This really comes down to who has and hasn’t saved. If you are a millennial that regularly saves into a retirement account you are probably looking good because the market has been good. But not a lot of millennials save for retirement which is the problem. Some of that is low wage, but some of that is bad spending habits.
Housing on the other hand is totally fucked for millennials regardless of what you are saving. If you got a starter home you are unable to sell and upgrade with decent rates. If you are first time buyer there is no inventory for starter homes because folks can’t afford to leave them even if they want to.
I am very sympathetic to this. When I had a friend go through cancer, it made me realize a lot of important things about life. In the middle of that list, but critical in that list of things is paying for supplemental disability insurance. It was like a few hundred dollars a year that is the difference retaining an additional 20% of your salary in disability if needed. I am probably more likely to near term need supplemental disability insurance vs life insurance, and if I’m still alive and thriving and on disability that’s probably a bigger financial drain on my family that sudden untimely death.
I think the personal responsibility experiment of 401k’s is proving to be a failure. Yes, responsible people with sufficient incomes are somewhat at fault for not using the available retirement vehicles. But if individuals can’t be trusted to tend to their own future, we should probably be mandating retirement savings. And with that increasing minimum wage and considering UBI’s to make it reasonable for people save and have money in retirement.
But thanks for the sympathy for the downvote brigade. Merely suggesting personal responsibility seems to bring on the hate in lemm personal finance discussions. I have coworkers and friend’s with 6 figure incomes, top 75% of USA household incomes. They hardly use their 401k’s and use Roth IRAs when they have the means to be maxing those out.
I love the comments in these discussions that are like “Fuck hedge funds, fuck investing, fuck the stock market, fuck 401ks. Bring back pensions.” And then I have to explain that pensions are investing in the stock market and actually own like 20% of common traded mid and large size company stock. Apparently folks want the benefit of being in the stock market without the personal responsibility to do it themselves, but in the process get to hide their guilt of personally investing in the market themselves. But that’s okay, and that’s why I think we probably should have mandatory minimum retirement savings and investment programs.
I don’t think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn’t get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB’s for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it’s not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.
Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.
Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn’t always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren’t easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it’s basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don’t own it all, but that’s fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.
Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don’t think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.
But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.
Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn’t have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.
“He has been “uncharacteristically vocal” about his support during press calls for his new film, Unfrosted, The New York Times reported.”
From the NYT link in the quote:
“As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely”
But when you go to the link to the NY Times article that references Mr. Seinfeld as being recently vocal about his support of Israel, one of the concluding comments in the article is:
Surely, Mr. Seinfeld sees it differently. His public comments have largely avoided geopolitical specifics, dwelling little on the choices of the Netanyahu government or prospective conditions for a cease-fire.
And he can still sound hesitant even in recent discussions about the Jewishness of “Seinfeld” — which an NBC executive once described as “too New York, too Jewish.”
Nothing about this makes me think Seinfield is a a strong supported of the war. Support for Israel after the attack can be a lot of things and does not mean pro Netanyahu war machine.
Pensions worked the same way. The difference is personal responsibility and inequity of employment and wage. But who’s 401k deprecates in value over the long term anyways? If you select a target fund that should be fine.
Is it possible that commenter is putting money into retirement accounts but not putting that money into any funds, etfs, or bonds? But even then, I would hope it’s in a money market type core position where they are getting some return. But I rolled over all my stuff into a target fund at my new employer 9 years ago. I’m up 21% on my cost basis.
So my employer did this thing where new hires automatically got enrolled in a 401k. If you did absolutely nothing to your 401k, each year it would automatically up your percentage to a max of Y. Is that common or uncommon? And in this world of 401k over pension, should that be more of a norm to help protect people that don’t know better build retirement savings. It doesn’t solve the problem of folks not having enough money and needing to use 401k for emergency funds…
How do you think pension plans make money? They are managed by fiduciaries responsible for investing. Guess where they invest. 20% of the stock market is owned by pension funds :retiregenz.com/what-percentage-of-the-stock-marke…
I think the “Pensions you don’t contribute to and the amount you get is fixed.” is a bit murky. If you have a pension that probably means you have a lower salary compared to an equivalent non pension job, because part of your labor value goes into funding the pension. But the main thing is 401(k) puts a lot of responsibility on the individual. And as this article points out, if you put a lot put retirement financial planning on the individual, that creates a larger social problem since many people can’t sufficiently do that themselves, even if they are being responsible with what they earn.
But the point is we can’t trust personal responsibility. If a significant volume of the population is basically guaranteed to not invest and save voluntarily for retirement that is always going to be a social problem. Also, there’s the problem of employers voluntarily providing retirement programs. Sure, I think there’s a question of what or how that savings is invested for retirement (pension, 401k, etc), but it seems there needs to be more mandate to require employer’s of a certain size to support retirement plans. And possibly even more mandate to require contributions to retirement plans. The article describes this in Australia: “Australia’s Superannuation Guarantee requires companies to contribute the equivalent of 11 percent of an employee’s monthly pay to an investment account that is controlled by the worker, who can also put in additional money. The “Super,” as it is known, includes full-time and part-time workers and has proved to be enormously successful. With its relatively small population — just 27 million — Australia now has the world’s fourth-highest per capita contributions to a pension system, and almost 80 percent of its work force is covered.”
That’s not accurate. A UN recognition of nation state is not a pre requisite for self governance. FIFA recognizes more nations than the UN. If Taiwan can’t be recognized by the UN I don’t think there’s reasonable expectation for Palestine.
Taiwan can’t get recognized despite its government being a founding member of the UN and folks surprised it’s contentious for Palestine to be recognized?
It’s cheap and easy for me to use it while traveling around and going on god knows what public wifi network. I am not using google VPN for privacy, but using it for some sense of security out of my home. Already paying for Google One storage, so this was a nice perk.
Millennials' retirement and homebuying plans may be a fantasy (www.businessinsider.com)
IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell (aftermath.site)
Welp, this didn’t take long....
Comcast Unveils Peacock, Netflix, Apple TV+ Streaming Bundle (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Cable is dead. Long live the cable bundle. Curious to see the pricing and if the bundle only includes ad tiered options.
Students walk out during Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech at Duke (www.independent.co.uk)
Was the 401(k) a Mistake? How an obscure, 45-year old tax change transformed retirement and left so many Americans out in the cold. (www.nytimes.com)
[Ahoy] What genre is DOOM? (www.youtube.com)
PSA: Nova Launcher is owned by an analytics company (www.androidpolice.com)
Since a few folks seem unaware of this, I’m posting anew for visibility.
US vetoes widely supported resolution backing full UN membership for Palestine (apnews.com)
VPN by Google One is shutting down for good (www.androidauthority.com)