Man I miss my retirement plan.
Oh it's not I don't have one, or am not working on one, it's just I miss the one I had before the Great Recession. The one that was soberly planned, carefully laid out, and based on what turned out to be a naive idea of some levels of market stability and predictability. Sure I had ups and downs in mind, but not the entire re-alignment of the world financial system.
You know what I'm talking about.
The whole Great Recession shattered and disrupted the retirement plans of lots of people, and for those that didn't have any they're even worse off than they were previously. This is going to be an issue, and I'd like to see more of the experts pay attention to it, let alone the various overpaid and underthinking pundits, politicians, and pop culture gurus.
Seriously, we just found the world financial system is a house of cards (each card reading "IOU"), Germany is helping to bail out Greece which owes money to German banks, credit is tight, the stock market is unpredictable and unreliable, and when people talk about a "lost decade" like Japan it starts to sound like that wouldn't be half bad.
So what's going to happen to people's retirements? Any plans out there people? Anyone?
Sometimes I hear silence. I don't think people want to talk about this. There wasn't enough good retirement planning in the US anyway in my opinion. It's hard to imagine just what to talk about now, or where to start, or what to do.
Sometimes I hear chatter, and its the stupid chatter that appears so much in Frustration Fridays. This is a chance to reform Social Security (and by reform, most people mean "do away with without thinking of repercussions")! This is a chance for people to tighten their belts and be responsible (of course this call never seems to come from the people who have pretty tight belts as it is). This is a chance to promote whatever crackpot or fossilized economic theories some airheaded personality has.
I don't hear a lot of serious solutions. Sure I see some, some of it quite good, but not enough, and certainly no big, long-term plans.
The silence and the chatter without solutions will have effects. We'll all be living it at some point.
So, what's the future of retirement and retirees? Seriously? Anyone?
– Steven Savage