return2ozmaSenator Bernie Sanders Report Warns Nearly Half of Older Americans 'Have No Retirement Savings'
WarmSodaI put money into my 401k for decades only to find out I had enough to cover two months of rent. Shits fucked.
Were you putting in a nickel per paycheck? The market has killed it over the last 30 years, even with a relatively low contribution, if you contributed consistently for 30 years you should have way more than that
You go tell my 401k account that.
Either you weren’t contributing for decades, or you literally only contributed $10-$20/mo for ~30 years. If your job provides a 401k option, with tax write-offs and everything else you should have been contributing a lot more to maximize its future utility. This is assuming your employer wasn’t even matching.
Either you aren’t telling us the full details, or you haven’t fully been contributing for decades.
Third option- their rent is $50K per month.
When your bedroom is the Kapua Suite in Hawaii.
4th option: They don’t know how a 401k works.
I don’t even know what that is, man. I worked, I didn’t play with stocks.
4th option confirmed. Everyone that has a 401k in some capacity, and isn’t sure how they work, please go check your 401k elections right now. It isn’t really “playing stocks” but just putting it somewhere that isn’t cash equivalent. Otherwise your money is depreciating in value from inflation. This is your chance to learn drom WarmSoda’s mistake and hopefully will keep you from making the same mistake!
Figured. A lot of people just straight believe everything they are told and remain ignorant to how things work. If your job offers any type of benefits, fucking read all of the documentation and if you don’t understand something, ASK QUESTIONS! So many people I work with are oblivious to some benefits available to them and when I try to explain, “hey this one thing is basically free money”, they shrug it off. Whatever, your loss.
You know what you should do? Instead of heading our warnings you should attack us and tell us we’re wrong.
Look stranger, no one is saying you’re wrong to call out the problems with the economy. Everyone is on your side there.
They’re saying that you personally made a mistake, and that’s one that other people can and should avoid for themselves. If after 45 years you REALLY TRULY only have like $2k USD in your retirement account then you messed up somewhere. That’s almost impossible the way compounding interest works.
Many 401ks are not actually invested by default, it’s up to the account holder to assign those funds themselves. Guessing that’s what happened to you. Unfortunately this isn’t widely known for some reason and companies don’t bother to educate employees about it.
I too enjoy blaming the victim. Thumbs up.
JackbyDevBut how? Share some statements or something. This is wild.
I’m guessing they didn’t opt in to invest the money anywhere and let it sit in the account not building anything
I made that mistake with my HSA for a while. I didn’t realize it was like an IRA.
People can be 2 things. You can be a victim and be a lying, fucking idiot.
Glad you’re not strangely getting upset over something that has nothing to do with you
Who’s upset?
Someone that’s replying multiple times to different conversations in the same thread with name-calling and accusations would be.
I hope your life gets better.
I hope your life gets better.
Who’s name calling? Who’s replying multiple times?
You should speak with a professional therapist my man.
Is the name caller here in the room with you now?
The projection is strong here
Who’s projecting?
You’ve literally followed me around this past replying with insults. You do realize other people can see your comments, right?
lol what the hell are you trying to say? If I’m harassing you, you’re welcome to block me.
Who’s name calling? Who’s replying multiple times?
Are you 8 years old man? What the fuck
Truth hurts I guess. Poor baby.
What the fuck are you talking about? Are you just pissed and taking it out on everyone in this thread? Do you think I’m stalking you?
I mean sorry about being poor but idk what the fuck you have against me.
Do you even understand what you’re saying in a conversation? Or do you just blank out everything and think what you said before never happened?
You were certainly putting in minimums. You should be aiming for 10%-15%.
how the fuck do you set aside 15% of your paycheck to invest in something you won’t see for another third of a century? you mansa musa or something?
I am so confused here–this is what you do to prepare for the future. I guess you could blow it on women or something.
no i mean who HAS 15% of their paycheck available to spend
Most people here decided they’re better than those with less money than them and it’s fine to blame those less fortunate for “thier mistakes”. It’s pretty depressing.
The only person I see being blamed obviously fucked up their 401k, or is complaining that they added a couple hundred dollars over the course of decades and don’t have a ton of money.
