8 ms·

Why Are 20-Somethings Retiring?

57 points by breitling 11y ago

hwstar 11y ago
It shouldn't be called retirement. It is probably more like a temporary hiatus. Also, it isn't just 20-somethings. US employment has been somewhat of a raw deal in the last 15 years for all age groups. Some people have realized that working to live just isn't worth it. There's a lot of bullshit work assigned in a typical corporate job, and this 'impedance mismatch' forces some people with financial strength to quit and do what they really want to do in life even if that means living on a much lower annual income.
- such_a_casual 11y ago
  > It shouldn't be called retirement. In personal finance it's called, "Financial Independence." Which basically means you aren't necessarily done working for the rest of your life, just that working has become completely optional. more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence
  - jazzyk 11y ago
    "...you aren't necessarily done working for the rest of your life, just that working has become completely optional" Optional - as long as you live in your parents' basement and don't want to start a family. :-)
    - krisdol 11y ago
      Dependence is the new independence!
      - lfam 11y ago
        My friends called it "pretirement".
    - geodel 11y ago
      Sometimes I wonder whether the next generation will even have parents who have houses with basements available for free/cheap. Maybe basements would be rented out to support family expenses. Or their parents could be living in much smaller places with no basements. Lately I have seen a few ads where owners are looking to rent out basements to families as cheaper alternative to apartments rather than as something where single folks would stay for short durations.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > Optional - as long as you live in your parents' basement and don't want to start a family. :-) I think this is where there's a fundamental disconnect in cultures. I'm 33, my wife 31. We're about to have kids, and we've strongly considered moving in with my parents, not only to spend more time with them, but also to provide care when necessary as well as have their help watching and raising our children. Just because we're well off (we're financially independent) doesn't mean we need an expensive mortgage in the suburbs to raise our family, nor does it mean we can't live with family or have them live with us. America is far more broken than I expected.
      - jazzyk 11y ago
        I come from a culture with close multi-generational ties, so I don't think there is anything wrong with your potential decision at all - if it is your _choice_, not _necessity_
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        I definitely agree it should be by choice, but that's only going to change in the US if workers start fighting for higher wages, more labor regulation, and other initiatives that value labor above capital. Otherwise, prepare to move to the basement.
      - snowwrestler 11y ago
        No one needs to move to the suburbs and take on an expensive mortgage to raise a family. An apartment or small condo is a fine place to raise a family, and millions of Americans do just that. It's just a cultural thing: many Americans prize their independence and privacy, so grown kids want to get away from their parents. And vice versa, by the way! My parents definitely would not want me to move my family to their house--they love us and enjoy visits, but are enjoying their own independent lives too.
    - a-priori 11y ago
      The premise of "financial independence" is that you save enough enough money and reduce your expenses enough that you can live for the rest of your life on your investments. Whether you choose to retire or not is up to you, but the point is that you are 'independent' of sources of income to fund your lifestyle. For example, you could reduce your working hours to spend more time on family or hobbies, or take long unpaid sabbaticals, or bootstrap a business, or just quit working entirely. It turns out that you can safely withdraw 3% a year indefinitely (from a portfolio composed of a mix of stocks and bonds in low-fee index funds) without reducing the the value of the investments in the long run. A higher rate of 4% will decline on average over time but can be enough to survive multi-decade retirements, so that's often a more realistic target. There are tools (e.g. http://www.firecalc.com/ http://www.firecalc.com/, http://www.cfiresim.com/ http://www.cfiresim.com/) to run simulations based on historical market data. At 4% you need a portfolio equal to 25 years worth of expenses. Let's say you spend $60k a year in today's dollars. This works out to a monthly budget of $5k. If you can save $1.5M then that will pay your expenses for 30 years, without any other income, with a 94% chance of success. At 3% you need 33 years of expenses, or $2.0M, and that has a 100% chance of success. This is all based on past data of course (past performance does not imply future performance and all that). These are large sums of money, but it's possible for most professional workers, and especially couples, to accumulate them if they are fairly frugal and make a decent income. The time required entirely depends on what portion of your income you can save (see http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...). Assuming a constant income, as well as constant expenses while working and after, if you save 50% of your household income it will take 17 years to reach the 4% level. So start at age 30 and you'll be done by 47.
