Watched a podcast recently and the guest was asked, “What is the most common financial mistake young people make?” and this pontificating genius replied, “Failing to contribute to a Roth IRA.”
Yes. What? No. Giving off some serious Lumbergh vibes, looking for the cover sheet on those TPS reports … not so great.
This guy went on to say that oh, say, $800 contributed today could turn into $8,000 in ten years, and all that growth is tax free.
Yes. What? No.
Yeh, I mean … yeh, but people are working full-time and living out of vehicles. There are entire tent cities all over the US filled with the working class.
Each and every month for years and years on end ordinary folks are facing $1,000 car notes, $1,200 student payments, and shelling out $2,500 to live with roommates, with food/gas prices on a steady rise and wages that remain stagnant.
And this guy thinks there’s extra money floating about to plan for a hypothetical end of work life.
Lotsa people are concerned about next week, much less half a century into the future.
Home ownership is a fantasy, and retirement? A pipe dream.
Methinks that much of the standard wisdom re planning for a future, much less the future, needs a re-education camp.
Twenty-year olds, the Millenials and the Gen Zs, are the most depressed group, what with MFs in their second generational grip of feminism (thank you so very much Boomers and Gen X), standard males abandoning adulthood for prolonged adolescence, and the entirety of both groups suffering through not one but two recessions and a p(l)andemic.
Oh, yes. So much to look forward to.
But … where there is life there is hope (‘cept with 90-percent full-thickness burns) and the (somewhat) good news is that youngerlings seem to be considering alternative approaches to the modern hamster wheel of existence (mankind masters likely won’t be pleased but they can run naked through muddy Burning Man) and choosing differently than their forebears {Matthew 11:25} … ergo, to wit, foregoing higher education and its related costs.
The nation is in crisis, what with $1.5T (yes, that is a “T,” as in trillion) of a student loan bubble just swelling to burst, the Cryptkeeper and his nurses finagling a borrower bailout, but no one is asking the basic question, which is: Why?
Why is book learning and skills training so expensive?
Why is assuming such heavy debt built into the process?
Why does it cost so much to learn to earn a living?
In the dim, dark days of Boomertown college was, if not free, at least affordable.
Now, during these muddling days of looming apocalypse, a two-year degree (AA) is almost $10K, whereas a four-year will run anywhere from $30K – $60K … and don’t get started on professional (a lá doctor/lawyer/master’s) degrees, all up into those six figures even before securing that first job.
Nopes, methinks the future will be filled with PAs and nurse practitioners and paralegals and AI, construction workers and small business owners … which is good, salt of the earth type of folks.
And these selfsame folks will have learned valuable lessons about lifeing in the 21st century … avoid debt, at all costs, pay by cash (which those selfsame mankind masters are itching to do away with shortly … see CBDC [shudders]) but where there are humans there will always be an underground, a black market, an off-grid, and many of a like mind will seek it, support it, maintain it.
Good. Change the narrative until it says something that makes sense.
And the goal might become to merely stay financially stable and physically fit (i.e., healthy and debt free), keep the footprint small (rent living/no marriage&kids) and just work to live until death.
Dismal, but better than the current options offered.
A Roth? Really?
Better yet … life insurance and a burial plan.
I like liquefaction but Half/theKid already lodged objection. If I’m lucky they’ll get to choose.
Maybe Capsula Mundi … an egg from whence we came, an egg within whence we depart.
How poetic. That would be great. Mmm’kay?