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How long will baby boomers keep working? For some, the answer is forever.
To grossly paraphrase Kim Kardashian, nobody stops working anymore. Just look at who’s in the running for the top job in the nation: a 77-year-old against an 81-year-old, both vying to keep working for another four years. Yet they’re in lockstep with a national trend — older Americans are working longer, into their 60s and even their 70s and beyond. Among Americans 65 and older, 19 percent were still working last year, which is almost a twofold increase from the late 1980s.
Last year, the average retirement age was 62, according to a Gallup survey, up from 59 in the early 2000s. Older people aren’t just delaying retirement, but working longer hours: On average, this group’s annual work hours are almost 30 percent higher than they were in 1987.
The question of why is hard to answer. People keep working because they want to and because they have to, and sometimes a mix of both. “You can think of it as both a reflection of empowered preferences to go work more and longer — versus curtailed savings that force you into the labor force. They’re both happening,” says economist Kathryn Edwards.
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Been voting R for years, watching them dismantle unions, pensions, and the social safety net yet now wonder why they can’t afford to retire.
Like the people in Ohio who started screaming “WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT” when the train derailed. Well, actually, you got precisely what you asked for. Why are you surprised?
Like the people in Ohio who started screaming “WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT” when the train derailed.
Aren’t you glad that Ronald Reagan got government off your back, Ohio?
So are you from Minnesota, West Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, or Hawaii? Or are you from a state that voted for Reagan twice too. Minnesota gets a full pass as the only state to not go to him in 84.
Ohio was a swing state until recently. Like Obama won us twice recently.
Ohio? The state that recently went red after decades as one of the most important swing states? The one that is so gerrymandered we barely have a vote and yet still manage to have union protections that are damn near unique in the country?
We weren’t conservative when the railroad was deregulated.
Even when they vote D they vote for the most procorporate piece of shit on the primary ballot.
Because they screwed up everything for everyone in the pursuit of short term gains, not realizing that everyone included themselves?
Thanks conservatives! By the way, the overwhelming majority of you were never really rich, and you will never be rich: You have been used to help make the already obscenely wealthy even wealthier at great expense to you, your loved ones, and your fellow citizens.
My parents were once low-end millionaires. Like with house, stock options, and such, they probably just punctured 1mill. They flat out have wasted MILLIONS of dollars in their lives, my father was successful and well compensated. They never really had a plan for retirement, never invested in their children. It was all them acquiring toys, going on trips, trading in their car for a new one the 30th (not joking, they have counted like 50 cars between them but only 2 - 3 at a time), getting a boat/camper/etc. It is ridiculous. They could have made our lives so much better and prepared for themselves.
Yeah, my father was the same, though not quite as wealthy. Completely selfish and did nothing for his children. A horrible man, actually.
Growing up for me was pretty much “Fuck you for being born now get a job when I was your age I pumped gas part time and paid for school so you can too”.
My gandfather, born in 1928, worked every day until lung cancer stopped him at 85.
My boomer father retired at 65 and died of a massive heart attack a few months later.
At 54, I’ve survived 2 heart attacks and am not expecting to reach retirement age.
The really unfortunate thing about the anonymity about a place like Lemmy is that those of us who have grown to enjoy talking to you and seeing what you have to say will never know if you stop posting because the worst has happened or if you just decided to not post on Lemmy anymore.
True of most, if not all of us. If I died tomorrow, none of you would know it.
This is true, but my apps are logged in for me. I’m sure my family would post something. :)
As morbid as it sounds, maybe there’s a genuine need for an internet “dead man switch” as a service? Something that blasts some stuff to your socials, emails your contacts, etc, when you fail to show up after a month or so.
It wouldn’t be the worst idea.
Dang. Now I’m going to worry about you dying if I don’t see you submitting things.
Maybe I’m already dead.
That’s a sad statement… Are there no possible changes that could give you a longer life expectancy? I’m in my early forties and I’m starting to have a different fear: my dad’s got advanced Parkinson’s and it’s a terrifying battle…
Watched the Netflix documentary on “blue zones” recently - not perfect, but a pretty compelling case for (at least for me) at least some dietary changes, and increasing substantially my daily walks… :-/
So I was diagnosed with 3 constrictions in my heart probably a decade or so ago. 1st heart attack resulted in a bypass for one of them. 2nd heart attack has a stent in the 2nd.
The 3rd is in a weird place and not easily fixed.
My retirement plan is to die in the AI-Climate wars, hungry and thirsty.
Yeah but think of all that income the sacrifices of you and your loved ones made for the company!
Which is why they keep voting for people to raise the retirement age, but only for people born after them.
All that lead poisoning compounds with the natural effects of aging, they both hurt the same parts of our brains.
So we get these spiteful assholes with zero empathy and poor critical thinking skills. And because their own actions and votes over the last 50 years fucked everything up for them, they want to fuck up everyone else’s lives.
The only way their fucked up brains can be happy. Is making others just as miserable.
They’re actively stopping younger generations from helping them, because it would help the younger generations more.
It’s frustrating how easy boomers had it yet how many still seemed to screw up their finances. I am significantly more financially literate than many I know yet I will never see the stupid returns they did on things.
