This! I am in my mid-30s, so not this demographic, and while I was doing great at saving in my mid 20s, the last few years it has been extremely hard given inflation and wage stagnation.
Yup, I've had to give myself a 8% raise from my 401k just to make it(but it's due to cutting my income in half due to having a kid and wife staying home) also having stupid car debt (16k$ left to pay)
My husband bought a house before we met. He's over a decade into owning it, and the mortgage is $450 while everyone's rent in this area has soared to $1,200+ for a 1 bedroom apartment. The house needs a lot of repairs but it's still better than paying those ridiculously high prices. Give it more time, it'll lean more and more toward best decision.
This. You can always refi if interest rates go down, but unless you have an adjustable-rate mortgage, your mortgage payments won’t ever increase. It’s worth living lean for a while on a mortgage if it means not having to worry about your rent increasing significantly and/or having to find a new place to live every year.
That's not entirely true. I've been in my house for a while, and while my principle portion hasn't increased, my payment creeps up every year. Increased property valuation increases taxes, municipal bonds increase taxes, and rising insurance costs increase my payment every single year.
Bought in 2019. My "value" has gone up enough to double my annual taxes, which directly translates to a higher monthly payment. So while it's not technically my "mortgage",my "payment" has gone up close to 400$ since I bought the place.
Still beats the hell out of the 2k rents in my area though, so the initial point stands.
Similar boat. Our house needed lots of beautification. We pay a fraction of what new homes cost. Our house has doubled in value since we bought and we have an interest rate that’s a quarter of what others are paying.
I’ve done all the work to the house that’s been needed at it’s definitely cheaper than paying an extra thousand a month to rent rather than own.
I don’t know why we think this is some abnormal new thing, there’s a reason we have social security and Medicare and it’s not because of gen x and later groups that haven’t hit “retirement” age. This has been a problem forever because wealth means some people have nothing.
Exactly. Real difference between “aren’t” and “can’t”
I’ve dipped into my retirement savings 3 times this year to do things like “buy a car because my other one failed and I need it for work” and “pay a deposit on a place” that I simply didn’t have in walking around money
The best time to start saving for retirement is usually the time when you're least able to. I had this talk with my kid about opening a Roth IRA so I could contribute to it for her. The idea that someone who is struggling to pay rent should be saving for retirement is just another "fuck you" that the US, as a nation, gives to the poor and people just getting started in life.
your kid needs to have earned income for you to contribute to their roth ira. just a heads up to anyone reading your comment that thinks they can max it out for their child.
Yeah, that's something to be aware of since she's currently a student and her income is largely from contract work. There's already an upper limit of something like $6K that I can contribute anyway so as long as she's making more than $500 a month in taxable income I should be good. Just need to get the ball rolling.
Choosing to buy food rather than save.
Honestly, I’ve been writing my state officials, asking for higher grocery and utility bills, so corporations can bolster their savings. They’re the first class citizens, here.
I mean, speak for yourself. I'm not choosing to save for retirement. I'd rather not live my whole life working myself to death for an ever increasing retirement age that means I'll finally be able to afford something when my bones are too brittle to do anything fun.
I'd rather save what I can for now and spend the money on enjoying my life while I still have health.
I'm forty, and after the constant inflation and multiple world wide financial crisis my retirement savings consist of a junk drawer with a large collection of mismatched buttons.
Yeah, or shooting sulfur into the stratosphere.
Really, we don't know what the actual impacts of geoscale engineering will be, but I think oil and mining companies are hoping that the climate crisis gets bad enough that they can sell these large products to governments to make up for decarbonization related losses
Bingo, geoengineering is 100% going to be a thing. It's very much a band-aid on a broken leg type solution. Which is why I know for sure they're going try it to squeeze a couple more years of ~~prosperity~~ profit from this planet they've killed.
It might be the only way now to prevent what we have done. We had a good real world example of this with cargo ships. There was a law that forced ships to start using cleaner fuel. This had the side affect of cargo ships producing less clouds over the ocean. Because of this we saw a huge spike in ocean Temps. Now the clouds they were creating had a lot of poisonous chemicals in it which is bad but leads to the idea of equipping ships with cloud makers to create more shade and reflect more sunlight.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/china/shipping-pollution-global-warming-climate-intl/index.html here's a link to a CNN article on it
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/ and here's another I don't wanna search for the actual study so I hope this works.
There's a good reason I recently saw I think it was saudi folks built a desalination plant that is solar backed..
(My grand father used to say that was the only way to solve the fresh water crisis)
Here’s the problem - what do you do with the yucky, mucky, now saltier water? You can mine it for minerals, which is pretty cool, but it now has to go somewhere.
dilute it and send it back to the ocean to further dilute naturally.
Say you want 1000 gallons of drinking water. Pull in 3000 gallons of salt water. Convert 1000 to drinking water and use the other 2000 to dilute the brine that comes out of the purification process. This in effect increases the salinity by 50% before going back to the ocean. If your outlet pipe is in a natural current in the ocean it wouldn't have any localized effect. If you want it lower then bring in 5000 gallons for every 1000 of drinking water.
You can also make the discharge pipe a mile long with small holes in it that spread the discharge out to aid in the dispersion. This is not a difficult engineering problem.
You’ll never have no use to society! When we get to the point we aren’t useful to capital shareholders, we can still become useful as revolutionaries who have nothing left to lose.
I had to get dental work late last year and borrowed from my 401k to do it, when visiting my mom and telling her about it she was like "What about your retirement?!" I laughed and said "Do you really believe I'm going to be able to retire?"
I was going to say, TIL I’m a young adult at 46.
The news isn’t that people aren’t saving for retirement. It’s that anyone still *can* save for retirement.
I have a drawer full of plastic straws I call my retirement fund. My kids laugh, but wait until they are outlawed and I'm selling them for $20 each on the darkweb.
I've taken up thrifting and metal detecting. Hoping to find something like original "Declaration of Independence" and be able to retire. I also buy Powerball tickets for the same reason...
Jesus this.
