191–200 of 316 posts
Interesting choice of words to frame the discussion. When it comes to cash, hoarding is no different than saving. But hoarding has a negative connotation and saving is positive.
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To me it seems that getting a decent return was a lot easier prior to 2007. Banks would pay interest rates of 6% or so and inflation was low. The stock market only gradually became overvalued.
Citation needed. In 2007 a 1 year cd was paying about half of that. Savings account rates have not kept up with inflation in my adult life time and I'm middle aged.
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Whatever you save with your blood, sweat and tears (if you are lucky) will be blown on medical expenses. The trick is to convert to cash (literal), then give it to your wife, convert medical expenses to debt and die.
That's not necessarily the only option. Long-term care insurance claims to address this problem. (Whether it actually does or not, I'm not qualified to answer.)
Honestly, the best argument for single payer is all of that bullshit is gone.
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Whatever you save with your blood, sweat and tears (if you are lucky) will be blown on medical expenses. The trick is to convert to cash (literal), then give it to your wife, convert medical expenses to debt and die.
Note that what you say applies mostly in developing countries and maybe the USA, not in other developed countries, as far as I can tell.
Interesting choice of words to frame the discussion. When it comes to cash, hoarding is no different than saving. But hoarding has a negative connotation and saving is positive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optionality has value but it decays over time. If you forgo consumption in favor of savings up until the very end then you haven't been better off, you've been worse off. The dead can't benefit from spending money.
The benefit of leaving my heirs a legacy far outweighs any 'benefit' I'd get from spending money needlessly...
Fear? Seems more that there are simply no safe investments with decent returns, interest rates are abysmal. I think folks are 'hoarding' simply to not run out by the time they die. Low interest rates are painted as great for the economy, but they amount to a war on savers and fixed incomes.
too frugally hmmm...spending habit established over decades is not an easy thing to change, no matter how much money one has. I am not convinced FEAR is a dominant factor. It could simply be that people think there is no need to spend much in order to have a decent life after retirement.
I think that you are right. A lot of people is arguing about investments, health care, etc. like if human beings where "Homo economicus". We are not. We are not immune to rational arguments, but we take a lot of decisions based in what we learned in our youth. "Homo economicus" was an interesting way of thinking about humans, it is no more.
There are a lot of reasons why retirees could wind up spending less money aside form 'hoarding'. For one thing, retirees often have paid off their homes, and have no mortgage payments. In addition to that, having a daily job entails a lot of soft costs that often go unnoticed - without your daily commute, your car (and tank of gas) will last a lot longer, you won't eat out for lunch as often, and even your wardrobe w…
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> They won't consume a lot of public resources (no need of school or of police repression). Either the host country's end-of-life medical care is not great by American standards (in which case what you write is true, but many Americans wouldn't care to move), or it is, and a retiree would consume considerable public resources. Unfortunately, there's no way to have it both ways.
Or the doctors and hospital admins there only make a terrific salary instead of an obscene one.
As a specific anecdote of the problem of government in healthcare: in my city a new children's hospital opened up a few years ago. The other area hospitals petitioned the government to not allow them to build the hospital until certain concessions were met. Among the concessions I'm aware of are not allowing the new hospital to own a medical chopper for 8 years. It was also not allowed to build a Level 1 trauma center. And of course that's after YEARS of not even being able to break ground while all this negotiating and concessions were being figured out. This type of interference raised the cost of healthcare for everyone in my city while likely decreasing the quality of care.