(11-30-2018 12:39 PM)bullet Wrote: Major employers are pushing older employees out earlier and earlier. If you work for a big company, its best to have ideas of what to do if your job gets eliminated at age 55. Its a combination of trying to save money on salaries and a belief that experience doesn't matter and old people are too set in their ways.
Not really. It's mostly an effort to clear men who are hitting their high liability age with regards to the corporate health care plan. The side benefit is that they also clean up their total salary outlays by replacing 50+ executives with younger people at lower pay grades. I didn't see much of the bias against "being set in your ways" mostly because they knew that experience did matter. Rather what I saw were men who were unwilling to make that last transfer of their career and who were settled in their community life.
Social Security isn't much of an income in retirement. But, it works fine for those whose homes are paid off, have no debt, and who don't feel the need to keep the swankiest car, and who have some modicum of savings sufficient to overcome a crises or two.
The biggest nightmare waiting to happen for some of my contemporaries is that they only invested in 401K's which they cannot effectively manage since most are tied up with their employers, they've bought into feeling that their kids need the newest and best of everything in order to stay in the right social circles, they've bought into that line of thinking for their social activities, and as the commercial says they are in debt up to their eyeballs.
The 401K is the problem because it is totally market dependent and virtually none of my buds have a safety net investment to offset the potential of a market retraction. They say they want to work into their 70's but most of them had to and I might add in order to keep their jobs (self employed excluded) they had to take "advisory" positions which pay them less for their years of experience.
I bet 75% of them are what I call debt zombies. They should be gardening, taking trips to see the grandkids, and enjoying the few years they have left. But instead, they drag themselves out of bed early, stay gone all day, and collapse when they get home. They aren't happy, they still don't have time for family, and the lifestyle at that age is literally killing them.
Say what you want but in 2016 the average life expectancy of an American male was 67 years. Now that figure is not adjusted for ethnicity that's the cumulative American male. The average life expectancy for the cumulative American female is 71.1 years.
Then check the last census results for the working ages within the population. 27% were under working age (18) and only 13.1% were retired or past 65. If 60% can't keep SSI going for 13.1% then something is terribly screwed up, especially if the average age of retirees is 63 and the average age of their deaths is 67 for men and 71 for women. (This is down due to homicides, drug related deaths, accidents, and other such factors which all play into the mortality rate.)
The whole big push on SSI is a total red herring seeking to lay blame for government deficits that are really being accrued elsewhere in the Federal Budget.