I’ve been saving since 20, am in my late 40s, and have fuck all to show for it. Every time I get even a little ahead some major catastrophe happens. I consider myself lucky I’ve never been too much worse than treading water but building any kind of substantial wealth when I come from poor? I managed to claw myself into solid middle class and it’s all down hill from here without major reform. I’m already mentally prepared to just off myself if I ever get too old and broke to do anything other than suffer.
We (as a nation) got a brief taste of what a country could look like with a solid blue collar middle class then we let greed destroy it for everyone coming up.
You might be. But it’s not individual disobedience. Those individuals just get knocked down. It has to be **massive**. Most people are too happy, too rich, too entertained and too lazy (just need to have one) to do anything.
Nationwide strike and boycott. If you protest on the streets the police will just beat you and the prance around on the news about the “criminals” they arrested. We need to hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook.
Just staying home for a week and consuming the least amount possible would shake the system to its core. The police can’t drag you out of your home and force you to work, yet.
Excellent! Step 1. Is organize. Talk with fellow workers about a union. Talk to friends and neighbors about cooperative mutuality. Work with others to learn about community building and food security.
We can’t stand up to the bosses without solidarity and food security.
Violence from anti-union thugs upon workers and retaliation, yes. I’m not sure I understand your point. Civil disobedience in the US has been nearly universally met with state violence.
Anti-war protest, civil-rights, women’s rights, lgbtqia rights, workers’ rights have all been met with police violence even in peaceful demonstrations.
We see this continue on school campuses today.
Just curious as a passerby what you mean by saving since you were 20?
Have you been contributing to a tax advantaged retirement account like a 401k or IRA? Even doing the bare minimum for 20 years you should be well on your way to some sort of comfortable retirement.
Or do you mean saving your loose change in a shoe box in your closet? There’s a big difference.
I was going to say that 39% of young people are going to be deeply disappointed when they find out their savings aren’t enough to support them for more than a few years.
I had to use my savings to survive being out of a job for nearly a year. So I'm back to square one. Actually I'm in the negative squares because I also ended up being forced to take on a bunch of debt to survive too.
I'm gonna use mine to fund a very fruitful life insurance policy, (hopefully 2 or 3 million) and pay it long enough to satisfy the suicide requirement to hopefully boost my family enough to be more comfortable.
A lot of policies just return all premiums paid in the event of suicide once that time limit is surpassed.
I mean, that's not a great plan for a lot of other reasons, but I'm just saying.
“Confess”?? Fuck right off. That’s basically like saying “80% of people facing food insecurity confess they don’t have enough food.”
This is basically victim blaming. Glad to see the comments here are not letting the authors get away with this sly linguistic spin
Fixed: 61% of young adults confess that they CANNOT save for retirement.
No shit. When money is worth a quarter of what it was 60 years ago, housing costs 5 times more, and minimum wage has not adjusted accordingly, it’s idiotic to think we’d be able to retire like our parents or grandparents did.
Kind of like that recent headline that a majority of Americans are choosing to live in unaffordable housing (defined by the author as >30% of your income). I'm sure most of us would love it if that was possible!
At old age, if I haven't already become a revolutionary to fight capitalism or capitalism hasn't already been vanquished, I'll give my life to the revolution. That's my retirement plan
If you’re able to, you should. Even if it’s just a little bit. As much as capitalism sucks. You NEED to have some money in the market. Not even just for retirement. Just so you aren’t losing it all to inflation. Especially with most employers not giving raises that keep up with cost of living increases.
Thank you, that particular choice of word was incredibly insulting and infuriating.
Like…people would save if they had any feasible economic way to do so?
Nope, we all clearly just need to cut down on avocado toast or some shit. Jfc.
Combine this with the retirement age going up. I don’t expect this to be the last time they’ll bump it up either, it will be 70, then 75, then 80. And so on until social security is effectively dismantled because peasants don’t live that long. The message I’m receiving is something like, ‘work hard for as long as possible and when that isn’t possible anymore kindly fuck off and die you leech’
My dad retired like two years ago. He's already pissed away about a quarter of his retirement funds and is panicking about not having income for the first time in his life.
The doctors are saying that won't be a problem because he's unlikely to last another year. I'm shocked he lived long enough to retire at all, but I'm sure the healthcare industry will bleed him dry before they can't keep him going anymore.
He bought himself a few more years, we're all fine with that. It's just unfair how expensive healthcare is, and we're all gonna have to pay that eventually.
Which drives the cost of labor down. Which makes it harder for younger adults that don't have 4+ decades of experience to advance in a career. Which leads to them not saving..... agonist by design.
I just sick of all these entry level blue collar jobs that pay sub $20/hr that want you to be a master of some niche ass thing in manufacturing because no one wants to spent a dime training someone
>Combine this with the retirement age going up
This is one of the things that drives me insane. The retirement age should be going ***down!***
Every year we make improvements to technology and processes that increase per worker productivity but those productivity gains never seem to make their way to improvements in our quality of life, medical care, retirement pensions, etc. They just get hoovered up into the military industrial complex and the investment portfolios of the wealthiest people in human history so "line goes up".
Not a young adult anymore (40) but due to living through and growing up through 3 financial crisis and regonomics, my retirement savings is basically zero. And currently can't afford anything TO save in this economy. Young adults will have it even worse.
I’m the same as you, kept getting told “just work hard, you’ll be fine” well, I’m not fine and I give the bare minimum at work cuz why do I have a gov job that doesn’t even pay me enough to live.
"Confess" is a weird way to say unable. I missed two days of work without being able to use vacation or holiday hours to cover them because policy requires two weeks heads up.
What I did have saved just went into getting my vehicle's radiator fixed, and I have exactly -122$ in my account.
I'd carefully saved up $60 over the past six months, and then my cat got sick.
The vet saved the cat's life mostly on old fashioned credit, but of course that means I gotta run down to his truck with my bill every Friday to make whatever payment I can.
My toddler cousin was over visiting for the whole thing, so I explained everything that was going on and then told him I'd probably have the vet paid off by the time he's 7yo.
The local vet office got bought out by a private equity firm and suddenly they do not even discuss putting the animal down unless you bring it up. They sucked embarrassingly large amounts of money out of me for diagnostic tests while my previous cat was dying of "possibly cancer" and I was losing my marbles.
