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

Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 108 posts

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#91

Post by dsheets »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #83
dsheets wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how the problem is defined. Do private pensions solve the “I hope I have money in old-age” problem better in a fundamental way? No. Do they solve the “I want to pay more now to have more later” problem better? Probably in most systems. Do they solve the “what is the fair value of grandpa’s pension this month” problem? Definitely yes. If you want guarantees, the state can pull tricks to make you believe…

You're mostly right, but production can only be stored for so long. If a young farmer produces more food than they consume, they can't save that specific food to eat when they retire. Likewise, investing in machinery to increase production later only goes so far without further reinvestment in the form of maintenance.

This time displacement of value service is exactly why the industry is financialized. Of course, the financialization creates a huge moral hazard and introduces middlemen that take more than they supply in many cases but the near universal demand for wealth preservation for old age is one of the few truly noble pursuits of finance. Now if only pension systems didn’t treat their beneficiaries as contemptible idiots who cannot be allowed to manage their own finances, the rampant corruption might stop.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#92

Post by potato3732842 »

vkou wrote: post #19
YWall39 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European pensions are predominantly unfunded, and promises typically amount to 3.5 times GDP. The prevailing view among those who have looked at this is that nobody under the age of 40 will get anything close to what is promised. The only exception is Netherlands, and maybe Sweden. Leaving private pensions the only option.

Basic demographic analysis will point out that in a world with a declining and aging population, private investments are probably not going to be doing so hot, either. Wealth creation requires work. Retirees don't work, but still require a portion of the wealth that workers create to live. It doesn't matter if it's a government pension or a 401K investment, a declining worker population will mean that you'll have the…

There's no fundamental reason that we can't save for retirement in a world with a roughly static population.

What we can't do is continue to use pyramid scheme math. Everyone more or less needs to set aside their own surplus for retirement over the course of their lives. Of course this gets financialized away such that the current workers pay the current retirees and whatnot but the math still holds. Basically at scale average people's entire lives can no longer be run based on net neutral or net debt with reliance upon market growth to have surplus available to spend at the end of it. We'll have to run a surplus and set some aside.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#93

Post by foxglacier »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #76
pjc50 wrote: post #11

Under-rated problem. The decline is real, and towards the end of their life many people end up handing a power of attorney to their children or other close relative in order to run their lives. While in the meantime there are so many more internet-enabled scams.

Except increasingly many elderly don't have children / relatives to pass power of attorney to. A bit of a tangent but there is a market opening for a national scale business that is a trustworthy end of life management service for people who are going to die alone. That is going to be a huge market if demographic trends are any indication. Local attorneys / solicitors already provide such services but one has no way…

Surely the government provides that? In my country it does. Those children EPOAs can also choose to give up their responsibility and the government will appoint a professional. It's not hard to just basically avoid hemorrhaging money.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#94

Post by wakawaka28 »

rightbyte wrote: post #75
wakawaka28 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the pension a public problem won't fix it. The money has to come from somewhere.

The money can come from tax. You can balance it such that payments don't exceed tax income if balance is of concern.

No, it can't come from tax in general. The whole problem is a lack of productivity per capita. So any tax high enough to pay the shortfall will be oppressive. It's not a magic money machine that beats private investment earnings.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#95

Post by HWR_14 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #82
HWR_14 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the military could retire with a full pension after 20 years. Wouldn't that imply that they have an expected retirement of around 40 years?

People living closer to 80 than 65, assuming enlisting at ~20 and retiring at 40.

But 65 is an unrealistically low life expectancy for someone retiring from the military.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#96

Post by foxglacier »

Dig1t wrote: post #85

My prediction: scams that target this are going to massively increase. The majority of people I know are not planning on having kids. There’s a huge percentage of my generation who are the last of their family and will have nobody to manage their estate when they start declining cognitively. There’s going to be a big opportunity for scammers and even legit businesses to vacuum up all of their wealth.

Though birth rates are declining, also age of mothers having their first child is increasing so depending on your friends' ages, it might not be as bad as it seems. They may say no up to their early 30's but change their mind by their late 30's. For fathers, who are generally older, that could happen in their 40's. It did for me.