It has nothing to do with them being poor, but with them fucking up and then trying to claim they are the victim.
I think you just figured out why we’re doomed. Don’t assume I have spent my life doing this, I’ve tried to stay out of poverty for most of it. Now that I can, I do. Those who have good pay right after college spend their lives paying in.
The trick is to set aside something, anything, no matter how small, to start. Then whenever you get a raise, set aside part of that so you will never have seen it or spent it.
Your most powerful weapon is not how much you can set aside now, but how early you can start. Investments over the length of your career can turn a little into a lot. Get started now, no matter how small, and use time as your greatest weapon.
Even that percentage is somewhat suspect: they used to recommend 7% as sufficient for most people. Yeah the investment world has changed but I can only guess the higher percentage is that reality happens and you’ll never achieve it perfectly. In my case, marriage, medical disasters, trying to buy a too expensive house and cars, layoffs, and divorce stole most of what had started as a promising investment
Living expenses > income. It’s not complicated math. You can’t save when you don’t have enough to live and already putting off things like car repairs, health care, hair cuts, buying clothes…
I’ve always made decent money, so admittedly it has been easy for me, but my first job, on the advice of our security officer (of all people lol) I immediately put 10% of my income into my 401k. So I went from making no money to 90% of what I had negotiated and learned to live on that. Every raise I got, I increased the amount so my raise was smaller, but my savings larger.
This is how you make it work.
Not gonna lie it sounds like you fucked up
Captain JanewayIs this a meme? Were you putting pennies into your 401k over those decades of investment?
I think everyone deserves a retirement. But aside from that, your claims are dubious at best.
Nope. Company matching and everything.
You can doubt all you want, but I’m the one sitting here without anything to show for being in the workforce my whole life.
You can doubt all you want, but I’m the one sitting here without anything to show for being in the workforce my whole life.
If you put “money in for decades” it would be almost impossible to only have enough for “two months rent” at this point. Either you’re not telling the whole story or you were literally robbed.
This still doesn’t explain the “only 2 months rent” part, but I’ve had friends who thought they were investing in a 401k but were seeing virtually no growth. Upon looking into it, they hadn’t allocated funds but were required to do so, so the money was sitting in a cash reserve pile earning the typical .02% interest.
So, this could mean losing out on 30 years of gains if it were to go on long enough. But 30 years of deposits should still have been way more than 2 months rent so dunno what to say about that part
WITH a company match? Did you have it invested in Enron or something? Even if you have zero investment gain, a company match just plain doubles your money.
I put 4%, matched by my employer, for 5 years and have 40k in there. Have you sorted out where the money all went? It’s wild that you can contribute and have nothing.
Or is your rent like 80k/month? lol
What were you invested in? An index fund? I’m doubting, but explain. Did your investments go poorly? Which investments? We’ve had a bull run for the past 20 years (when you look at general markets and not particular markets). Sucks if you invested in one company, but that’s why they say diversify…
Your retirement, still, IMO shouldn’t be predicated on you knowing how to invest. Just because you might have made bad investments, doesn’t mean you should be destitute. But I’m trying to make sense of your story.
A lot of people don’t even know they need to invest the 401k funds. So they throw money into a bucket and it only grows as much as they put in.
Yeah that’s fair, but decades of doing that pretty much guarantees you’d have more than 2 months rent. Even without investing, you should have - what - $50k? And that would be $50k/~15 years = ~$3,000 a year, which is about $150/month.
In terms of contribution amounts, that’s on the lower end no? But even still they should have something to show for it. Not 2 weeks of rent.
But all of this conjecturing is moot. I’m pretty sure the original commentor is either trolling or just angry and uninterested in providing wisdom from their mistakes. I’d love to know what they did just so I can avoid it. 乁( •_• )ㄏ
Did you fuck up and leave it all in the cash-equivalent fund instead of actually investing it?
I don’t even know what that is, man. I worked, I didn’t play with stocks.
yikes.
I don’t understand stocks
It shows.
My dude, that’s because you’re a fucking idiot
When the magic money generation machine goes wrong.