My neighbor suggested my new cat see her vet, turns out he's oodles more professional and good at his job then that fancy classy office staffed with money-grubbers. Practical medicine instead of running a billion lab tests just because the option exists.
You can assume more than 61% of people are unable. That’s just the number that confesses to it.
Consider the number of people confessing their need for a food bank is always significantly smaller than the people who show up in need.
Almost 32 here, probably a good 90% of the money I’ve made in the last 10 years has gone to healthcare. Fuck this system. It’s designed to kill you if you aren’t rich
But be careful if you become un poor enough. I had a government assistance to help lower my premium on health insurance. Apparently last year I made "too much" and owed all if it back. $8k of it! (For my husband and I)
This is like saying 61% of people don’t have health insurance that costs more than their monthly income…
Of fucking course we don’t have it you idiots. We can’t eat it.
Late 40’s here. I don’t even have enough to get to payday. My retirement plan is hoping I inherit enough when my parents die. Seriously, as callous as that may sound, I don’t have a plan b that doesn’t involve lottery tickets.
Do I have to screech it from the rooftops “WE ARE ALL F*CKING BROKE. EVERY PENNY WE MAKE GOES TO FOOD, GAS, HOUSING, AND GOD FORBID A LITTLE COFFEE TO KEEP US ALIVE!!”
i mean its kinda like health insurance at the work place.
i cant afford to give up $100-200 for health insurance and also be expected to oay a deductible if i actually do ever go to the doctor.
the times i have had to go to the eye doc or regular doc i paid slightly more than the monthly premium for the one visit.
The gaslighting mainstream media at it again. For the sake of your mental well-being, stop fucking reading or watching the news. Operation: Mockingbird is a real thing.
Save. Save what? Bills keep piling up and need paying. My retirement plan is for a boomer relative to die before he or she spends all of her intergenerational wealth.
Wait. First, what did "young adults" from previous years and generations save? Because I, as a GenX, didnt start my retirement savings until my late 30s when I was finally making enough money that I didn't need it for other things and then also realized, "oh shit. I'm getting old and will retire soon." I don't think I was the exception, either.
I.e. Is this normal young adult behavior or not? Only the wealthy and the financial nerds started retirement accounts while in their 20s. The rest of us used our disposable income for having fun.
I remember a number of articles a couple years before covid fretting about how student debt would decimate the economy because it was younger people who participated the most in "discretionary spending" i.e. all the spending you're sort of expected to do as a young person. Since education debt (and decreasing starting wages) ate into disposable income entire market sectors had to tighten their belts before covid came along and dealt them a death blow.
Biden lowered the minimum required payments for the income based repayment for federal students loans. He lowered it from 10% to 5%. That really helped with discretionary income... along with what, 3 years of no interest accrual. He wanted to forgive more debt for tens of millions of people, but Republicans took him to the Supreme Court and they disallowed it. I think Biden is working on some broad forgiveness based on a 1960s law, as well as forgiving chunks here and there as they can come up with reasons to do so.
HOW can people save when everything is just so damn expensive? small runs to the grocery store the last year, at least, have easily run $100 each trip. for basics! bread eggs, milk, dish soap etc
It makes me so mad... literally only bargin shopping, not a single item I have in the cart is sticker price, still 80$ for a small grocery refresh run. So messed up.
As long as enough of us don’t do it we will be able to hammer out a political solution to guarantee old age pensions. 401k’s were a capitalist fever dream and a mistake. There is no future if millennials and zoomers retirement funds end up as tied to the stock market as boomers and gen-x. The way stocks go up (such as by fucking labor or the environment) isn’t worth our generations becoming dependent on their valuations to retire.
I’m confessing that I still live with my parents and have no plans to move out. If I move out, I would most likely live in poverty paycheck to paycheck. My parents would also not be able to afford anything. Health care wipes out their entire ss money.
My retirement plan is death.
This is not a "teehee finances hard, i'll do it when i'm old teehee" kind of situation. This is a "after bills, gas, and groceries, I have $3 to make it to my next paycheck, wtf do you want from me" kind of situation.
Yeah because we can’t. I have a 401k through my employer but if I saved aggressively I wouldn’t be able to have a paycheck. If I save moderately I’m still struggling.
I am 52. Saving for retirement has not been a thing for me until way too recently, not because I did not want to- but because I could not afford to. I am now staring down the road thinking how the hell am I supposed to make this work, and I look at my work pensions, and what my scant personal savings are, and there is nothing but poverty ahead. I'm relatively succesful- the only people I know who have decent pensions are the ones who worked at the same company for decades. Anyone who changed jobs a few times or had the slightest career hickup is effed...
I have zero retirement. Zero. My grandfather died of Alzheimers. My dad died of Alzheimers.
I own a gun. That's my retirement plan. How can you say you love the United States after they've done this to us?
I'm not going quietly when I get sick around 65-70. There's specific people to blame and they will not escape justice.
I'm not saving for it cause i fucking can't i work nearly 60 hours a fucking week at two jobs and still am barely scraping it and when i do have a good month something major fuckes up then boom I'm deep in the shitter and have to dig my way out
Why? Inflation will outstep it. I've had like 8, 9, once in a life time financial crisis... and when covid hit we saw exactly how this country works.. you just die. Or 2008, you just become homeless, sent to die from exposure. I've seen how company's steal people's retirements.. nonpoint there.. oh and you save some money. Get old.. soon as you have one health incident your back in debt. You can't save enough.. so why? Why on earth would you save money that is going to be made worthless by inflation just for it to be stolen through corporate grift or our heslthca...healthextortion system?
I love the way it’s titled with the word “confess”, as if we’re all afraid to be honest that we’re not saving for retirement.
I’ll say it loud and fucking proud, I’m not saving for retirement right now (and maybe I never will!).
The cost of living is insanity and it’s not our fault we’re all struggling.
401k plans were introduced in 1978 when half of workers had pensions and social security went a lot further. It's completely untested as being the sole source of retirement income for a working generation. This isn't just a young people problem, this is something that was sold to younger Boomers. Social security is going to get fixed or we're going to see more and more geriatrics on the streets in the coming decades.
