Half of old Americans have no money saved

In my opinion, you need to learn to distinguish between income and wealth, instead of employing Liberal Göbbelizing tactics using logical fallacies to conflate and equivocate income with wealth.

No country on Earth provides free higher education to everyone just for the asking.

In other countries that have "free" (snicker) education, only the cream of the cream of the crop gets free education.

The cream of the crop gets to go to a 2-year college.

The cream gets vocational training.

The crop gets to retread tires or sling bratwurst and beer at a Becker's Imbiß.

And, you're wrong about higher education for adults. Technology begets technology and you are powerless to stop "globalization" unless you wanna start WW III, so you need to retrain adults who have lost their jobs due to certain types of events, except the idiotic Liberal one-size-fits-all policies don't work here.

You give those people, age 35 and older, who lost their jobs due to certain events no-interest or low interest student loans.

Low interest means nominal token interest, like 1%-3%, since they don't have as much time to repay the loans as traditional college students do.

You restrict those student loans to public universities only.

You make them take an aptitude test, and restrict their majors to their aptitude(s), so, no, no one will be majoring in The Culinary Preferences of Norman-French Transvestite Transgender Lesbian Midgets in 12th Century Ulster.

And, you restrict the loans to tuition only. No books, no parking fees, no Spring Breaks, and no more Christens who borrowed over $200,000 in student loans and bought herself a car, and her boyfriend a car, and rented an apartment in the most expensive suburb of Columbus, Ohio, and shopped at high end places and bought nothing that wasn't high-end and then demanded that the court order her husband to pay the student loan -- that's right, her boyfriend was not her husband.

That is a baseless assumption.

 

Saw a financial advisor today. I am in good shape after having to start over at the age of 40 and a divorce. Planning for the future is something that should be ingrained in education early.

One friend lived what he was taught. Save 10% for retirement and 10% for vacations. He has enjoyed both.

 

In my opinion you need a basic classes in economy. To call an economy theory "Liberal Göbbelizing" shows that the only arguments you have to call names - no very useful in serious discussion,

Agree, and never claimed this is the situation. You can also argue with me that in decimal system 2 + 2 = 4 and I will agree too.
There are some countries, like Denmark, where higher education is not only free - all student accepted is getting financial help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Denmark#Tuition_and_financial_aid_system

You are wrong - I never said I want to stop globalization. I only showed that Republicans support outsourcing American jobs while Democrats want to make outsourcing American jobs overseas more costly.

You want to give loans to people who lost their jobs and have family to feed? You must be Republican! How about forcing company which fire American workers and sends jobs overseas - to pay for retraining fired workers?

 

In what world? The democrats bellyached about Trump's tariff's to high heavens and suddenly have been as quiet as a Church mouse when Biden kept them in place. Bill Clinton was the one who signed NAFTA and hundreds of trade deals the incentivized moving production overseas. All the current democrats want to do is find a way to put a bigger tax on profits, not stop those profits from rolling in by the boatload.

 

In today’s world Republicans want to make outsourcing American jobs as cheap as possible and Democrats wants to make it more expansive and this is a proof:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/...ote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=2&vote=00249

I don’t remember when democrats bellyached about Trump's tariff's to high heavens, I remember when Trump lied that tariffs are paid by China and not only Democrats exposed this lie:


Who won the tariffs war?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...na-won-trump-s-good-and-easy-to-win-trade-war

Was NAFTA bad for the US? I didn’t read the NAFTA agreement, but for sure there were bad parts for us. Was this situation corrected? According to Forbes Magazine – a little:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phille...e-policy-part-1-fixing-nafta/?sh=24bb531a5a2f

 

40 is not too late to start building wealth...
as long as one is not in a huge hole of debt.

.

 

Nor is any age really. I personally think the Suze Orman types really do a disservice by painting the picture that if you don't or can't do what they say, you are hopeless and are going to die starving in the basement of a crack house. I mean my grandpa had no savings when he retired but by the time he died he had no real debts, everything paid for, and still managed to accumulate enough cash to pay for his and my grandmother's funerals, final medical bills and cash left over just off his SS check and a small monthly pension of a couple hundred a month. He would have been better off but for Carl Icahn targeting his employer leading to a chain of events that ended up with his pension having to start over later in his career, but he still did okay in the end.

