To clarify, Social Security is based on your 35 highest earning years as inflation adjusted. If theoretically, your nominal salary were level through your career then the early years would do more to boost your payments than later years. New years of earings only displace earlier years if they are increasing your payment. It’s possible that after a long career that additional years of earnings will not increase your payout, but they will not decrease your payment.
Pro athletes in particular may not be doing much to improve their SS payments by finding a new career but their SS payments will not be decreased.
SS changes are needed. However, I agree that it won’t happen during Trump’s current term. Trump won’t do anything unpopular when inaction can easily be blamed on someone else.
I hear that, everybody’s situation is different. There are provisions in military and police retirement plans allowing for earlier retirement; that might be a model for the future of SS.
Usually, this type of change is phased in over a period of years which could allow those in physically stressful jobs to retrain. Not everyone will want to retrain but more and more learning new things is part of the reality of work.
I really can’t see someone who spent most of their life doing manual labor, retraining at age 67 for a white collar job so they don’t need to retire for 3 years.
I have a hard time seeing this happening. I’m constantly amazed by how many people currently in their 60s are proud to not know how to use a computer or deciding everything is too complicated to figure out.
I’ve been hearing similar stuff from teachers trying to teach high school kids. It seems to be a skill that only a limited segment of society will ever learn.
For the most part people learn things that they care about. Not everyone cares about organizing their computer files. A lot of people don’t care that much about their computers period as long as they can get to a few favorite sites.
Surprise, the people that can’t work their computers has enablers that come over and fix the problem.
To learn, the student first needs to see a benefit sufficient to motivate the effort. Also, when trying to teach your parents you should understand that they don’t see things the same way you do. They may have difficulty controlling the mouse, seeing the screen or remembering the correct order of steps to apply to make a change. On top of that the software creators feel the need to redesign the interface every few years. Who hasn’t had a piece of software remove a favorite feature with a new release?
I don’t know, but I can’t imagine not being able to figure out whatever new technology comes around in my old age, and I hope it doesn’t happen to me, should I live that long.
I remember trying to explain a computer to my grandmother some years ago. She just couldn’t understand, but maybe that was a function of her Alzheimers, which wasn’t apparent at the time. I hope I don’t have those genes…
Well, if nothing blows up I’m definitely down to <5 years of needing to work. I was 100% in equities until just a few years ago, and even then I only bought a small amount of BND, I rotated pretty hard this year and I’m up to about 17% BND. I don’t know what my goal is, but I’ll ramp that up to 25% very soon and that’s a good start. Longer term I’m probably going to aim for more like 30%, plus something like $150k in a HYSA or the like.
Does that make sense where you may be retired for 40+ years? I get keeping near term money low risk, but don’t you have a long retirement in front of you?
I’ll be 50-52 at retirement, so could be 40 years, sure.
The Trinity study used a 75/25 asset mix, but folks have also modeled 100% equities and 50/50 and everything in between. The real risk is retiring into a recession, and having some stable assets slightly improves your chances there. And honestly, the probability of ruin isn’t that much different from what I’ve seen. But mentally, I certainly feel safter knowing I’ve got a year plus of very stable assets plus several years of bonds I could lean on if I need to ride out the recession.
I don’t know, maybe I’ll stop closer to 25%, inclusive of bonds and HYSA. It’s a journey, lol.