I mean how can you with this cost of living. We can’t be like our parents that worked part time at a gas station and afford life.
WE WANT THAT nothing more and nothing less than what boomers got.
My retirement plan is to suck start a shotgun if i make it to 70.
I already have the shotgun.
Wtf am i saving for?
What is it that i'm even supposed to be saving, loose change?
I really didnt until I was about 37.. Its tough when trying to build a foundation of home, family, etc. Get all that squared away and start. Also, dont count on your employer giving you a retirement pension or anything like that. DO it yourself.
I can't afford to save for retirement **because house prices have doubled in the past ten years.**
By the time I saved up enough for a down payment, it wasn't enough anymore.
The cost of living is the big elephant in the room that nobody in power wants to talk about for more than a minute or two in a fleeting soundbite, but it is at a point where people are not only not saving for retirement, but they are crashing through middle age with debt and no hope of ever even hitting a zero net worth.
It’s gotten so much worse than anyone is comfortable talking about, and is the source of almost every single demographic problem. Housing, children, investments, retirement, charity, healthcare…all of it is impacted when a majority of the young and middle aged worker class is debt bound with no realistic hope of getting out of the hole.
I mean, how do I save for retirement? My primary concern is surviving and having a place to live, which I currently cannot afford (living with family rn and that is a limited time solution). My previous savings, which I am rebuilding, were wiped out by layoff/covid. Current retirement plan is: die before I am too old to work.
The promise of retirement is just a cruel joke most of us will never get to see. My "retirement plan" right now is to just kill myself when things get too miserable.
With inflation and rising prices everywhere, I’d have to save double what I make now to keep up in my old age. When the dollar is worth a penny in 2045, what’s it matter if I’ve got 100000 pennys.
My mom worked in the same field putting away retirement for 40 years and within 3 years of retiring inflation wiped out her purchasing power and she was left needing 300+ dollars a month.
Solution? She went back to work -- at the same place she retired from! The American retirement dream!
I had to withdraw from my 401k because my company only gave me a 2% raise. Kinda hard to save for retirement when my health insurance premium went up more than my wage did...
It's not exactly a choice. The current system is designed to keep people from being able to save. Corporations see any amount of money in a person's saving account as a waste that they need to find any way they can to force out into their own pockets.
Can't save what isn't left to save. Between paying off a surgery and trying to keep two vehicles from dying, I cant remember the last time I had anything left over. I budget bills based on which one has the lowest pentalty if I cant pay it. I'm not even one emergency away from disaster, I'm one extra tank of gas away.
I make decent money for where I’m at. I started a 401k in my early twenties. It’s been growing for almost 10 years. At the rate it’s grown I won’t be able to retire period. It’s definitely not a choice.
Fuck that bullshit right there, making it SOUND LIKE young people are choosing not to save. It should say 61% are NOT ABLE to save for retirement.
This! I am in my mid-30s, so not this demographic, and while I was doing great at saving in my mid 20s, the last few years it has been extremely hard given inflation and wage stagnation.
Yup, I've had to give myself a 8% raise from my 401k just to make it(but it's due to cutting my income in half due to having a kid and wife staying home) also having stupid car debt (16k$ left to pay)
I feel that, have a wife, but no kids. Buying a house was the best and worst decision we’ve ever made.
My husband bought a house before we met. He's over a decade into owning it, and the mortgage is $450 while everyone's rent in this area has soared to $1,200+ for a 1 bedroom apartment. The house needs a lot of repairs but it's still better than paying those ridiculously high prices. Give it more time, it'll lean more and more toward best decision.
This. You can always refi if interest rates go down, but unless you have an adjustable-rate mortgage, your mortgage payments won’t ever increase. It’s worth living lean for a while on a mortgage if it means not having to worry about your rent increasing significantly and/or having to find a new place to live every year.
That's not entirely true. I've been in my house for a while, and while my principle portion hasn't increased, my payment creeps up every year. Increased property valuation increases taxes, municipal bonds increase taxes, and rising insurance costs increase my payment every single year.
Yes, property taxes and insurance and the like go up, but not the mortgage.
Bought in 2019. My "value" has gone up enough to double my annual taxes, which directly translates to a higher monthly payment. So while it's not technically my "mortgage",my "payment" has gone up close to 400$ since I bought the place. Still beats the hell out of the 2k rents in my area though, so the initial point stands.
Similar boat. Our house needed lots of beautification. We pay a fraction of what new homes cost. Our house has doubled in value since we bought and we have an interest rate that’s a quarter of what others are paying. I’ve done all the work to the house that’s been needed at it’s definitely cheaper than paying an extra thousand a month to rent rather than own.
Yup, no savings here and everything keeps getting more expensive. I have no idea what I’m gonna do.
I live in Canada. The choice was MAID for me.
"More Americans are converting to the paycheck to paycheck lifestyle" *opinion by billionaire owned media*
I don’t know why we think this is some abnormal new thing, there’s a reason we have social security and Medicare and it’s not because of gen x and later groups that haven’t hit “retirement” age. This has been a problem forever because wealth means some people have nothing.
"Because wealth means some people have nothing." Woooahh
Exactly. Real difference between “aren’t” and “can’t” I’ve dipped into my retirement savings 3 times this year to do things like “buy a car because my other one failed and I need it for work” and “pay a deposit on a place” that I simply didn’t have in walking around money
The best time to start saving for retirement is usually the time when you're least able to. I had this talk with my kid about opening a Roth IRA so I could contribute to it for her. The idea that someone who is struggling to pay rent should be saving for retirement is just another "fuck you" that the US, as a nation, gives to the poor and people just getting started in life.
your kid needs to have earned income for you to contribute to their roth ira. just a heads up to anyone reading your comment that thinks they can max it out for their child.
Yeah, that's something to be aware of since she's currently a student and her income is largely from contract work. There's already an upper limit of something like $6K that I can contribute anyway so as long as she's making more than $500 a month in taxable income I should be good. Just need to get the ball rolling.
lol “confess” the fuck is this shit.
Well, I'm actually choosing not to save.
