451–460 of 488 posts
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Just leave the US, problem solved.
I said in another reply, that’s actually a real Plan B. We are going to stay in Costa Rica for 5 weeks starting next week and my wife and I are both learning Spanish now. I’m at around an A2 CEFR level. I’ve already researched the residency requirements for both there and Panama
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Statistics! Can a person below the median income afford to retire early? The answer is a resounding no. Can a person the top 10th percentile (upper middle class) afford to retire early? Yes.
there are still tribes in the amazon that have very little money, like the hazda. they may not call it retirement but they don't need to go to the office everyday. Serious question, what makes us so addicted and dependent to money that we can't imagine any way of life without a lot of it?
"Saving regret" ought to also refer to when you have saved too much. The shocks in that case would be things like "inflation ate away all my savings before I got to use them" or "the government confiscated my savings via wealth taxes" or just generally "the government made me spend 37% of my income on saving when I wanted to use it to raise kids."
Raising kids in a society where people hate their community and don't want to contribute through things like taxes generally isn't a society that is good for kids and their development.
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To me it sounds like a tax structured in a strange way so it doesn't obviously read as a tax. It's essentially a forced loan to the government at subpar rates. The "tax" is the delta between what the government pays out for the bonds vs what a bond of equivalent risk in the free market would have paid. The magnitude of the investment also probably makes it impractical for anyone but the very wealthy to retire before…
It’s almost impossible for an upper middle class couple to retire in the US before their 65 unless they have some type of government provided or private company provided health insurance like teachers, police officers, military etc. It’s about $25K a year for a decent plan which is doable. But you have to hope that Republicans - and yes this is a political issue - don’t successfully kill the ACA and make it impossibl…
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What about the people who do not make enough to save and all their money goes to inflated living expenses? When do they get to retire?
They get Social Security and Medicare, which while insufficient for many these days is a lot more than they would have gotten 100 years ago. No one is going to argue that the system is perfect or can't be improved. Good people get screwed over all the time and always will, the most we can try to do is minimize that population.
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This is being entirely disingenuous and is completely different to what goes on in Dubai. I have lived there and can rattle off plenty of criticisms about the country but complaining about migrant workers who clamour to work in SG is not one of them. The vast majority of Singapore migrant workforce are Malaysian citizens who live over the border in JB, you can rent a 2 bed apartment there for $300 a month and eat out…
> while commuting each day to a developed country Must be a fully automated border or something? That kind of commute would be unthinkable between e.g. Canada and the USA for most folks
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We don't have the free market. We've never had the free market. Every economy has always been under some degree of regulation and centralized control simply by virtue of existing within the context of a society and government that enforces laws and levies taxes.
The government has never controlled the means of production for the most part except for “natural monopolies” like utilities, cable etc where everyone should be served and it doesn’t make sense to try to have two companies building out infrastructure
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> while commuting each day to a developed country Must be a fully automated border or something? That kind of commute would be unthinkable between e.g. Canada and the USA for most folks
I don't know about the USA, but such an arrangement is extremely common in Europe thanks to the Schengen area.
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To me it sounds like a tax structured in a strange way so it doesn't obviously read as a tax. It's essentially a forced loan to the government at subpar rates. The "tax" is the delta between what the government pays out for the bonds vs what a bond of equivalent risk in the free market would have paid. The magnitude of the investment also probably makes it impractical for anyone but the very wealthy to retire before…
That's partially true. 37% contribution of pay, earmarked for personal welfare expenses (housing/healthcare/retirement), basically covers 60% of a typical state budget. But these funds aren't pooled like taxes. Typically the top 25% pay something like 80% of the income taxes. And the recipient of that tax revenue is typically the bottom 50% who get means-tested welfare benefits. In the Singaporean model it seems that…
Singapore's economic policies are complicated and often misdirecting. I'll break down the misconceptions. The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average decades) at rock bottom interest rates (it's pegged to the overnight rate or a min…
For those who know how to manage their money, this is absolutely a hit on potential returns. But for many who may not, this is net more than what they would have otherwise