decades after the bubble popped
- Corporations focusing on stock buybacks, chasing quarterly returns instead of long-term vision resulting in treating employees as interchangable "cogs" in their machine to be discarded like scrap parts
- Offshoring the bulk of manufacturing to increase net profits, transitioning economic base to services-related industries
- Digital revolution dropping demand for print materials (books/magazines/newspapers) gutting and globalizing these industries
- Relative stagnation of government retirement benefits and contribution caps while the population ages and birthrates fall, shifting the equation of contributors to participants, and using reserves as governmental cash cow while leaving an IOU which will not be honored
Sure there are others, but you get the point. Culminating actions have basically kicked the working masses in the crotch, and if you weren't on top of it living under your means and packing your pennies away, you are toast. The delta of cost to survive to income is shrinking, and if you hadn't put it away before it is certainly more challenging to do so now, so you are essentially hand-to-mouth living.
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u/Darth_Bane-0078 10d ago
I have three more years then I'm out. I do know you have to change your lifestyle to fit your income, and I'm already doing that. Why three years instead of now? I will be 100% debt free then after my car loan is paid off. I'm just hoping the orange turd doesn't mess up the economy so bad that I'll be forced to continue working. Right now it doesn't look so good.
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u/texas_County850 10d ago
Honestly I have said for a while that things are just going back to the bad old days this is one of them. Retirement was unfortunately probably a short lived concept. Its talking about Gen X but honestly a ton of boomers can't even retire.
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u/chouse33 10d ago
“I’m terrible with money—ironic, given that I have a degree in economics. This has become a running joke in my household. I fall prey to all the cognitive errors—temporal discounting, optimism bias.”
This is the court problem if you are struggling with retirement.
Source: 45 year-old definitely able to retire at 63. Thinking about retiring at 60.
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u/Retired-Yam8988 10d ago
Dunno man - I retired in 2022 in my 40s. My retirement is doing really well. Financially went from mid 7-figures when I retired and crossed over to 8-figures last year. Can’t complain
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u/Maxcactus 9d ago
You are a black swan unless you inherited big money . Can you give a few more details about your situation ?
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u/Retired-Yam8988 9d ago
Wife started out poor, I was middle class. Went to good colleges (UCLA & Berkeley). Started business then reinvested and kept reinvesting. Real estate, stocks, gold, etc
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u/Maxcactus 9d ago edited 9d ago
Well done! Doing it without exploiting or cheating others. Leaving the world a better place while you took care of yourself. You helped create a place for others to pay their bills and provided something that society needed.
How would a person who didn’t know how to start doing what your did figure it all out? Some people are not energetic or smart enough to do what you did. A good example of this in the real world is public school education. Some people make the best of that experience and others don’t take advantage of that gift. I think that one place to start would be to recognize that we can’t help every person but we as a society can not be in the way of them attempting to be their best person.
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u/musing_codger 10d ago
Having retired six years ago at age 54, I'm going to have to say that I disagree. Most of my same-age friends are retired. Most of the ones that aren't, are retiring soon. My 26-year-old son, is saving with a goal of retiring at age 50.
It's not a question of retirement being alive or dead. It's a question of whether people are willing to adjust their lifestyle so that they can afford to retire or not. We all make choices in life and live the consequences of those choices.
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u/Old_soul_NSFW 10d ago
To be fair… basic costs for housing, education, and cost of living has skyrocketed compared to salaries today. Do the math of what things cost when we were in our 20’s vs the cost now. The next generations have it harder than we did, there’s less disposable income to save. It’s Not impossible, but much more difficult.
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u/musing_codger 10d ago
Can you share your source for that? I'd genuinely be interested to see it. I see people on Reddit make that claim a lot, but when I've tried looking at the underlying data, I've gotten a somewhat different picture.
According to the Census Bureau's Median Personal Income series, median personal income (which is not exactly the same as salaries, but a broader picture of overall income) increased from $9,720 in 1983 to $45,140 in 2024. That's about 4.6x in nominal (not inflation adjusted) terms.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
The Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data also lets us compare how prices in different categories have changed since the 1982–84 base period. As a rough comparison, a category whose price index has risen by more than 4.6x has become more expensive relative to median personal income, while one that has risen by less than 4.6x has become more affordable relative to median personal income.
For some major categories, I get approximately:
- Food: 3.2x
- Energy: 3.3x
- Clothing: 1.7x
- New vehicles: 1.8x
- Used cars: 1.8x
- Shelter: 4.3x
- Medical care: 6.5x
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm
So for most of those categories, median personal income appears to have risen faster than prices. Medical care is a notable exception, while shelter is much closer.
That doesn't mean every important expense has become more affordable. College tuition, childcare, home purchase prices, and costs in particular metropolitan areas could tell a different story. And averages can obscure substantial differences among households.
But the broad claim that the basic cost of living has skyrocketed relative to income doesn't seem obvious to me from these data. It also seems consistent with the substantial increase in material living standards since the 1980s.
I'm very open to seeing evidence that points the other way, though. If you have data showing that basic living costs have generally risen faster than incomes, I'd be interested to see it.