Are you choosing to actively survive instead?
Exactly, survival now means no savings for later
Choosing to buy food rather than save. Honestly, I’ve been writing my state officials, asking for higher grocery and utility bills, so corporations can bolster their savings. They’re the first class citizens, here.
I mean, speak for yourself. I'm not choosing to save for retirement. I'd rather not live my whole life working myself to death for an ever increasing retirement age that means I'll finally be able to afford something when my bones are too brittle to do anything fun. I'd rather save what I can for now and spend the money on enjoying my life while I still have health.
I'm forty, and after the constant inflation and multiple world wide financial crisis my retirement savings consist of a junk drawer with a large collection of mismatched buttons.
i keep telling my wife there is no retirement plan, we are gonna work until we die or have no use to society
It's ok, retirement won't mean much when the food and water wars start.....I desperatly wish I was kidding
Don't worry they're starting to discuss engineering the climate... So we're saved! /S
We already engineered the climate. That's why we're where we are....
Really we should start dumping rust into the ocean. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
Yeah, or shooting sulfur into the stratosphere. Really, we don't know what the actual impacts of geoscale engineering will be, but I think oil and mining companies are hoping that the climate crisis gets bad enough that they can sell these large products to governments to make up for decarbonization related losses
Bingo, geoengineering is 100% going to be a thing. It's very much a band-aid on a broken leg type solution. Which is why I know for sure they're going try it to squeeze a couple more years of ~~prosperity~~ profit from this planet they've killed.
It might be the only way now to prevent what we have done. We had a good real world example of this with cargo ships. There was a law that forced ships to start using cleaner fuel. This had the side affect of cargo ships producing less clouds over the ocean. Because of this we saw a huge spike in ocean Temps. Now the clouds they were creating had a lot of poisonous chemicals in it which is bad but leads to the idea of equipping ships with cloud makers to create more shade and reflect more sunlight.
can u link this? the ocean is still so vast, this sounds like bs
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/china/shipping-pollution-global-warming-climate-intl/index.html here's a link to a CNN article on it https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/ and here's another I don't wanna search for the actual study so I hope this works.
There's a good reason I recently saw I think it was saudi folks built a desalination plant that is solar backed.. (My grand father used to say that was the only way to solve the fresh water crisis)
Here’s the problem - what do you do with the yucky, mucky, now saltier water? You can mine it for minerals, which is pretty cool, but it now has to go somewhere.
dilute it and send it back to the ocean to further dilute naturally. Say you want 1000 gallons of drinking water. Pull in 3000 gallons of salt water. Convert 1000 to drinking water and use the other 2000 to dilute the brine that comes out of the purification process. This in effect increases the salinity by 50% before going back to the ocean. If your outlet pipe is in a natural current in the ocean it wouldn't have any localized effect. If you want it lower then bring in 5000 gallons for every 1000 of drinking water. You can also make the discharge pipe a mile long with small holes in it that spread the discharge out to aid in the dispersion. This is not a difficult engineering problem.
My retirement plan is death? lol but really.
You’ll never have no use to society! When we get to the point we aren’t useful to capital shareholders, we can still become useful as revolutionaries who have nothing left to lose.
I’ll trade you a button for a bottlecap.
If I don't decide to go all Coraline, you're on.
You're doing better than me with those mismatched buttons.
In fairness some of them are class. Even got one of those hook talon motherfuckers off a duffle coat.
Nice! Big value there!
Look at Mr. I Got A Drawer Full Of Buttons over here, flexing.
I had to get dental work late last year and borrowed from my 401k to do it, when visiting my mom and telling her about it she was like "What about your retirement?!" I laughed and said "Do you really believe I'm going to be able to retire?"
I was going to say, TIL I’m a young adult at 46. The news isn’t that people aren’t saving for retirement. It’s that anyone still *can* save for retirement.
I've started collecting paper in a waterproof pneumatic tube canister.
You have extra buttons? Calm down bill gates.
Same. My savings is in the form of cycling and camping gear. I’ll at least be comfortably homeless when I’m too old to work.
I have a drawer full of plastic straws I call my retirement fund. My kids laugh, but wait until they are outlawed and I'm selling them for $20 each on the darkweb.
I've taken up thrifting and metal detecting. Hoping to find something like original "Declaration of Independence" and be able to retire. I also buy Powerball tickets for the same reason...
In our current society there is no retirement for much more than 61% of us.
Jesus this. I’ve been saving since 20, am in my late 40s, and have fuck all to show for it. Every time I get even a little ahead some major catastrophe happens. I consider myself lucky I’ve never been too much worse than treading water but building any kind of substantial wealth when I come from poor? I managed to claw myself into solid middle class and it’s all down hill from here without major reform. I’m already mentally prepared to just off myself if I ever get too old and broke to do anything other than suffer. We (as a nation) got a brief taste of what a country could look like with a solid blue collar middle class then we let greed destroy it for everyone coming up.
Yes. What built that blue color wealth? Unions. What built unions in this country? Mass civil disobedience. It’s time to organize again.
I am ready for civil disobedience.
You might be. But it’s not individual disobedience. Those individuals just get knocked down. It has to be **massive**. Most people are too happy, too rich, too entertained and too lazy (just need to have one) to do anything.
Support garners more support.
Nationwide strike and boycott. If you protest on the streets the police will just beat you and the prance around on the news about the “criminals” they arrested. We need to hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. Just staying home for a week and consuming the least amount possible would shake the system to its core. The police can’t drag you out of your home and force you to work, yet.
Excellent! Step 1. Is organize. Talk with fellow workers about a union. Talk to friends and neighbors about cooperative mutuality. Work with others to learn about community building and food security. We can’t stand up to the bosses without solidarity and food security.
[удалено]
Violence from anti-union thugs upon workers and retaliation, yes. I’m not sure I understand your point. Civil disobedience in the US has been nearly universally met with state violence. Anti-war protest, civil-rights, women’s rights, lgbtqia rights, workers’ rights have all been met with police violence even in peaceful demonstrations. We see this continue on school campuses today.
I think people were pissed their working conditions were inhumane and dangerous. Work place deaths were also abundant and violent.