The poverty trap absolutely existed throughout the post world war 2 era. As an example, many of the tools for good financial health were denied to minorities. And anyone who ended up in poverty coded areas got the same treatment because the racism was built into the infrastructure and services. For example conservatives used the myth of the black welfare queen driving a Cadillac to drive demand on welfare restrictions. But those restrictions applied to anyone in the system.
But even with all of that there’s still many people who thought you put your 40 in and the pension/social security takes care of you. Only to have half of that yanked out from under them. There’s still medical debt, and scams, and natural disasters, and just tons of ways to lose your wealth.
There’s an entire group of boomers that never had a chance.
It could also be a cultural thing with this particular cohort. They were the ones who voted for Reagan (and Nixon if they are a bit older). The younger ones were the original Yuppies. Later in the 80s, as they started accumulating more stuff, Michael Douglas reassured them that “Greed is Good”. They idolized Alex P. Keaton.
It’s very possible that they don’t see their own self worth if they are not getting paid for something.
Don’t forget good old fashioned Christian guilt, idle hands and all that
I have seen this too. It’s how much money you earn that defines your worth. If you are making the world a better place, you’re not a good person. You should, instead, be doing sales or something and making more money.
My worst nightmare is working until death. What an absolute waste of the only time we have on this earth.
Same. The thought alone saddens and pisses me off so much. Life has so much more potential than this.
My worst nightmare is not engaging my mind and turning into a reactive mush pile that yells at a TV screen out of manipulated fear. I see what’s happened to my mother and how my father has maintained his sanity.
I plan to “work” until I can’t. However, at some point, I plan on retiring from my career and getting into re-wilding and offering my services and knowledge at a steeply discounted rate so I can work with and train people in a field our planet needs. Hopefully doing some field work and manual labor alongside younger people that can out pace me and teach me their knowledge & skills about the natural world that I didn’t learn. That, or starting some sort of no-til organic community farm/ranch or something else that engages my brain & body that provides greenspace.
I don’t want to take jobs away from those that need them and I figure this will be a good way to avoid my worst fears, keeping positions open for those that need them, and to pass my knowledge along to the specialists that are growing in the knowledge space I excelled in in my carerr (software data science & engineering).
That’s a wonderful plan, but not what’s being discussed.
People are being forced to work until death, just to survive.
It sounds like you enjoy teaching others, which is awesome, but you aren’t at risk of dying hungry on the streets if you stop.
It’s one of my biggest fears as well, but sadly, I’ve accepted that it will most likely be my fate to work until long after my body is destroyed just so I can afford to sleep and eat
I read elsewhere that Boomers are the generation entering the workforce in highest numbers. I suspect that part of the problem is that pensions were a thing when Boomers were young, they only went away in the late 80s to mid 90s. I have to imagine that millions never adjusted for this fact and didn’t actually work on putting away a retirement savings. Now you have millions of people who suddenly realize that they will live 20 years past their savings and have no choice but to do something about it.
Older genX also hasn’t done well either. The personal finance sub was full of people concerned about older parents and relatives not having savings or living ability when shit hits the fan and questioning how to manage their own families + the elders.
I’ve heard that. And to make it worse, some states have familiar responsibility laws. You can actually be taken to court and forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars on your parents.
That’s why it’s a good idea to start giving your parents cartons of cigarettes for Xmas now. Much cheaper in the long run.
Nothing cheap about cigarettes.
Yeah, alcohol is the way to go.
Takes a lot of smokes to equal a camper.
Wtf what if I hate them. Do I just take them upstate and leave them on a Farm? “Sorry officer no idea what happened to him”
“The question of why is hard to answer.”
There is a federal pension plan.
Only federal employees are allowed to take it.
If it was for everyone, we would not have people forced to work until they die.
Only federal employees take it because only federal employees pay into it from their salary, and have negotiated contributions from their employer.
Make all employees and employers pay into it, and then everyone can participate.
Isn’t this what social security literally is?
That’s called ‘taxes.’
UBI.
We already have the answer. We just keep pretending it’s unproven after 5 decades of successful experiments.
Isn’t requirement age 66?
You’re not required to stop working though.
Yes.
I’m on the Boomer/Gen X border. I’m still working because I want to but in a different career (college professor) than before, one with less stress and a lower salary. I have plenty of hobbies but don’t derive the same satisfaction from them as I do from work. I just don’t expect that to be the case forever, though.
Great book coming out in a few days on the subject, and that there are choices where it’s not too late. When business news like MarketWatch are advertising the need for change in retirement scheme it may have enough legs for actual change.
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Extracting wealth while capable is a smart tactic as long as they are backing it with an education. Quit being a judgmental dick.
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What’s a decent job?
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Does your family have to approve of your employment for you to deem it a decent job? My parents don’t get this new fangled technology nonsense that I work with. It’s just a passing phase in their minds. So is my work indecent?
Does the difficulty of a job make it decent? Does one need to suffer for their wage? Does the ease of a task make it less decent to you?
Which society are you referring to? The USA’s? Finland’s? Botswana’s?
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