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Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

telegraph.co.uk

951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#951

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. It's most appropriately a shared investment scheme. Your pension money should not sit idle while you are building it. That money can earn a percentage in many ways and dividend reinvestment makes the fund grow massively. > Retirement depends on having young workers. Profits do. Retirement is going to happen regardless of how many young workers there are.

There is zero advantage to a society-level investment scheme and many disadvantages - mainly due to distancing "investors" from the investment which means that the goal of the system becomes profit only without any consideration for ethics.

> There is zero advantage to a society-level investment scheme and many disadvantages […]

The first advantage is they're generally a mix between tontines and annuities, which helps to mitigate longevity risk.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#952
post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain. Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic. On th…

But if you don't have kids, it's easier to save money to fund your own retirement. Kids are expensive.

> But if you don't have kids, it's easier to save money to fund your own retirement. Kids are expensive.

Empirical studies have found the opposite: if you don't have kids you tend to spend more on yourself, which means you have (on average) a higher life-style during working years which you take in retirement. A higher / more lavish lifestyle means you need higher income and more savings… which many folks with a lavish lifestyle generally don't do.

People with kids spend less on themselves and so are in the habit of a less lavish life-style and so need less savings in retirement because their spending habits are lower.

As a general rule if you have kids you need 40-50% of your working-age income in retirement, but you do not have kids you need 50-60%.

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/retirement/re...

* https://archive.is/bzJMV

As for having kids and saving for retirement, there's ways to balance both:

* https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/retired-money/the-rule-of-...

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#953

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends and I would love to have 4/5 or 3/5 of working days with 4/5 or 3/5 of salary, but sadly I don't know any companies that offer that. I understand that it may be hard with meeting culture, but we can make 1 or 2 days with no meetings. I don't want to go back to the stress and uncertainty of freelancing; I want a predictable, safe income with simply scaled-back hours/pay. My salary (and my friends') in IT is…

I don't think time worked linearly correlates with profitability, especially when talking about long timeframes. E.g. working 120 hours per week for a year is extremely unlikely to result in 3x the productivity as 40 hours a week. Same with working 3/5ths as much, it's unlikely to linearly scale down to 3/5ths the value (not that "it can't ever", just not as a typical expectation). That aside, plenty of places offer…

4x10 is rough. I’ve been in positions that started with 5x8 then went to 4x10, then others 8,10, or 12 with built in overtime or comp time to get to 40hrs average.

You end up trying to cheat meals for speed eating unhealthy. High amounts of caffeine, little family time, and at least the first day off is usually wasted catching up on lost sleep. If you happen to do shift work, good luck trying to get much done as you need to shift to a different schedule to be somewhere during open hours.

We were more inefficient going from 5x8 to 4x10. Try training on little sleep before coffee kicks in. You need to re-do it later. Try sleeping after drinking coffee all day to stay awake, it’s great for your heart and blood pressure.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#954
post #942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or possibly making a trade off on any number of other areas the government spends money on, or raising taxes. A lot of heavy lifting was done here.

Yea, no shit. It’s called sarcasm.

Oh. Well, carry on then.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#955
post #615

It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system. In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future. And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing? Graeber's thesis of bull…

We need a revolution already, it's overdue. Fuck this shit.

[flagged]

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#956

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people are living longer, in better health (I think but didn’t verify with data) and entering the workforce later (due to more secondary schooling). Setting aside the issues of declining birth rate for a minute, this seems like a reasonable adjustment to the other factors?

So what do we do with all the productivity gains we’ve had?

Find jobs we like, with more flexibility and a better work-life balance.

Commercialize GLP1s.

Spend it on wars.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#957

It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system. In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future. And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing? Graeber's thesis of bull…

Yes, that's what strikes me as well. Where is the productivity gains going? Why are we still working 40 hour weeks, and possibly even for many more years? If I remember correctly, Denmark even removed a holiday recently. So work more days a year as well. That's the problem here. That a few people reap all the benefits of this, while the rest of us toil.

Never a bad time to link this:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#958

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you fix it? Note that even Scandinavian nations with very generous healthcare and childcare policies can't raise their rates, it simply seems that as people get wealthier, they have fewer kids, regardless of the status of their country's systems.

Yeah, people keep trying to find a purely economic reason for why folks are having less kids. I think I'm satisfied with the very simple reason that raising kids is hard work . Most people feel like 1 kid already gets their hands full. That's really it IMO. Whenever it was that joint families split up into disparate nuclear families, obviously the load of raising say 5 kids that was being shared among 20 people, sudd…

Best simple and obvious explanation I’ve seen for the root cause.

So … probably most straightforward solution is to update local zoning laws to encourage a more communal style of living. Not communes but more along the lines of suburbs-as-village.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#959
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That omits the essential fact that economies tend to grow - quite a bit over your lifetime. 2% compounded annual growth over 50 years will result in the economy being 2.7x its starting size.

Why? And established elsewhere is this post, people apparently don't want to live like we did 50 years ago, so economic growth has merely been translated into inflated expectations.

> economic growth has merely been translated into inflated expectations

It's been translated into far better services too.

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