I wonder what proportion of women would naturally want to have children if there was no social or economic pressure either way. I suspect it's higher than the proportion of professional women who have children because low-income women do so at a higher rate. So we may have a generation of lonely old people sitting on a pile of money and being doubly vulnerable to scams.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#97

Post by rightbyte »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #94
rightbyte wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money can come from tax. You can balance it such that payments don't exceed tax income if balance is of concern.

No, it can't come from tax in general. The whole problem is a lack of productivity per capita. So any tax high enough to pay the shortfall will be oppressive. It's not a magic money machine that beats private investment earnings.

Your statement only makes sense if you assume growth. At steady state investments into e.g stocks and direct transfers is about the same thing.

And ye, if the economy shrinks so will pensions. But that would be the case for stock investments too.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#98

Post by david-gpu »

theamk wrote: post #88
otoburb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I've lost count how often an elderly family member (who is still sharp as a tack fortunately) told me that the "police", "your beloved niece", or "Microsoft" called them. It's very sobering when we realize that we too will one day be just like them.

Right now my default reaction to phone call from unknown number is to ignore it instead of picking it up. Hopefully this will stay with me as I get older. (my parents are notably different in this default)

Caller IDs can be easily spoofed. For example, you may receive a call from what appears to be your bank's fraud department. The person on the other side of the line may warn you of some (fake) suspicious activity and "send you" a one-time security code to verify your identity. In reality, the scammer has already gained access to your email account and is now trying to log onto your bank account, for which they need the one-time code.

There is an existing scam that goes something like that. I probably got some of the details wrong.

Bottom line: do not trust any incoming calls.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#99

Post by theamk »

david-gpu wrote: post #98
theamk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now my default reaction to phone call from unknown number is to ignore it instead of picking it up. Hopefully this will stay with me as I get older. (my parents are notably different in this default)

Caller IDs can be easily spoofed. For example, you may receive a call from what appears to be your bank's fraud department. The person on the other side of the line may warn you of some (fake) suspicious activity and "send you" a one-time security code to verify your identity. In reality, the scammer has already gained access to your email account and is now trying to log onto your bank account, for which they need t…

by "unknown numbers", I mean "not at my address book", which is pretty small. So this excludes my bank's security department - why would it be there?

And if scammer spoofs my friend's number, I should be able to recognize it's not my friend, or at least understand thar my friend won't need my bank code.

(Sadly modern phones don't make it easy to tell if the label is from your address book or from external syatem. Adding personal prefixes to end of names, like "John (from NY2020 party)" helps a lot with this.)

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#100

Post by tharkun__ »

david-gpu wrote: post #98
theamk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now my default reaction to phone call from unknown number is to ignore it instead of picking it up. Hopefully this will stay with me as I get older. (my parents are notably different in this default)

Caller IDs can be easily spoofed. For example, you may receive a call from what appears to be your bank's fraud department. The person on the other side of the line may warn you of some (fake) suspicious activity and "send you" a one-time security code to verify your identity. In reality, the scammer has already gained access to your email account and is now trying to log onto your bank account, for which they need t…

I'm like your parent commenter and I would expand on what they call "unknown number".

I don't take calls from "unknown or unexpected caller id". I had someone call me recently that I was actually expecting to call me. But their caller id had their personal name instead of the company I expected it from so I didn't take it. They can leave a message. And they did.

If "my bank" calls me but I don't expect it, the caller id can have my bank's name all it wants. They can leave a message and I'll call them back at a number I find on my card / online.

What might work is if I was expecting my bank to call me and then a scammer calls me with bank caller id. But they'd also need to know what it's about. I've also found that if you're already in contact with large companies and they call you back they very much don't user caller id at all. All their outbound calls say "unknown number". Had this while troubleshooting a phone number transfer.

If I do expect a call from an unknown number and thus take them, I still don't take phone calls with my name. I say things like "Hello". That's it. Then they many times ask "Is this so and so" without explaining who they are, which I find pretty rude and dumb. So my answer to that is: "The question is who you are and what you want". I've had many encounters where the answer from them then makes it clear they are legitimate and they probably thought I was rude but I'd rather be rude than out of my savings. Training for when I'm 80.

Post reply on HN