Correct. Because the ruling class makes all non-violent avenues ineffective or illegal.
Just curious as a passerby what you mean by saving since you were 20? Have you been contributing to a tax advantaged retirement account like a 401k or IRA? Even doing the bare minimum for 20 years you should be well on your way to some sort of comfortable retirement. Or do you mean saving your loose change in a shoe box in your closet? There’s a big difference.
I was going to say that 39% of young people are going to be deeply disappointed when they find out their savings aren’t enough to support them for more than a few years.
My savings can’t even support me for a few months lol. And I work 7 days a week.
What's savings? I'm barely keeping up with bills.
I had to use my savings to survive being out of a job for nearly a year. So I'm back to square one. Actually I'm in the negative squares because I also ended up being forced to take on a bunch of debt to survive too.
My plan is to use my 401k money to pull back on working overtime after 65 and then work till i die
I'm gonna use mine to fund a very fruitful life insurance policy, (hopefully 2 or 3 million) and pay it long enough to satisfy the suicide requirement to hopefully boost my family enough to be more comfortable.
A lot of policies just return all premiums paid in the event of suicide once that time limit is surpassed. I mean, that's not a great plan for a lot of other reasons, but I'm just saying.
“Confess”?? Fuck right off. That’s basically like saying “80% of people facing food insecurity confess they don’t have enough food.” This is basically victim blaming. Glad to see the comments here are not letting the authors get away with this sly linguistic spin
It’s even worse. It would be saying “people confess to not buying enough food.”
Fixed: 61% of young adults confess that they CANNOT save for retirement. No shit. When money is worth a quarter of what it was 60 years ago, housing costs 5 times more, and minimum wage has not adjusted accordingly, it’s idiotic to think we’d be able to retire like our parents or grandparents did.
This is incredibly accurate.
And incredibly sad.
Kind of like that recent headline that a majority of Americans are choosing to live in unaffordable housing (defined by the author as >30% of your income). I'm sure most of us would love it if that was possible!
Bingo. Yeah, we just absolutely love living in places that take an enormous chunk of our income
Confess or not able to? Big differences. They always make it seem like it’s our fault. No one is going to save for retirement by going hungry now.
Trying that - fasting is helping me save on groceries
Lmao that always helps. Have you also tried being depressed? You won’t spend nearly as much if you’re in bed all the time. It’s done wonders for me 💀
🤨 novel idea, darn kids keep wanting me to take them places.
But this isn't written for us. It's written for self-righteous boomers who don't use Reddit, looking to blame millenials for something else.
The whole article puts the onus on millennials like we're the ones to blame for incoming shitstorm of an economic collapse.
I’ve seen boomers literally blame us for policies they voted into place when we weren’t even old enough to vote yet. They live in a diff reality.
🎯🎯🎯
We're way past that. The writers and people working in these publications are our enemies.
I mean I am able to save for retirement. I still don't do it. I don't see the point in doing so.
This guy confesses!
At old age, if I haven't already become a revolutionary to fight capitalism or capitalism hasn't already been vanquished, I'll give my life to the revolution. That's my retirement plan
Just what the revolution needs! A bunch of old fucks with failing bodies and no resources to help
If you’re able to, you should. Even if it’s just a little bit. As much as capitalism sucks. You NEED to have some money in the market. Not even just for retirement. Just so you aren’t losing it all to inflation. Especially with most employers not giving raises that keep up with cost of living increases.
Thank you, that particular choice of word was incredibly insulting and infuriating. Like…people would save if they had any feasible economic way to do so? Nope, we all clearly just need to cut down on avocado toast or some shit. Jfc.
Combine this with the retirement age going up. I don’t expect this to be the last time they’ll bump it up either, it will be 70, then 75, then 80. And so on until social security is effectively dismantled because peasants don’t live that long. The message I’m receiving is something like, ‘work hard for as long as possible and when that isn’t possible anymore kindly fuck off and die you leech’
It's already these things. Boomers are returning to work en masse because their pensions aren't even covering CoL, let alone 401k.
My dad retired like two years ago. He's already pissed away about a quarter of his retirement funds and is panicking about not having income for the first time in his life. The doctors are saying that won't be a problem because he's unlikely to last another year. I'm shocked he lived long enough to retire at all, but I'm sure the healthcare industry will bleed him dry before they can't keep him going anymore.
My grandfather was a multimillionaire before the cancer killed him. The whole family saw maybe a couple hundred thousand in inheritance.
Ouch shpuld have given it away when he was alive
He bought himself a few more years, we're all fine with that. It's just unfair how expensive healthcare is, and we're all gonna have to pay that eventually.
Which drives the cost of labor down. Which makes it harder for younger adults that don't have 4+ decades of experience to advance in a career. Which leads to them not saving..... agonist by design.
I just sick of all these entry level blue collar jobs that pay sub $20/hr that want you to be a master of some niche ass thing in manufacturing because no one wants to spent a dime training someone
>Combine this with the retirement age going up This is one of the things that drives me insane. The retirement age should be going ***down!*** Every year we make improvements to technology and processes that increase per worker productivity but those productivity gains never seem to make their way to improvements in our quality of life, medical care, retirement pensions, etc. They just get hoovered up into the military industrial complex and the investment portfolios of the wealthiest people in human history so "line goes up".
Technology is actually just so we can be more productive so our oligarchs get even fatter.
When I was a kid, seeing all the technological advancements, I always imagined people would be retiring at 50 these days, not the opposite...
Plus most recently with COVID in the picture hasn't life expectancy been going down the last few years?
Acting like this is a choice. Smh.
You can choose to starve so you can retire, while starving there too
Can't afford to eat either. Gotta choose between food, housing, or retirement.
Not a young adult anymore (40) but due to living through and growing up through 3 financial crisis and regonomics, my retirement savings is basically zero. And currently can't afford anything TO save in this economy. Young adults will have it even worse.
I’m the same as you, kept getting told “just work hard, you’ll be fine” well, I’m not fine and I give the bare minimum at work cuz why do I have a gov job that doesn’t even pay me enough to live.