- krisdol 11y ago
  They're defining retirement as "you don't have a job and aren't looking for one", which is an egregious stretch of a definition. They're not financially independent or retired, they've given up looking for work worth doing.
  - mrec 11y ago
    If they're neither working nor financially independent, what are they living on? Not a rhetorical question; I don't live in the US, and am a bit vague about its welfare system. Is this essentially about people moving back in with family?
    - fapjacks 11y ago
      We have nothing approaching basic income or housing that anybody could live off reasonably. Either these kids are living with parents, living off parent's money, or are living out of their cars. There is no in between here. I suspect that it's the former, which is really giving an awful impression about what is possible in the States. The vast majority of Americans need to work their asses off just to make rent. If you don't do that, you are either living off someone else's money, or don't have a house. End of story.
      - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
        >We have nothing approaching basic income or housing that anybody could live off reasonably. State welfare programs, section 8, food stamps, "earned income credit", medicaid, SSI, TANF, SNAP, etc. There's lots of aid in the US. Over 100m people nationally are on some level of means tested welfare. That's pushing one third of this nation. National spending accounts for $1T in welfare spending. That's slightly less than Mexico's entire GDP; a country of 122m. http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA694.pdf http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA694.p... The narrative of the US not having any welfare is asinine. In fact, the spending is staggering. When I lived in poorer neighborhoods in Chicago, most of my neighbors were on a fair amount of welfare to the point where they never had to bother getting a job. If you're willing to live in an urban area and live a modest lifestyle its largely trivial to game welfare benefits for a living.
- thecosas 11y ago
  Could also just be a statistical anomaly. Saying it doubled in that age range, it could even come down to "this is what I wish the situation was". Thew title of this post is a little misleading and the wrong question to ask.
- jazzyk 11y ago
  A lot of people found a way to live on low income obtained from parents, disability benefits, temp jobs, renting out grandma's apartment, etc. Sharing apartments or living with their parents, etc. Given that a lot of job growth in the economic "recovery" (especially for younger people) has been in the minimum wage range, I don't blame them. If you can't even pay the most basic bills from a minimum-wage job to live independently, why bother?
- tastynacho 11y ago
  > There's a lot of bullshit work assigned in a typical corporate job yeah its called being young and being inexperienced. Gotta put the time in before you're qualified to enjoy the meat..
  - sp332 11y ago
    And with no guarantee of upward mobility, why would someone put up with it?
    - pc86 11y ago
      Nothing is guaranteed, so I'm not sure what the lack of one has to do with anything.
    - CountSessine 11y ago
      Switching companies every 3 or 4 years is the new normal - you can't expect to ever get promoted within the same company. There's still upward mobility - its just that it's within an industry, not an individual company.
      - sp332 11y ago
        But I'm still a lot less likely to accept crap work just to hope that I get promoted later. The expected value of the upside is smaller, so should the downside be.
        CountSessine 11y ago
        Agreed, but is that necessarily a bad thing? If your labour has market value and you're taking crap from your employer, shop around for a new job. The other way of saying that we don't have lifetime employment anymore is that we don't have to suffer through lifetime employment anymore. You don't have to tolerate stultifying bureaucracy. You don't have to suffer nitwit bosses. You don't have to deal with impossible coworkers. With an open labour market, you can work where you like. A couple of days ago someone posted patio11's blog article on his experience working in Japan as a salaryman. The other side of the security of lifetime employment over there is that you have to tolerate horrible working conditions at your lifetime employer, and the labour market is so rigid that if you ever leave your employer, no one else will ever hire you.
- twothamendment 11y ago
  Working to live just isn't worth it? What does that leave you with? When I started working I worked jobs I didn't want to do for the rest of my life, but it wasn't just about the money. I leaned skills, learned to work and learned I better find a new, better job - even if it is only slightly better. Some jobs only leave you with one important thing - a work ethic, and that is what gets you a better job, someday. I know, I'm just one person, but that is my story and I'm sticking to it. Maybe it will only get one person off their butt and doing something they don't enjoy.
