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Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

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Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#301

Post by TheCoelacanth »

drew1492 wrote: post #57
djrogers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how much they had left when they died - not what they had when they retired. So that's after the 20-30 years of living off those savings...

Spending down your principal may not be a smart idea though, especially if one is in good health. It runs the risk of them outliving their savings. Spending 4% or less of your assets annually is sustainable indefinitely, statistically speaking.

That's optimal from an individual perspective, but not necessarily from a societal perspective. The author suggests it might be better if people had insurance which paid an annuity after reaching a certain age (say 80) and then people could plan to have their savings run out at 80 instead of everyone having to plan to live until 100 with only a tiny fraction making it to that age.

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#302

Post by TheCoelacanth »

dmh2000 wrote: post #184

a table in the article implies that $300,000 nest egg makes you rich. Lol. that's not rich. that's marginal retirement.

$300k at the end of retirement not at the start. Having $300k more than you actually need isn't what I would call rich, but it's also not marginal.

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#304

Post by imgabe »

mannykannot wrote: post #272
Mouse47 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandfather had a stroke two weeks ago. It affected 3/4 of the left side of his brain, which means he couldn't speak (except for 'shit', 'god damn', 'yes/no') and couldn't swallow. Or walk, obviously. He told us repeatedly while he was alive that he didn't want to be put in a home. He wanted to cut his grass, feed the birds and be left alone - and after the stroke there was no way he could do that. We respected hi…

Basicplus appears to be responding to imgabe's second paragraph, which seems to suggest that euthanasia should be an obligation, not a choice. The legalization of euthanasia raises some moral questions with respect to coercion and self-serving misrepresentation, but in cases like your grandfather's, where a decision has been made, those concerns no longer apply.

Perhaps I was vague, but I'm not suggesting we start murdering the elderly if that's what you mean. Like everything else in the world, we have a limited amount of resources to spend on healthcare. A disproportionate amount of them are spent extending the lives of people who have already lived a long full life.

If we have to choose between helping someone who's already lived 70 years live another miserable 10 years in a hospital bed hooked up to a machine vs. helping a 30-40 year old person overcome cancer so they can go back to supporting their family, we should do the latter first. Just thinking off the top of my head maybe we could accomplish this with pricing, by making end of life care more expensive and using the cost to subsidize care for younger people.

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#305

Post by astrodust »

imgabe wrote: post #263
astrodust wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone's a fan of Logan's Run . Enjoy your manadatory execution when you're forty you old bastard.

False dichotomy. There's a pretty big difference between dying after having a stroke that leaves you permanently disabled in your 70s vs. mandatory execution of healthy 40-year-olds.

There's a huge gradient between being a vegetable and virtually dead and suffering a minor injury that leaves you permanently crippled but in a way that isn't a big deal.

Where along that spectrum will you draw the line? Is that even possible to describe without being needlessly cruel, like someone who lost the use of both hands due to a stroke is killed but someone who lost the use of one hand and one leg gets to live?

These sorts of decisions should be left in the hands of those who are most impacted by it: The person in question. I'm a supporter of more dignified end-of-life options, of people being able to opt-out of life-saving treatment if they think it's not worth the fuss or the outcome is undesirable.

There's still a huge difference between someone electing to die with dignity because their cancer treatment has a 10% chance of delaying the onset by a few years, but a 100% chance of making their life a living hell for the duration, and someone who's told they're too ill to live and has their life abruptly terminated.

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#306

Post by Consultant32452 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #268
Consultant32452 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Typically the problem is that there are too many hospital beds, not too few. I'd be interested in a citation for this because it's counter to basic economic theory of supply and demand. If the supply outpaces demand, then the price should be going down, not up.

ECO 101 fails all over the place. Here's an example. A quick good will find you many more. http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20150221/magazine/30... Medical services are a complex market. It's nonsensical to randomly apply basic economic principles without knowing what you are doing. (Good luck telling congress that) The smart thing to do is to make primary care more accessible -- you'd be able to close many ho…

I see what you mean, but the over-priced beds are just a temporary phenomenon while smaller more agile competitors are killing the large facilities. In the end, cheaper service for health care is still being found from new competitors moving into the market.

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#307

Post by cko »

cko wrote: post #274
ransom1538 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, this is probably the best hack. Put assets in some kind of trust, then have the American taxpayer pay for those expensive last years. I am a pharmacist at a long term care pharmacy, and assisted livings in my area charge up to $8000 a month. Their model seems to be 1. Drain your assets until you qualify for Medicaid, 2. Move you from your private suite to a slightly shittier shared room. I believe Medi…

EDIT: employees to give you your meds

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#308

Post by FabHK »

bradleyjg wrote: post #287
FabHK wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a collective insurance-like pension system, where the people dying early subsidise the people dying late. Then everyone just needs to save to the expected age of death, rather than the maximum age of death.

We have a fairly efficient market in (vanilla) annuities which act as a form of longevity insurance.

Annuities are great (if administered effectively, which is helped by economies of scale).

The UK has an efficient annuities market, it seems to me. My understanding was that in the US, it was to a large extent a tax-avoidance scheme, rather than a risk-mitigation mechanism, but I don't know enough about it.

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#309

Post by FabHK »

oppositelock wrote: post #123
FabHK wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say doesn't invalidate the paradox. In fact, that is precisely the paradox - that the individually responsible and rational thing (more saving in the face of uncertainty) actually accelerates the problem: an economy crashing down. Among the policy lessons would be to reduce uncertainty, and encourage consumption (in the economic sense), e.g. via government provided stabilisers (food stamps, unemployment bene…

Which eminent economists? You get two of them in a room and you get three different opinions. Here's one economics PHd wielding economist refuting the paradox of thrift. http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Murphythrift.ht... Here's an eminent one refuting it, in case the Nobel prize counts: https://mises.org/library/hayek-paradox-saving Here's my issue with Keynesians and neo-Keynesians. They have zero conce…

As I said, it's contentious, and Nobel-price-level economists are wrangling with it. That's why I'd be careful making definite statements about it casually. Note that Hayek wrote nearly a decade before Keynes, nearly a century ago, and Keynes has held up remarkably well in the last decade.

The invocation of Say's law strikes me as insufficient to strike down the paradox of thrift.

Re: Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear

#310

Post by bradleyjg »

FabHK wrote: post #308
bradleyjg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a fairly efficient market in (vanilla) annuities which act as a form of longevity insurance.

Annuities are great (if administered effectively, which is helped by economies of scale). The UK has an efficient annuities market, it seems to me. My understanding was that in the US, it was to a large extent a tax-avoidance scheme, rather than a risk-mitigation mechanism, but I don't know enough about it.

In addition to regular vanilla annuities, for which we have a pretty efficient market, we have these terrible, awful, no good products that are misleadingly called variable annuities.

The variable ones are far more profitable and so get pushed onto people while you need to go seek out someone to sell you an ordinary annuity. They have a deservedly terrible reputation which I fear has tainted the ordinary kind somewhat in the public mind.

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