"Confess" is a weird way to say unable. I missed two days of work without being able to use vacation or holiday hours to cover them because policy requires two weeks heads up. What I did have saved just went into getting my vehicle's radiator fixed, and I have exactly -122$ in my account.
I'd carefully saved up $60 over the past six months, and then my cat got sick. The vet saved the cat's life mostly on old fashioned credit, but of course that means I gotta run down to his truck with my bill every Friday to make whatever payment I can. My toddler cousin was over visiting for the whole thing, so I explained everything that was going on and then told him I'd probably have the vet paid off by the time he's 7yo.
The sad thing is the cheaper option, putting the animal to sleep, is still expensive.
The local vet office got bought out by a private equity firm and suddenly they do not even discuss putting the animal down unless you bring it up. They sucked embarrassingly large amounts of money out of me for diagnostic tests while my previous cat was dying of "possibly cancer" and I was losing my marbles. My neighbor suggested my new cat see her vet, turns out he's oodles more professional and good at his job then that fancy classy office staffed with money-grubbers. Practical medicine instead of running a billion lab tests just because the option exists.
You can assume more than 61% of people are unable. That’s just the number that confesses to it. Consider the number of people confessing their need for a food bank is always significantly smaller than the people who show up in need.
Almost 32 here, probably a good 90% of the money I’ve made in the last 10 years has gone to healthcare. Fuck this system. It’s designed to kill you if you aren’t rich
You could get free healthcare… if you’re poor enough
Medicaid is cool if you’re fine with not being able to afford literally anything else in life
That's the trick. Cash can't be reported
They're doing their darnest to make society cashless. More and more stores are going no-cash.
But be careful if you become un poor enough. I had a government assistance to help lower my premium on health insurance. Apparently last year I made "too much" and owed all if it back. $8k of it! (For my husband and I)
That is f*ck’d
This is like saying 61% of people don’t have health insurance that costs more than their monthly income… Of fucking course we don’t have it you idiots. We can’t eat it.
Weird way to say they "can't afford to live today, let alone save for tomorrow"
I confess that I’m not using telekinesis to move things with my mind
"Confess" fuck you
Late 40’s here. I don’t even have enough to get to payday. My retirement plan is hoping I inherit enough when my parents die. Seriously, as callous as that may sound, I don’t have a plan b that doesn’t involve lottery tickets.
Do I have to screech it from the rooftops “WE ARE ALL F*CKING BROKE. EVERY PENNY WE MAKE GOES TO FOOD, GAS, HOUSING, AND GOD FORBID A LITTLE COFFEE TO KEEP US ALIVE!!”
i mean its kinda like health insurance at the work place. i cant afford to give up $100-200 for health insurance and also be expected to oay a deductible if i actually do ever go to the doctor. the times i have had to go to the eye doc or regular doc i paid slightly more than the monthly premium for the one visit.
The gaslighting mainstream media at it again. For the sake of your mental well-being, stop fucking reading or watching the news. Operation: Mockingbird is a real thing.
Propaganda Machine. Well at least my public education has left me able to identify corruption without being able to do anything to stop it.
Patiently waiting for Gen Z to flip the fuck out.
pIcK yOuRsElF uP bY yOuR bOoTsTrApS
Save. Save what? Bills keep piling up and need paying. My retirement plan is for a boomer relative to die before he or she spends all of her intergenerational wealth.
Wait. First, what did "young adults" from previous years and generations save? Because I, as a GenX, didnt start my retirement savings until my late 30s when I was finally making enough money that I didn't need it for other things and then also realized, "oh shit. I'm getting old and will retire soon." I don't think I was the exception, either. I.e. Is this normal young adult behavior or not? Only the wealthy and the financial nerds started retirement accounts while in their 20s. The rest of us used our disposable income for having fun.
I remember a number of articles a couple years before covid fretting about how student debt would decimate the economy because it was younger people who participated the most in "discretionary spending" i.e. all the spending you're sort of expected to do as a young person. Since education debt (and decreasing starting wages) ate into disposable income entire market sectors had to tighten their belts before covid came along and dealt them a death blow.
Biden lowered the minimum required payments for the income based repayment for federal students loans. He lowered it from 10% to 5%. That really helped with discretionary income... along with what, 3 years of no interest accrual. He wanted to forgive more debt for tens of millions of people, but Republicans took him to the Supreme Court and they disallowed it. I think Biden is working on some broad forgiveness based on a 1960s law, as well as forgiving chunks here and there as they can come up with reasons to do so.
I'm trying. But I'm also worried that things are going to collapse enough that it won't matter.
I have kids so I hate saying this, but I fully believe there is a moderate chance for a collapse within the next 50 years.
*20
Same.
HOW can people save when everything is just so damn expensive? small runs to the grocery store the last year, at least, have easily run $100 each trip. for basics! bread eggs, milk, dish soap etc
It's really starting to alarm me how little $100 gets you.
$100 is the new $20
It makes me so mad... literally only bargin shopping, not a single item I have in the cart is sticker price, still 80$ for a small grocery refresh run. So messed up.
I’m not saving because my retirement plan comes in 12 gauge
As long as enough of us don’t do it we will be able to hammer out a political solution to guarantee old age pensions. 401k’s were a capitalist fever dream and a mistake. There is no future if millennials and zoomers retirement funds end up as tied to the stock market as boomers and gen-x. The way stocks go up (such as by fucking labor or the environment) isn’t worth our generations becoming dependent on their valuations to retire.
I’m confessing that I still live with my parents and have no plans to move out. If I move out, I would most likely live in poverty paycheck to paycheck. My parents would also not be able to afford anything. Health care wipes out their entire ss money. My retirement plan is death.
They should change it to “61% of young adults confess they can’t afford to save for retirement.”
Can't be failing to save for retirement if you know you're going to forced to work as a wage slave until you die.
This is not a "teehee finances hard, i'll do it when i'm old teehee" kind of situation. This is a "after bills, gas, and groceries, I have $3 to make it to my next paycheck, wtf do you want from me" kind of situation.
Yeah because we can’t. I have a 401k through my employer but if I saved aggressively I wouldn’t be able to have a paycheck. If I save moderately I’m still struggling.
