Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

graphics.latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 198 posts

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#131

Post by MrMullen »

mmagin wrote: post #73
MrMullen wrote: post #46

Why don't these people move to a place where it is much cheaper to live? Costa Rica , Panama, and Mexico all come to mind. Living in the US is expensive and you can live much cheaper in other countries and have the adventure of living in another country. https://internationalliving.com/countries/costa-rica/cost-of...

Do the countries you mention want immigrants who are not likely to benefit their economy significantly and who probably don't have fluency in the local language?

Costa Rica and Panama happily take America retirees. America retirees have a guarantee income, they don't cause trouble and health care is affordable in those countries. The retirees should learn spanish but there is no reason they could not stay in their own enclaves, if they had too.

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#132

Post by maxerickson »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #33
rdlecler1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you have never been poor. Poverty and misfortune wears you down. A moment of weakness is inevitable. Moreover financial stress has shown to significantly reduce effective IQ.

Exceeding the speed limit isn't exclusive to the poor and downtrodden. Should fines for breaking the law be different for different incomes? Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"?

Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"?

This applies to basically everything that a society does. Even in small local elections you have decisions where a significant portion of the voters don't get their way, and those sorts of elections tend to be over things that people largely agree on (paving roads and plowing snow and ...).

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#133

Post by zanny »

tamana wrote: post #65
toomuchtodo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of living is not the problem (except for healthcare cost inflation, which Medicare could mitigate if someone could gut Congress of representatives preventing Medicare from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies). The problem is that everyone who collects Social Security is living longer. The question is: How can you continue to provide a high quality of life to seniors without bankrupting the country. It can…

The answer is that SS age gets pushed back along with average lifespan

Until we reverse aging this just pushes people who should have been able to retire into the labor market longer and longer while their bodies fail. That is a terrible punishment to inflict on people who expected to be able to live their later years without suffering.

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#134

Post by Lawtonfogle »

knicholes wrote: post #14
kafkaesq wrote: post #6

Westfall — 5 feet 1 tall, with a graceful dancer’s body she honed as a tap-dancing teenager — is as stubborn as she is high-spirited. But she finds herself these days in a precarious place: Her savings long gone, and having never done much long-term financial planning, Westfall left her home in California to live in an aging RV she calls Big Foot, driving from one temporary job to the next. This is just shameful. You…

I find it unfair that I'm expected to make sacrifices while I'm young to ensure a comfortable retirement and also have to pay for other's retirements because they failed to do so.

I'm okay with sharing my profits with those who have fallen on bad times through no fault of their own. Yes, I worked hard for what I have, but there are those who also worked hard for what they had, but forces beyond their control conspired against them.

But how should one feel when they are being asked to share with someone who spent everything on the present. They benefited then while you benefit now. It might be fair for me to share with them now if they could share with me their own benefits, but alas they cannot. It would be nice of me to do so anyways, but if I am forced to sacrifice reaping the benefits of saving... then why should I have ever saved to begin with?

What lesson do we want to pass on to our children? That if you plan for the future, you will be able to benefit from your savings and we will help you if you suffer bad luck, or that you should live in the now and you will be taken care of in the future even if you don't plan for it?

(And to complicate the matter, most cases are a combination of some bad choices and some bad luck.)

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#135

Post by maerF0x0 »

harrumph wrote: post #74
maerF0x0 wrote: post #3

Its tricky to feel sympathy w/ the lady in this article. She's part of the most benefitted generation, the "hardships" shown are induced by her own choices (expensive dinner, speeding ticket) and by world standards she's won the lottery to even be alive and living comfortably at her age. Alas, thats the trick with other people's stories-- difficult to project how it would feel if I were in their shoes.

The cost of going 8MPH over the speed limit being pegged at a week's income is not anything any person chooses. It is imposed, as well as being brutal. These backdoor taxes on the poor exist for only one reason: concentrations of wealth work very successfully at avoiding most taxation.