  - creshal 11y ago
    How long are people going to pretend that the lack of full employment for now close to 40 years everywhere across the globe is the fault of people being "too lazy" to work? You can't fix globalization and automation with personal work ethics.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
  What's the alternative, "mooching to live"?
  - hwstar 11y ago
    Working long enough to save enough money to have good investments to live off of so that you can say "screw you" to employers which offer mediocre jobs and working environments.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    Financial Independence and accepting to live off $22-35k annually. Unless you have a larger investment pool or a well-above-average and stable ROI to increase that beyond 35k...
- SonicSoul 11y ago
  There's a lot of bullshit work assigned in a typical corporate job What jobs don't have that? As if startups magically solved this problem by giving employees nothing but innovative thought provoking problems and everything else is handled by worker elfs. No, every place has its share of bs work. the difference is that a portion (majority?) of corporate folks stopped caring to actually solve problems. Instead they do the minimum to keep their jobs. You can do the same thing every day, waste 30% of time chatting with coworkers, another 30% on the net, and then complain about how boring your job is. I've yet to see corporations that didn't have good problems to solve.
  - cobaltblue 11y ago
    Almost every not-typical-big-corporate job has less bullshit work assigned than the lot of BS assigned to typical big corporate job workers. Startups and even mid-size companies don't magically solve the problem of having to do BS work, there's typically just a lot less of it. When what you do or don't do is all up to you, the portion of BS work goes to 0 because you don't want to do it so you don't. Companies fall on a BS scale that correlates to their size and determines how much BS work you don't want to do that you have to do anyway (or rather, you always have a choice, but if you don't do it then you're fired/the company goes out of business/a customer is pissed off and sues you/etc. which makes it not much of a choice at all).
    - SonicSoul 11y ago
      I've worked at larger co's (1k+ employees) where BS work was actively eradicated in order to have breathing space to move forward and innovate. This is possible but requires vigilant management and hiring the kind of people that want to make a difference. There's more red tape at corps which may be part of the BS you're pointing out but even that was actively fought. I see it similar to technical debt. It's easy to accumulate if you're not careful and easy to live with at first but will slowly come back and take you down.
      - cobaltblue 11y ago
        I would describe your experience as atypical, wouldn't you? Just like Valve's nearly-flat management is atypical and requires a certain mesh of personalities and pruning to work at all. Counterexamples exist, it's not a perfect correlation, but unless they're plentiful they don't really change the typical.
jophde 11y ago
Yea, I am sure the percentage of 20-somethings who are actually financially independent is less than .0001%. Everyone else inherited money or gave up all hope of finding a real job.
- DINKDINK 11y ago
  300e6*.0001/100 = 300 people in the USA. There's probably more than 300, 20 year olds who are living off private incomes.
  - cobaltblue 11y ago
    Even worse, he said of 20-somethings (not out of the whole population, and not just 20 year olds) which leaves a start number around 45 million, or a mere 45 people in the USA. It's actually pretty easy to become financially independent before you hit 30 if you finish college on time (while you're 23) and get a 6-figure job out of college, and work for a few years with a small (sub-25k/yr) annual cost of living.
    - pc86 11y ago
      It's also "actually pretty easy to become financially independent" if you hit the lottery. Both our examples aren't really conducive to an actual discussion. 1. The number of fields allowing a new grad to get a six-figure job are very small. 2. The number of places offering the above while also allowing the new grad to live in an area where they can have a sub-$2k/mo footprint are incredibly limited. 3. Of the people who are actually able to take advantage of the above, the majority of them will have no interest in doing so. For every highly-compensated employee at Google living in a van in the parking lot there are several in houses they can't afford with credit card and student loan debt to boot. 4. Gaining financial independence for the sake of gaining financial independence is sort of a pointless goal. My guess is if you collected every person in the US who retired by the age of 30 and removed those who inherited money, won the lottery, and started a business, you could fit them in in a single large room.