 

We're just down sizing to the basement of a crack house. You've got me worried now that it might not be suitable.

 

I don't watch Orman. But I do like listening to Dave Ramsey's radio/pod cast program and listening to the diverse people who call in to tell their personal finance stories..

I basically manage my personal finances the way my smart thrifty parents did. They started out poor as church mice. My grandfather [a farmer in the Ozarks] gave my parents five raw acres of land as their wedding gift. My father dug his own water well and built his own two room rock cabin on that land. A year later my brother was born in that little rock cabin.

Fast forward over a decade to when I was born, my parents owned 60 acres in the country and a nice house in the city. Except for that first 5 acres, nothing was given to them. It was all my father's hard work, my housewife mother's thriftiness, living within their means and owning their home [the only debt they had was house and car loans.]

When my brother [who was born in that little rock cabin] wanted to go to college, my father sold several acres of land that would cover cost for the first few years... and told my brother he would have to manage it himself if he wanted to get an advanced degree. My brother worked part-time and won a science scholarship to get his PhD, received his 2 year post-doctorate at Cal-Tech and became a NASA scientist.

When my father retired early at age 62, he and my stay-at-home mother had successfully raised three children, owned a paid off farm in the country, a house in the city, a nice cushion of money in the bank... all on my father's one lower middle-class salary.

.

 

A long time ago I knew someone who actually had to do that. He was pretty clean cut and wasn't a drug user at all.
But his mother had alcohol and other issues, didn't have her life together, and she had to move out of a rented home and rent a room somewhere else where her son couldn't come along. So she managed to find cheap "alternative accommodation" for him. Goes to show what type of "connections" that mom had.
I felt really bad for the kid.
(They were Native American ethnicity, by the way, living in a high cost of living region)

 

Plenty of crickets to eat. You'll be fine. Lots of protein.

 

I thought I was a spend thrift before COVID but I really have become Scrooge McDuck since covid. I have paid off all my credit cards for about the first time since I had credit and have a growing chunk of cash in saving. I hope I can be as thrifty 5 years from now. We'll see. If my car engine hadn't decided to lose a cylinder, my mortgage would be my only real debt for now (until student loan payments resume). Even the car I got in January (newer used) I am closing in on having enough in savings to pay off the remaining balance if need be...

 

Good for you! Keep it up!

Live below your means, pay off your debt and save money.

Your future self will thank you !!

.

 

Yes it's a problem. Do you like the idea of the minimum wage being a "living wage"?

 

That would be another separate complicated discussion, for another thread.
The first step is to recognise that there is a problem that exists, for the majority to come to a consensus that such a problem even exists. The second step, after that, is to try to come up with solutions to address the problem. It's hard to seriously discuss solutions with people when so many people are not even onboard with the idea that the problem the solution is seeking to address even exists in the first place.

 

Does the OP claim include assets? In the UK many people use their homes as their future investment (Partly because they don't trust pension companies) Down sizing is a common parlance here now.
Just wondered if its the same over there.

 

That is a fair point. I do not think the claim in the OP article included home assets.

But people should not be expected to treat their home they live in like a cash machine at the bank.

I shouldn't even have to waste the time explaining this but the difference is obvious. If you take money out of your home, that money has to be repaid at some point. Unless of course you will be losing your home, and presumably be put in a very bad situation, possibly even wind up homeless.

Of course, we cannot compare those who rent to those who own a home but have no other savings.
But that type of thing does not factor into a simple metric that people can so easily look at.

 

Yet the answer IS easy. Start your life as you mean to continue - from a baseline of assumed future disaster. IOW, start planning for a time when you can no longer work (at whatever age that is), on day one of your first job. Live accordingly, all your days. Make good choices, stay married, don't have more kids than you can afford with only one parent working, and be deliberately frugal always.

It's the failure to do the above which is causing this problem. It's not 'they system'.

 

No, we can do more. We can ensure those resources are ONLY going to those who've fallen into the cracks via 'necessity'.

 

1) You do not have to do that today, either. Constantly needing 'brand new' is a First World problem.

