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More Americans are considering retirement

bloomberg.com

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Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#71

Post by itronitron »

paulpauper wrote: post #46
jerry1979 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of raw wages, it seems like overall the millenial generation does have either lower wages or higher debt than the boomer generation. Page 16 (table 2) compares wages from 1979 to 2019: the wages have gone up for college grads but have gone down for non-college grads. [0] Do note, of course, that to get those college wages, most students needed to go deeply in debt. In terms of the larger economic environment…

the college wage premimum holds even after accounting for student loan debt

True, but that doesn't account for higher risk and cost associated with finding or switching jobs as one's education and specialization increases. Higher wages but fewer opportunities.

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#72

Post by malandrew »

refurb wrote: post #39
cercatrova wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably will be, what will be (truly, materially) different?

A big part of older folks wealth is based on gains from housing. Do you think that will continue at the same pace and leave us with an inflation-adjusted doubling or tripling of home prices? Do you think migration trends into cities will continue unabated? Do you think US population growth which drives much of the housing market will continue?

I don’t see why I wouldn’t continue. Population is still steadily growing. What isn’t due to childbirth is being made up with immigration.

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#73

Post by malandrew »

sam0x17 wrote: post #20
paulpauper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Most boomers and are not rich at all. Go to your local food store and you will probably find plenty of older employees...it's not just 20-somethings who are stuck in crappy professions or in a rut. Many boomers did not save for retirement and face the same problems young people do. Also there are plenty of 20 and 30-year-olds on Reddit (such as on investing and FIRE subs) and hacker news who have sizable…

Except the vast majority of them own property that they originally purchased for under $50k which, if sold, would net them hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Many of them are on pensions (something that doesn't even exist anymore), plus they receive social security payments.

If you’re going to make those assertions, bring data. Certainly some have done well, but the assertion that most of the boomers have done well or even disproportionately well relative to other generations should be supported by data not handwaving

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#74

Post by jleyank »

jason-phillips wrote: post #64
jleyank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of 60+ senior developers sitting there occupying positions in the modern software industry? If so, they must have been damn lucky not needing to look for work after they hit 45 or so... Or, are they doing stuff "nobody in their right mind" would be interested in doing, like Cobol or Fortran?

> If so, they must have been damn lucky not needing to look for work after they hit 45 or so... Or, are they doing stuff "nobody in their right mind" would be interested in doing, like Cobol or Fortran? I think the key(s), whether you're sixteen or sixty, are natural intelligence and a great work ethic. I'm fifty and am full-stack in whatevers with a side of devops/architecting. I frequently have to walk into a room…

COBOL is what gets a lot of people paid and probably underpins far too much in govt and larger companies. It’s rumoured to be the reason IBM keeps binary compatibility in their mainframe line as “they lost the source code long ago.” Supposedly, it’s a meal ticket for mostly old fart consultants.

FORTRAN, on the other hand, is used to melt compute clusters while trying to make things go boom, or model micro- or macroscopic properties to design various things. Damned language still optimizes or runs large scale better.

As you all know, few pay to rewrite code that works well.

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#75

Post by malandrew »

Ancalagon wrote: post #26
jonas21 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By looking only at share of wealth, this is missing the fact that total wealth in the US has grown tremendously over the time period in question. In absolute terms, the inflation-adjusted amount of wealth held by the Baby Boomer and Millennial generations at similar ages is about the same. In 1989 (the first year in the Fed's data), the Baby Boomer generation held $4.33T in wealth, which would be $9.5T in today's dol…

Not saying you're wrong, just playing devil's advocate that you could say $4.3T was worth a lot more in 1989 than $7.5T in 2021 based on the outsized pace of inflation for necessary goods to continue living well and growing your personal wealth (homes, healthcare, education). It all depends how you define inflation, and arguably the method to weigh inflation currently does not reflect the growth of those previously m…

Read their comment again. The person you’re replying to adjusted for inglflation.

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#76

Post by jleyank »

paulpauper wrote: post #58
sam0x17 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the vast majority of them own property that they originally purchased for under $50k which, if sold, would net them hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Many of them are on pensions (something that doesn't even exist anymore), plus they receive social security payments.

It's not like boomers in the '70s and early '80s had $50k just lying around. Even today that is considered a sizable amount of $. Wages were pretty low back then even when adjusted for inflation. Saving $50k would have been a major challenge even for professionals back in the 80s. It's easy to see how cheap things were generations ago and think that this meant things were thus more affordable, but not necessarily so.

Fwiw, starting salary for a chemistry PhD in industry was somewhere in the 30-40k usd range in the early 80’s. There was a downturn during that time that made looking for anything but a postdoc difficult.

Edit: unless it’s changed recently, the ACS publishes their salary survey for chemists in the us yearly so you can look it up if you seek data on pharma salaries.

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#77

Post by jleyank »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #60
dougmwne wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At it's heart, FIRE is a reaction to how tenuous, unsustainable and unstable the job market has become in recent years. I don't particularly want to sit on the couch and binge Netflix, but I have such low faith that I'll be able to maintain decent employment that won't destroy my physical and mental health till the age of 67 that FIRE is a completely reasonable thing to aim for. The only unreasonable thing is the cor…

Yep, my wife and I are growing into this mindset. We both generally enjoy our careers and doing something meaningful, but we're focused on getting to the point where working is only for the "fun" things in life.

Kids or dinks? Huge difference in how the cash flows.

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#78

Post by Ancalagon »

malandrew wrote: post #75
Ancalagon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying you're wrong, just playing devil's advocate that you could say $4.3T was worth a lot more in 1989 than $7.5T in 2021 based on the outsized pace of inflation for necessary goods to continue living well and growing your personal wealth (homes, healthcare, education). It all depends how you define inflation, and arguably the method to weigh inflation currently does not reflect the growth of those previously m…

Read their comment again. The person you’re replying to adjusted for inglflation.

I read it, but I was playing devils advocate arguing the inflation number are incorrect relative to the value of the dollar 30 years ago on essential goods.

Re: More Americans are considering retirement

#80

Post by jandrewrogers »

jleyank wrote: post #55
dougmwne wrote: post #2

This sounds absolutely wonderful to me. At this point we have 2 generations straining for opportunities and advancement while the wealthiest and luckiest generation in the history of the country sits at the top of the ladder. Time for them to go enjoy their good fortune in Florida and let the rest of us crack into that turf they've been hoarding.

There are a bunch of 60+ senior developers sitting there occupying positions in the modern software industry? If so, they must have been damn lucky not needing to look for work after they hit 45 or so... Or, are they doing stuff "nobody in their right mind" would be interested in doing, like Cobol or Fortran?

That is a bizarre characterization. Many (most?) people designing and building state-of-the-art data infrastructure software, for example, are 40+ and in extremely high demand, the opposite of unhireable and they are paid silly money. This isn’t unusual.

Age has nothing to do with it, relevancy does, and some domain expertise is difficult to acquire without decades of experience, even on the bleeding edge.

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