The choice to drive, the choice to speed are what I was talking about.

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#136

Post by 1024core »

vinceguidry wrote: post #102
maerF0x0 wrote: post #3

Its tricky to feel sympathy w/ the lady in this article. She's part of the most benefitted generation, the "hardships" shown are induced by her own choices (expensive dinner, speeding ticket) and by world standards she's won the lottery to even be alive and living comfortably at her age. Alas, thats the trick with other people's stories-- difficult to project how it would feel if I were in their shoes.

Every time I read stories like this, I think of dozens of things, little things, that people can do to improve their situation, one thing at a time. First off, the speeding ticket. You're in an RV, how do you go 15 over the limit? Doesn't make sense to me. You're wasting gas and painting a big red target on your back for the cops. If I were in her situation, I'd have already trained myself to keep to the speed limit…

> You're in an RV, how do you go 15 over the limit?

She was doing 43 in 35, or just 8mph over the limit. That's not impossible.

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#137

Post by hiram112 »

s_q_b wrote: post #8

Before Social Security, over 70% of seniors died in poverty. Today, that number is less than 10%. The amount of transfer payments to the elderly is so much larger than to any other age group, but unless you're willing to let those below the median income die in abject poverty, it's necessary.

There's a lot that can be done to lower the amount we spend on the elderly. Something like 50% of health care costs are spent on a small minority of the population in their last year or two of life.

Anecdotally, my grandmother who worked as a state nurse for about 15 years (which is less than I've worked now that I'm in my mid 30's) received a golden pension higher than the average salary in the US along with 100% free health insurance. In the last few years of her life she used probably a million dollars in health services - new hips, massive amounts of brand medication, ear specialists, eye specialists, and finally the last few weeks of life sustaining care in the hospital.

She did not die in poverty. In fact, for the last 30 years of her non-working life, she enjoyed better medical care and a standard of living far better than any of her grandkids who were paying for her.

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#138

Post by MrZongle2 »

maxerickson wrote: post #132
MrZongle2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exceeding the speed limit isn't exclusive to the poor and downtrodden. Should fines for breaking the law be different for different incomes? Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"?

Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"? This applies to basically everything that a society does. Even in small local elections you have decisions where a significant portion of the voters don't get their way, and those sorts of elections tend to be over things that people largely agree on (paving roads and plowing snow and ...).

This applies to basically everything that a society does.

I completely agree. Couldn't we say, then, that the current system of traffic fines (or at least the one that applies to the woman in this article) is something that has been approved by our society...rich and poor alike?

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#139

Post by bishnu »

nugget wrote: post #103
kafkaesq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has near universal basic income for older folks. No, we don't -- because the amount you get depends on how much you've earned before you're eligible. And because it isn't nearly enough to actually live on (and has stayed flat while living costs have skyrocketed). The whole point of basic income is that it's (1) unconditional and (2) pegged to actual, real basic living expenses.

The woman in the article receives $1390/month in COLA'd fixed income and free ''major medical'' health care. I can tell you from personal experience: this is ''enough to actually live on''. It's not super comfortable but then we're talking about someone who worked for decades and ended up with a net worth of zero. I'm not assigning blame I'm just restating a fact. Where my family is from in the midwest a studio apart…

She's over $50 000 in debt. You can't just discount that from this type of analysis.

Re: Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

#140

Post by Lawtonfogle »

alkonaut wrote: post #52
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But there should be no hesitation at all about applying it to seniors. As in, right now. So something like social security. Which she is already receiving.

Feels like a poor kind of "social security" to have to work if you are elderly. Either something is missing in the story, like an expensive addiction, or the minimum benefits (minimum pensions or social security) are simply too low to actually allow someone to retire on.

She was receiving $1200 per month if I remember correctly.

Most basic income schemes I see tend to offer less than that. Perhaps this shows that basic income is not the solution we sometimes treat it as.

Post reply on HN