      - 11y ago
erroneousfunk 11y ago
John Keynes and the 15 hour work week make the news rounds every now and then: http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-... Perhaps we were wrong in predicting that he was entirely wrong. Obviously, companies themselves aren't going to be huge proponents of providing "part time" workers with full time benefits or providing opportunities for occasional employment, but people are finding ways through more creative methods that may not quite register as "in the workforce" according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. People stay in school for much longer because they can afford to (okay, yes, student loans are a problem, but there's also not a critical "you must be in the workforce otherwise your family farm will fail and everyone will starve" motivation), how hard they work is more often seen as an "option" rather than a survival need.
tinalumfoil 11y ago
> When you're in your twenties you should be spending that time really exploring and thinking about the things that give you meaning. Once you start growing up and living a life more you won't be able to do that again. -Digit CEO (from video) I hate the idea that once you leave college and get a job your life of having fun is over. As though fiscal irresponsibility is necessary for finding your life's "meaning" and you can only do that in the four years you spend at college. I really have to question someone that found their life's meaning at a point in their life where they couldn't bother to be financially responsible for themselves.
- taurath 11y ago
  If you want to make enough income to have financial security in the US in most industries that means taking a salaried job, and ~15 days of personal time off not including weekends and holidays. Its not that having to work 40 hours a week doesn't leave time enough to find your life's meaning, but its damn hard to do more than attend 2 major outside-of-norm events or go on any journeys that aren't majorly bookended by going back to work.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I hate the other end of that idea (reality) - that you have to grow up and be responsible and stop having fun or be spontaneous in your life, because from now on it's career, marriage, career, kids, career, retirement and death.
  - eanzenberg 11y ago
    Which are all choices you make.
    - steve-howard 11y ago
      Career is certainly not a choice I make. It's a necessity. Hell, I'd probably enjoy it more if I didn't need it.
      - 11y ago
swagv 11y ago
The article did a poor job of explaining its titular premise, imo
- twothamendment 11y ago
  Agreed, and the video in the article had some advice that needs updated. What 20-year old is going to spend less because their credit card is frozen in a block of ice? I don't touch mine that often. There are so many ways to pay, service that already have the card number. It isn't a bad idea, just a bit out of date. I think I could freeze mine for most of the month and not change anything and I don't use cash.
- LVB 11y ago
  Yeah, looking at their graph: "Why are you retiring?" "Because I'm retired." Thanks!
- steve-howard 11y ago
  Especially since the number jumped from 1% to 2%, and even assuming that's a significant difference it still deserves a lot more qualifiers.
tracker1 11y ago
Grr... autoplay video with a toolbar that auto-hides.
- shawn-furyan 11y ago
  As a bonus, if you accidentally scroll down far enough to kick off the here's-a-random-unrelated-article misfeature, then you're rewarded with a second autoplay of the video!
marshray 11y ago
Perhaps more are working for under-the-table wages.
