Over on Reddit, someone asked an apparently sincere question: "If I don't start drawing my social security until I'm 70, how can I retire at 65?"
The longer question was that this person was seeing other people retire at 65 and did not understand how they were doing it.
I can't believe that level of cluelessness is actual. But maybe this person was like 20? Who knows.
The replies were all like, well, when we were in our 30s we didn't buy boats or jetskis or immense houses, we didn't spend a month in France, we put our excess money in the stockmarket and....
The notion that people exist in America who do not have "excess" money appeared nowhere in the discussion. I mean, I was making a middle-class salary (sort of) and there were many (many, many) months when we barely made it to payday. When the car broke down or someone got seriously ill, we had to put that on credit cards. "Just don't buy it if you can't afford it" did not apply.
I was only able to retire at 65 because I inherited my father's money. If I had to depend on social security, I would never have been able to retire. Never. My SS check is just a little over two thousand a month and if I had retired at 70 it would have been a little under 3000 a month. Try living on that.
I do have TIAA money, which has had from three to five percent of my salary per month added to it since I was a baby professor back in 1995. (There was frequently an option to increase that amount, sometimes by as much as five percent more, but we could never afford to do without those $$$.) TIAA pays out another couple thousand a month. We could have scraped by on that, maybe.
But we couldn't have afforded six hundred a month for Medicare Part B, D, and G on four thousand dollars a month, and frankly we're only doing as well as we are right now because (due to my father's money) I can afford to buy those. If we had to depend on Medicare A (the only one the government pays for) we'd be literally thousands of dollars in debt right now.
If you're depending solely on your social security, you can't retire. Period.
4 comments:
To be fair— many people who claim SS at 62 are often not making much more in the labor market because SS payments are progressive. Many of them are also dual eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. They’re not living well, but retirement isn’t as big a drop from working because work didn’t pay much either.
I mean, true. And also appalling.
In all of my years in public school, there were zero classes which dealt with personal finance.
After reaching adulthood the most retirement advice I got was "save money for retirement", which is only slightly useful.
I've had some kind of financial advisor for 35 years and that wasn't all that useful. Most of what I've learned about actual-retirement planning came from other people a few years older than me.
I'm convinced American society isn't geared towards helping people retire at all, ever. I'd never even heard of Medicare Part G until reading your post and I need to sign up for Medicare in 10 months. I didn't know I needed to sign up for Medicare, even if I'm employed at age 65, until a few years ago.
Same. My SIL (Toni, who married Scott) has been my main source of what to do about Medicare. Find a good insurance broker, that's my advice.
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