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Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

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Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#101

Post by wakawaka28 »

rightbyte wrote: post #97
wakawaka28 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you invest wisely, you will make money or approximately tread water even if the economy is shrinking, because businesses operating with sufficient foresight make money on average. It might not be enough to retire on. That is a separate question. If there is not enough juice in the system to fund everyone's retirement, then neither investment nor taxation can create that productivity. There might be some in-between solutions but anything that does not involve generating enough production and profit to at least fund pensions seems guaranteed to be regrettable.

Re: Taxation, if you want to make up for the shortfall in people's pensions with an additional tax, you're assuming that someone else is making enough money to make up the difference. That is not the case. People can hardly fund their own pensions to the extent recommended, much less anybody else's. Most businesses are not profitable enough to fund extra pension contributions either, and imposing that cost will stifle them.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#102

Post by matthewdgreen »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #87
matthewdgreen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But in our society that “trustworthy end-of-life management service” is going to realize that it can achieve better returns by abusing seniors’ finances (or else lookalike services will pop up.) This is the pattern with most debt management companies: they take vulnerable people and upsell them on high-interest consolidation loans. You either need strong societal values that can stop this (and a business struct…

Firstly, is that worse than letting individual scammers prey on the elderly which is what is happening now? Authorities already can't keep up with finding and prosecuting each of these individual cases. For an institution, there's at least some small hope of scrutiny and eventual accountability for crimes. Secondly, there can be institutions that are trustworthy enough. There are nationwide scale banks in the US that…

I am simply pointing out a risk. Everything you do to make things better can be corrupted, and you need to take enormous steps in advance to counteract that.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#103

Post by S_Bear »

PopAlongKid wrote: post #84
dutchbookmaker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that I know quite a few baby boomers and every single one has a pension, a 401k, maybe a roth AND gets social security and medicare. Not a single one has a college degree. All life long factory workers. Some alcoholics. All they did was show up to the factory job. I know my father hasn't read a book in at least 50 years and he might not have read any in school either. They have no real expenses either besides g…

>They have no real expenses either besides going out to eat, vacations and sports gambling. Then you don't really "know" boomers. First, there are tax expenses on the pension/401k/Soc Sec. Rent or homeowner maintenance/taxes/insurance are huge, even without a mortgage. Transportation--how do they get to the eat-out place? Medicare does not cover dental or vision, and you can usually expect several crowns/root canals…

My parents are poor boomers that could have been rich boomers if they had any self control at all. Instead they pissed away opportunities and money and now they sit and complain they don't have enough. If they had to live as I do, they'd be wealthy due to how high their earning power was in the 70s and 80s.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#104

Post by S_Bear »

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.

I don't know, my lifetime lack of affordable healthcare probably means I'll die unexpectedly before my mind goes. So that's nice.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#105

Post by jvanderbot »

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)

It won't be phone calls. We don't trust them. Our parents / grandparents did.

It might be a brain interface pushing intrusive thoughts. Our grandkids will quietly ignore these thoughts like zen masters because they recognized spam. It might be a perfect video chat from your spouse, all spoofed by AI. People will adapt but not us because it'll be new and emerging when we're already crystalized in our patterns.

We will become the vulnerable generation somehow.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#106

Post by hakfoo »

YWall39 wrote: post #15
kome wrote: post #7

i strongly oppose the American approach to pensions, which is regrettably spreading worldwide. relying on private savings to finance retirement is highly risky, and this is the crux of the article in question. pension systems should be administered through public programs, not turned into moralistic contests in which individuals are penalized if their investments fail for any reason (and it's only their fault... whil…

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.

We always forget that people actually consume services, not dollars. What if instead of a pension or Social Security delivered as a cheque, we provided a basket of highly subsidized services, essentially state-funded retirement homes?

These can be delivered on enormous government scale, potentially bringing unit costs down far below what individuals can achieve.

It could be an effective way to create an evergreen economic engine in regions that have had poor development-- dropping a community of 200,000 retirees into a Rust Belt city creates tens of thousands of infrastructure and support jobs.

Private retirement schemes could, of course, deliver additional luxuries, but it would be a huge stabilizing influence to know that nobody is going to have to try to drag themselves back into the workforce at 92 because their 401(k) ran out and they can no longer afford their rent.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#107

Post by rstuart4133 »

dachris wrote: post #41
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.

Google site:bogleheads.org elderly scams - the list goes on and on ... I've also got elderly relatives, and even with their pensions secure (European-style pension system), there's lots of people going after their money. Trying to prepare them for encounters with online and real world scammers is an ongoing process, e.g. by recounting the cases that I read in the news to foster mistrust. I've lost count how often an…

My mother bought a house in a retirement village decades ago. A few years ago she had her land line disconnected. The reason is on weekends she was getting 20 or so scam calls a day. I asked around, and everyone in the village was getting these calls. But if you went a block outside of the village it all stopped. The scammers had identified the range of phone numbers used by land lines in the village, and rang them non-stop, for months on end.

Re: Undiagnosed Cognitive Decline Eats into Seniors' Retirement Savings

#108

Post by CobaltFire »

HWR_14 wrote: post #95
datadrivenangel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Little late here, but it wasn’t really when the system was put in place.

Smoking, alcoholism, poorer medical care, etc. likely meant a much shorter lifespan.

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