PaulHoule 11y ago
Nothing gets in the New York Times unless it interests people over 50. Back when the boomers were young there were huge numbers of article about hippies, drugs and all that stuff because old people like to read about what young people are doing and try it out for themselves. It makes them feel young. Old farts have been obsessed with iTunes, iPhones, iPads, and all that i-stuff for Apple as long as they've been making it. I think people of all ages and social classes are in a bad mood these days. I saw some rich guy on CNBC this morning and he was pissed because we don't appreciate everything rich people do for us and it is not hard to find pissed off poor people. Lots of old people like Trump because they are pissed off about this or that. People are pissed off about health care, obamacare, etc. It is so ungrateful when you consider that 200 years ago people had no idea why infectious diseases made you sick, there were no painkillers, no psych meds, no blood pressure meds, no insulin or thyroid hormone. No antibiotics, antivirals, no heart surgery, warfarin, etc. For almost all of human history faith healing was the first line treatment for everything and now people are pissed. People get pissed off driving and don't think it is a miracle that we have cars, roads, gas, mechanics, etc. Anyway you've got to get over this idea that any generation is special; often it is much more like 10% of the boomers did it, and 30% of X, and 50% of Y and 70% of the Millenials do it -- most generational change is a "diffusion of innovation" situation. If you want to understand the post 2000 period you have to understand the 1960s and 1970s and a good book from that era is http://www.amazon.com/uncommitted-alienated-youth-American-society/dp/B0006BMZYC http://www.amazon.com/uncommitted-alienated-youth-American-s... and it explains a lot of things like the hippie phenomenon and then the cult boom, school shooters and why people who don't have it bad join ISIS, all that. It is also the first academic book to use the word "postmodern". He says "Our age inspires scant enthusiasm." and that is it. People don't really believe anything they are told and just go through the motions. For instance, look at defined contribution pensions. There has been Republican FUD against Social Security since it began, and now we have these private plans which might work if people had money to put in them, and some of us are fortunate enough to do so, but a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck -- personally I still think investing in the stock market is the best massy thing to do, but looking at the chart of the last 20 years I am not going to blame anybody who thinks it is a casino. People are not committed, they are not engaged, they don't feel like stakeholders, they don't feel that they are valued, they see organizations such as schools, colleges, the military, corporations as exploitative, treating people like racehorses, burning them out, throwing them away. At my local startup incubator there was this conversation I just couldn't take from some guy who had all this bullshit and weird ideas about networking and at some point it's like "bud... if you are talking to a VC they want to hear you are working on product and talking to customers" Yet, disengaged people see something like "Y Combinator" and they see it like Harvard Business School, a credential, social proof because if you are disengaged you aren't experiencing the joy of learning, creating, etc.
DickingAround 11y ago
They're not retired. They're probably selling drugs. Not kidding. We have a lot of drug selling inmates (0.5% of Americans are in jail for drugs). It's also an industry people can get jobs in without experience and that booms in a recession. These retired kids are probably being honest in saying they're not just 'staying at home'. They're probably selling drugs. It's a job. Just not one they want to list on a survey.
- DickingAround 11y ago
  I think this is a possible/probable explanation? Anyone who downvoted it want to explain why the downvote?
Spooky23 11y ago
I know a guy who was an IT generalist making decent money, who met and married a woman who is a physican when she was in med school. Her first gig was to an impoverished rural area (to accelerate payments of med school loans), so he quit and went with her. Now he's a 30-something stay at home dad. He does a few remote consulting gigs, more to stay in touch than for the money.
nickbauman 11y ago
Totally anecdotal: A few months ago a friend was down by the Mississippi river park in downtown Minneapolis where there were a group of young homeless guys drinking under a bridge trestle. Turns out these guys had undergraduate degrees with massive student loan debt. They explained they'd decided to become homeless because they didn't see any way to ever pay it back.
VLM 11y ago
The numbers involved are extremely small. Twice nothing is still roughly nothing. My suspicion is at least some young women married an (older?) guy and are doing the stay at home mom thing. Its not like the economy is booming, they're not missing out on anything. "Maybe when the economy is better, and my kid is in preschool, my art degree will really pay off"
seizethecheese 11y ago
Summary: the percent of people aged 20-24 who answered the survey an employment survey as "retired" changed from 1 to 2%. Bloomberg then finds a narrative and beats it to death.
CountSessine 11y ago
Fewer people willing or able to take a job might eventually cause a shortage of workers, leading to surge in wages and longer-term inflationary pressures, according to Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman. "We're going to be running out of labor as we go through time,'' Blinder said on Bloomberg Television Dec. 31. Oh, my. I hadn't even thought of that. I guess we'll need to expand the availability of slave-labour employer-controlled visas and guest worker programs, won't we? Let's forward this to our lobbyist.

57 points by breitling 11y ago

It shouldn't be called retirement. It is probably more like a temporary hiatus. Also, it isn't just 20-somethings. US employment has been somewhat of a raw deal in the last 15 years for all age groups. Some people have realized that working to live just isn't worth it. There's a lot of bullshit work assigned in a typical corporate job, and this 'impedance mismatch' forces some people with financial strength to quit and do what they really want to do in life even if that means living on a much lower annual income.