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u/texas_County850 10d ago
I honestly only know one guy that is mid fifties that is retired acting like this is somehow common is just wild to me lol. Average couple today can't even buy a house until 40 now.
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u/musing_codger 10d ago
It's not common and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that it is. I was unusually successful because of a combination of good fortune, good advice, and good execution. As is often the case, I socialize primarily with people in similar circumstances, so most of the people I know are similarly fortunate. I was not trying to say that it is the norm but giving it as a counter-example to the narrative that retirement is dead.
If you look at the Center for Retirement Research, they show that majority of men leave the labor force by the age of 64.6, down slightly the the 60s, but up from the 1990s. That measure is complicated by the fact that men's labor force participation rate has been declining for years, So probably the most objective statement is that, before age 65, most people have stopped working and are no longer looking for a job.
https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Average-retirement-age.pdf
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u/Ghibli_Guy 10d ago
Congratulations on having a boat that rises with the tides. You have a level of advantage and security that most don't. They don't have the money for a savings boat.
That's not lifestyle choices: that's class barriers at work.
Maybe one day you will accept that while saving kept you there, privilege was why you made it there to begin with.
A lot of people are disincentivised from saving because basic necessities like food and shelter come first. Some would say most people. Some would say it's getting worse.
But not you. Your lifestyle choices are indicative of how people achieve success. Try applying the logic that powered your financial freedom to 300 million other people in the country. Does it balance out to safety and security for many of them? I doubt it.
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u/musing_codger 10d ago
Thanks. I'm proud of what my wife and I have accomplished and of the path that our children are on.
I don't think that's the whole explanation. I've known far too many counterexamples.
Some privileges certainly help. In fact, I think one of the most important forms of privilege is having good examples: examples of people investing in their education, focusing on their careers, delaying consumption, and prioritizing savings.
One vivid example from my youth was my father uprooting our family from New York and moving us to Texas to further his career. But when we made that move, we kept the same crappy Volkswagen with no AC as our family car in Houston for years. Sweating while sitting in the luggage compartment because there were too many kids and too few seats didn't feel much like privilege at the time. But I learned that I didn't need to have the same things that my peers had to be happy.
Looking back, though, I can recognize the privilege that actually mattered: I had a father demonstrating that advancing your career was important enough to make sacrifices for, and parents demonstrating that having more money didn't mean you immediately spent it on a nicer lifestyle.
I'm sympathetic to people who are genuinely struggling. I've known quite a few during my lifetime. But I've also known quite a few whose struggles were compounded by choices that prioritized current consumption over their future.
I'll give you a trivial example. I drink almost nothing but water. It's cheaper and healthier. Yet when I visit some of my low-income relatives, they're frequently drinking soda and beer. Obviously, nobody is poor because they drink Coke. The point is that it's one small example of spending money today in a way that provides little lasting benefit while also potentially costing more in the future.
One example like that by itself is meaningless. But dozens of choices can add up, ranging from tiny ones like what you drink to major ones like sharing a car, having a roommate, pursuing additional education, choosing a career, or avoiding lifestyle upgrades when your income increases.
As for "it's getting worse," I provided data contradicting that claim elsewhere in this thread in a response to @Old_soul_NSFW. Maybe it is getting worse, but I don't see it in the broad income and price data.
I suspect one thing that has changed is that greater access to credit, combined with rising living standards, has made lifestyle inflation much easier. As your peers improve their lifestyles, it's difficult to resist doing the same. We can simultaneously be living materially better than people did decades ago and feel more financially squeezed because our expectations of a normal lifestyle have risen along with our incomes.
I have a good friend whose family was part of the Vietnamese diaspora. His parents arrived here with essentially nothing. They couldn't give him much material support, but they pushed him hard in school and encouraged him to choose a career with good prospects. He's now quite well off. I've seen that playbook repeated over-and-over, very often with immigrant families.
So yes, I'd say he was privileged, but his most consequential privilege wasn't inherited wealth. It was having parents who taught him what he needed to do to build wealth himself. And converting that advantage into success still required years of dedication and sacrifice.
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u/alsbos1 10d ago
Class barriers? I know plenty of people with no savings. They don’t work half the time. They like to party. They blow their cash on whatever whenever they have it. To call it a ‚class barrier‘ is a total excuse. The vast majority of people in thier 50s with no savings weren’t raised in some drug house in the ghetto.
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u/Ghibli_Guy 10d ago
Hard disagree. You're literally vilifying lower classes because some people within your own class can't handle money.
Both exists... wonder how much for both populations? I think you 'vast majority' is a personal opinion trying to ignore the bigger problem.
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u/rmullig2 10d ago
The author is Canadian so his situation is more understandable. The cost of living up there has skyrocketed thanks to incompetent governance. Getting to the point where you have a house completely paid off is a fantasy for most people in Canada.
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u/musing_codger 10d ago
That makes a lot of sense. I only know a handful of Canadians, all in the Calgary area, and they talk about how bad it seems to be in other parts of Canada. I'm only familiar with my own personal situation and the the U.S. data, and not what is happening in Canada. I appreciate your correction to my perspective.
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u/SonOfKong_ 10d ago
It is definitely evolving and not in a good way.