Survey: 52% Won't Maintain Living Standards In Retirement

by JASmius



<snort> Optimists:

More than half the country's pre-retirement households — 52% to be exact — are at risk of being unable to maintain their current living standards when they retire, according the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

I can personally testify to that because it is already my reality, the product of having been involuntarily retired and, apparently, blackballed from my former (accounting) profession before the age of fifty.  Consequently, the retirement nest egg that would otherwise have been able to build for another decade-plus now has to tide Mrs. Hard Starboard and I over for twice as long (according to current life expectancies), which by definition has already cut our standard of living in half.  Or would have, in practical terms, if we hadn't already been living well within our existing means for years before I was so unceremoniously stripped of my ability to earn a living, which is most of why I accumulated the retirement nest egg I did while toiling away in a profession that will never make anybody rich unless you're the kind of corporatish front-runner and ass-kisser I refused to be.

See how that vicious circle closed?  Very educational, wasn't it?  Be grateful that for you, the lesson is free.  Germanically frugal as I am, it's costing me four figures each and every month.

That estimate is for 2013, based on the most recent data from the Federal Reserve. The risk index was little changed from 53% in the last survey three years ago, but well above the 31% level for 1983.

Speaks volumes about the Reagan and Obama presidencies, respectively, doesn't it?

"Our expectation was that the index would improve sharply in 2013," Alicia Munnell, the Center's director, writes on MarketWatch.

For some inexplicably delusional reason.

"It certainly felt like a better year than 2010. The stock market was up, and housing values were beginning to recover. But the ratio of wealth to income had not bounced back from the financial crisis."

That's because 2013 wasn't a better year than 2010.  Or 2009, or 2011, or 2012, or now 2014, and as many years as Barack Obama remains in power.  He can't fully "fundamentally transform" Obamerikastan until the middle class has been decimated into grinding, abject poverty, and that ideological goal cannot be attained as long as the middle class (1) still exists and (2) has the proverbial "hope of better days" ahead.  Stamping out hope, and the middle class along with it, is the change for which sixty-two million numbnuts twice voted, and it's taken six years for a bare majority of Americans to realize that for them - or all of us - hope died on November 6th, 2012, and it may never be coming back. 

Bottom line: "many Americans need to save more and/or work longer," Munnell says.

And there we have the bitterest irony of the Age Of The One: None of us would ever be able to retire if any of us were still going to be working that long.  A Rubicon after which it is crossed, Barack Obama will call a presser and triumphantly and grinningly declare that, "I have achieved full employment!"

You know that aphorism that asks, "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody his present to hear it, does it make a sound?"  We can't even have the last American pink-slipped turn the lights out on their way out of the country because (1) the power grid will have been long since shut down, (2) the company that manufactured pink slips will have been bankrupted long before as well, and (3) the fence O will have built around our borders to keep Americans in will prevent it in any case.

See what I get to spend my extended retirement years chronicling while I watch everything I ever worked for and earned slowly ebb away, until the remainder is violently plundered because I'm a white male of European descent?