such_a_casual 11y ago
> It shouldn't be called retirement. In personal finance it's called, "Financial Independence." Which basically means you aren't necessarily done working for the rest of your life, just that working has become completely optional. more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence
- jazzyk 11y ago
  "...you aren't necessarily done working for the rest of your life, just that working has become completely optional" Optional - as long as you live in your parents' basement and don't want to start a family. :-)
  - krisdol 11y ago
    Dependence is the new independence!
    - lfam 11y ago
      My friends called it "pretirement".
  - geodel 11y ago
    Sometimes I wonder whether the next generation will even have parents who have houses with basements available for free/cheap. Maybe basements would be rented out to support family expenses. Or their parents could be living in much smaller places with no basements. Lately I have seen a few ads where owners are looking to rent out basements to families as cheaper alternative to apartments rather than as something where single folks would stay for short durations.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > Optional - as long as you live in your parents' basement and don't want to start a family. :-) I think this is where there's a fundamental disconnect in cultures. I'm 33, my wife 31. We're about to have kids, and we've strongly considered moving in with my parents, not only to spend more time with them, but also to provide care when necessary as well as have their help watching and raising our children. Just because we're well off (we're financially independent) doesn't mean we need an expensive mortgage in the suburbs to raise our family, nor does it mean we can't live with family or have them live with us. America is far more broken than I expected.
    - jazzyk 11y ago
      I come from a culture with close multi-generational ties, so I don't think there is anything wrong with your potential decision at all - if it is your _choice_, not _necessity_
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        I definitely agree it should be by choice, but that's only going to change in the US if workers start fighting for higher wages, more labor regulation, and other initiatives that value labor above capital. Otherwise, prepare to move to the basement.
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      No one needs to move to the suburbs and take on an expensive mortgage to raise a family. An apartment or small condo is a fine place to raise a family, and millions of Americans do just that. It's just a cultural thing: many Americans prize their independence and privacy, so grown kids want to get away from their parents. And vice versa, by the way! My parents definitely would not want me to move my family to their house--they love us and enjoy visits, but are enjoying their own independent lives too.
  - a-priori 11y ago
    The premise of "financial independence" is that you save enough enough money and reduce your expenses enough that you can live for the rest of your life on your investments. Whether you choose to retire or not is up to you, but the point is that you are 'independent' of sources of income to fund your lifestyle. For example, you could reduce your working hours to spend more time on family or hobbies, or take long unpaid sabbaticals, or bootstrap a business, or just quit working entirely. It turns out that you can safely withdraw 3% a year indefinitely (from a portfolio composed of a mix of stocks and bonds in low-fee index funds) without reducing the the value of the investments in the long run. A higher rate of 4% will decline on average over time but can be enough to survive multi-decade retirements, so that's often a more realistic target. There are tools (e.g. http://www.firecalc.com/ http://www.firecalc.com/, http://www.cfiresim.com/ http://www.cfiresim.com/) to run simulations based on historical market data. At 4% you need a portfolio equal to 25 years worth of expenses. Let's say you spend $60k a year in today's dollars. This works out to a monthly budget of $5k. If you can save $1.5M then that will pay your expenses for 30 years, without any other income, with a 94% chance of success. At 3% you need 33 years of expenses, or $2.0M, and that has a 100% chance of success. This is all based on past data of course (past performance does not imply future performance and all that). These are large sums of money, but it's possible for most professional workers, and especially couples, to accumulate them if they are fairly frugal and make a decent income. The time required entirely depends on what portion of your income you can save (see http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...). Assuming a constant income, as well as constant expenses while working and after, if you save 50% of your household income it will take 17 years to reach the 4% level. So start at age 30 and you'll be done by 47.
krisdol 11y ago
They're defining retirement as "you don't have a job and aren't looking for one", which is an egregious stretch of a definition. They're not financially independent or retired, they've given up looking for work worth doing.
- mrec 11y ago
  If they're neither working nor financially independent, what are they living on? Not a rhetorical question; I don't live in the US, and am a bit vague about its welfare system. Is this essentially about people moving back in with family?