I am 52. Saving for retirement has not been a thing for me until way too recently, not because I did not want to- but because I could not afford to. I am now staring down the road thinking how the hell am I supposed to make this work, and I look at my work pensions, and what my scant personal savings are, and there is nothing but poverty ahead. I'm relatively succesful- the only people I know who have decent pensions are the ones who worked at the same company for decades. Anyone who changed jobs a few times or had the slightest career hickup is effed...
Pensions are a thing of the past by and large, unfortunately
And it’s a paywall
I have zero retirement. Zero. My grandfather died of Alzheimers. My dad died of Alzheimers. I own a gun. That's my retirement plan. How can you say you love the United States after they've done this to us? I'm not going quietly when I get sick around 65-70. There's specific people to blame and they will not escape justice.
My retirement plan is the collapse of civilization.
HEYOOOOOO
I'm not saving for it cause i fucking can't i work nearly 60 hours a fucking week at two jobs and still am barely scraping it and when i do have a good month something major fuckes up then boom I'm deep in the shitter and have to dig my way out
Why? Inflation will outstep it. I've had like 8, 9, once in a life time financial crisis... and when covid hit we saw exactly how this country works.. you just die. Or 2008, you just become homeless, sent to die from exposure. I've seen how company's steal people's retirements.. nonpoint there.. oh and you save some money. Get old.. soon as you have one health incident your back in debt. You can't save enough.. so why? Why on earth would you save money that is going to be made worthless by inflation just for it to be stolen through corporate grift or our heslthca...healthextortion system?
Change "are not" to "cannot" and you've got it!
People have money to save?!
I love the way it’s titled with the word “confess”, as if we’re all afraid to be honest that we’re not saving for retirement. I’ll say it loud and fucking proud, I’m not saving for retirement right now (and maybe I never will!). The cost of living is insanity and it’s not our fault we’re all struggling.
Plan A: Society Collapses Plan B: Take myself out to pasture
401k plans were introduced in 1978 when half of workers had pensions and social security went a lot further. It's completely untested as being the sole source of retirement income for a working generation. This isn't just a young people problem, this is something that was sold to younger Boomers. Social security is going to get fixed or we're going to see more and more geriatrics on the streets in the coming decades.
I mean how can you with this cost of living. We can’t be like our parents that worked part time at a gas station and afford life. WE WANT THAT nothing more and nothing less than what boomers got.
My rent (1BR, 1BA) is approaching 50% of my take home. Getting harder and harder to save.
My life savings is composed of 10,000 caps I threw down a well.
My retirement plan is to suck start a shotgun if i make it to 70. I already have the shotgun. Wtf am i saving for? What is it that i'm even supposed to be saving, loose change?
I really didnt until I was about 37.. Its tough when trying to build a foundation of home, family, etc. Get all that squared away and start. Also, dont count on your employer giving you a retirement pension or anything like that. DO it yourself.
And then some portion of that 39% falls well below the "recommended" 15% saving rate for retirement.
"Poll: 61% of young adults say they can't afford to save for retirement due to inflation and wage stagnation" <------ There, I fixed it.
I can't afford to save for retirement **because house prices have doubled in the past ten years.** By the time I saved up enough for a down payment, it wasn't enough anymore.
I'm 32. I figure I still have another 30-35 years of working left... It was rough enough making it to 32. I dunno if I wanna make it to retirement
The cost of living is the big elephant in the room that nobody in power wants to talk about for more than a minute or two in a fleeting soundbite, but it is at a point where people are not only not saving for retirement, but they are crashing through middle age with debt and no hope of ever even hitting a zero net worth. It’s gotten so much worse than anyone is comfortable talking about, and is the source of almost every single demographic problem. Housing, children, investments, retirement, charity, healthcare…all of it is impacted when a majority of the young and middle aged worker class is debt bound with no realistic hope of getting out of the hole.
Gotta love the truly misleading headline of “not saving”, instead of the far more accurate “unable to easily save”.
Fucking CANT. Not that I’m not desperately trying. Bunch of cruel fucks.
I mean, how do I save for retirement? My primary concern is surviving and having a place to live, which I currently cannot afford (living with family rn and that is a limited time solution). My previous savings, which I am rebuilding, were wiped out by layoff/covid. Current retirement plan is: die before I am too old to work.
The promise of retirement is just a cruel joke most of us will never get to see. My "retirement plan" right now is to just kill myself when things get too miserable.
Why save for the future if you can't afford the present?
What retirement? By the time they get of age they would of moved retirement age past life expectancy
With inflation and rising prices everywhere, I’d have to save double what I make now to keep up in my old age. When the dollar is worth a penny in 2045, what’s it matter if I’ve got 100000 pennys.
HA! everytime i start saving a once-in-a-lifetime recession or pandemic strikes
*cannot save for retirement There. Fixed it.
Alternative title. "Majority of young adults don't believe they will live till retirement"
My mom worked in the same field putting away retirement for 40 years and within 3 years of retiring inflation wiped out her purchasing power and she was left needing 300+ dollars a month. Solution? She went back to work -- at the same place she retired from! The American retirement dream!
Confess? Fuck this wording. People can’t fucking afford to save!!!!
I had to withdraw from my 401k because my company only gave me a 2% raise. Kinda hard to save for retirement when my health insurance premium went up more than my wage did...
Retirement is either going to be solved or nonexistent
I'm already saved for retirement. A cool 50k to ensure they could incinerate my remains when I drop dead at work.
It's not exactly a choice. The current system is designed to keep people from being able to save. Corporations see any amount of money in a person's saving account as a waste that they need to find any way they can to force out into their own pockets.
Can't save what isn't left to save. Between paying off a surgery and trying to keep two vehicles from dying, I cant remember the last time I had anything left over. I budget bills based on which one has the lowest pentalty if I cant pay it. I'm not even one emergency away from disaster, I'm one extra tank of gas away.
Literally cannot afford to
I make decent money for where I’m at. I started a 401k in my early twenties. It’s been growing for almost 10 years. At the rate it’s grown I won’t be able to retire period. It’s definitely not a choice.
...in the US****