2) Rent? Very few people rented in our parents/grandparents' day. The majority of working class people owned their home.

3) Economies wax and wane. The survivor is the person who adapts to those changes.

 

Over 60 years (roughly an adult lifespan), that apartment will cost you $900,000, IF the rent stays at $1250 a month - which of course it wouldn't. That's already $200,000 more than the three bedroom house, and you will have nothing to show for it at the end of that time - and you will of course have to keep paying that rent til the day you die. Further, a three bedroom house offers the option of sharing resources - which financially benefits the homeowner, and probably also those they share with.

This here is why people are in the poop. They make terrible decisions.

 

That's not what downsizing means! It means SELLING your high value property to buy a low value property, and living off the difference. It's a very common practice, and a very sensible one - if you're not in a position to buy a cheaper place with cash, and rent out the high value place as a form of income.

 

because in their day, min wage was rising with inflation, it kept up

 

Massive economics fail on a variety of levels.

First, you have either demonstrated that you are incapable of distinguishing between Demand-pull Inflation, Cost-push Inflation, Wage Inflation, and Monetary Inflation, or you can make those distinctions, but you're attempting to deceive people.

Second, you have either failed or refused to accept, or disingenuously ignored the fact that when your government reports "Inflation" it is reporting the aggregate of Demand-pull Inflation, Cost-push Inflation, Wage Inflation and Monetary Inflation. In other words, when it is reported that "Inflation" increased 2.5% in August, that is, for example:

0.2% Monetary Inflation + 0.1% Cost-push Inflation + 2.3% Demand-pull Inflation = 2.5% "Inflation"

Note that Wage Inflation was omitted because it has only occurred twice in US history and under extraordinary circumstances, so it is a phenomenon that is unlikely to occur country-wide ever again, although it could occur at a local or regional level.

Third, the federal minimum wage was never intended to keep pace with "Inflation" and it most certainly was not intended to keep pace with "Demand-pull" Inflation. Claims to the contrary are pure propaganda, as Göbbelists cherry-pick a single month, namely, February 1968, and hold it out as the be-all end-all. The federal minimum wage has been in effect for, this is September, so 1,003 months and to cherry-pick a single month out of that is, well, a wonderful Göbbelism. I won't even get into the fact that agricultural workers, who comprised 90% of your work force in 1938, weren't even allowed to have the minimum wage until 1964.

Fourth, Demand-pull Inflation is the primary driver of "Inflation" and neither your Congress nor the Federal Reserve have any control over it and are not the cause of it.

Fifth, Demand-pull Inflation is an inviolable Law of Economics. It's function is to prevent the over-use, over-consumption or depletion of goods, services and resources.

Sixth, since Demand-pull Inflation is 100% caused by consumerism, there are only three options:

1) Stop consuming like the locust-like Borg that you are; and/or
2) Seek substitutes for the affected goods, services or resources; and/or
3) Increase the Supply of the affected goods, services or resources.

Seventh, putting it all together, increasing wages to match Demand-pull Inflation is a stupid, ineffective, destructive policy, since that only serves to increase Demand causing even greater shortages and driving prices higher and causing price hikes to come at faster/shorter intervals.

In other words, that's a game that neither you nor anyone else in this Universe can ever win. Not ever.

Finally, pining for the Past or waxing poetically about the Past is an automatic fail in Economics, unless the exact same identical economic conditions exist for the two periods being compared.

In your parents/grandparents day, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the whole of Africa, the whole of South America, and most of Central America were places your parents and grandparents couldn't even find on a map and none of States could even be remotely considered as a "global economic player."

In your parents/grandparents day, the US was the dominant global player and had no competition globally, except for the usual suspects like Germany, France and Italy.

I won't even get into the fact that your parents/grandparents benefited HUGELY from the murder, robbery, fraud and theft perpetrated by your government and your major corporations on hapless 3rd and 4th World States.

 

Thank you for your answer which tells me the difference between the US and the UK.
Down sizing in the UK is common practice, you sell your big family home and buy something smaller while pocketing the cash.
Equally, equity release is well established, where you get money from your homes value and they sell it after you die.

I agree this does not help the rental market, but it does effect the figures.