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    We have nothing approaching basic income or housing that anybody could live off reasonably. Either these kids are living with parents, living off parent's money, or are living out of their cars. There is no in between here. I suspect that it's the former, which is really giving an awful impression about what is possible in the States. The vast majority of Americans need to work their asses off just to make rent. If you don't do that, you are either living off someone else's money, or don't have a house. End of story.
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      >We have nothing approaching basic income or housing that anybody could live off reasonably. State welfare programs, section 8, food stamps, "earned income credit", medicaid, SSI, TANF, SNAP, etc. There's lots of aid in the US. Over 100m people nationally are on some level of means tested welfare. That's pushing one third of this nation. National spending accounts for $1T in welfare spending. That's slightly less than Mexico's entire GDP; a country of 122m. http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA694.pdf http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA694.p... The narrative of the US not having any welfare is asinine. In fact, the spending is staggering. When I lived in poorer neighborhoods in Chicago, most of my neighbors were on a fair amount of welfare to the point where they never had to bother getting a job. If you're willing to live in an urban area and live a modest lifestyle its largely trivial to game welfare benefits for a living.
thecosas 11y ago
Could also just be a statistical anomaly. Saying it doubled in that age range, it could even come down to "this is what I wish the situation was". Thew title of this post is a little misleading and the wrong question to ask.
jazzyk 11y ago
A lot of people found a way to live on low income obtained from parents, disability benefits, temp jobs, renting out grandma's apartment, etc. Sharing apartments or living with their parents, etc. Given that a lot of job growth in the economic "recovery" (especially for younger people) has been in the minimum wage range, I don't blame them. If you can't even pay the most basic bills from a minimum-wage job to live independently, why bother?
tastynacho 11y ago
> There's a lot of bullshit work assigned in a typical corporate job yeah its called being young and being inexperienced. Gotta put the time in before you're qualified to enjoy the meat..
- sp332 11y ago
  And with no guarantee of upward mobility, why would someone put up with it?
  - pc86 11y ago
    Nothing is guaranteed, so I'm not sure what the lack of one has to do with anything.
  - CountSessine 11y ago
    Switching companies every 3 or 4 years is the new normal - you can't expect to ever get promoted within the same company. There's still upward mobility - its just that it's within an industry, not an individual company.
    - sp332 11y ago
      But I'm still a lot less likely to accept crap work just to hope that I get promoted later. The expected value of the upside is smaller, so should the downside be.
      - CountSessine 11y ago
        Agreed, but is that necessarily a bad thing? If your labour has market value and you're taking crap from your employer, shop around for a new job. The other way of saying that we don't have lifetime employment anymore is that we don't have to suffer through lifetime employment anymore. You don't have to tolerate stultifying bureaucracy. You don't have to suffer nitwit bosses. You don't have to deal with impossible coworkers. With an open labour market, you can work where you like. A couple of days ago someone posted patio11's blog article on his experience working in Japan as a salaryman. The other side of the security of lifetime employment over there is that you have to tolerate horrible working conditions at your lifetime employer, and the labour market is so rigid that if you ever leave your employer, no one else will ever hire you.
twothamendment 11y ago
Working to live just isn't worth it? What does that leave you with? When I started working I worked jobs I didn't want to do for the rest of my life, but it wasn't just about the money. I leaned skills, learned to work and learned I better find a new, better job - even if it is only slightly better. Some jobs only leave you with one important thing - a work ethic, and that is what gets you a better job, someday. I know, I'm just one person, but that is my story and I'm sticking to it. Maybe it will only get one person off their butt and doing something they don't enjoy.
- creshal 11y ago
  How long are people going to pretend that the lack of full employment for now close to 40 years everywhere across the globe is the fault of people being "too lazy" to work? You can't fix globalization and automation with personal work ethics.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
What's the alternative, "mooching to live"?
- hwstar 11y ago
  Working long enough to save enough money to have good investments to live off of so that you can say "screw you" to employers which offer mediocre jobs and working environments.
- Nadya 11y ago
  Financial Independence and accepting to live off $22-35k annually. Unless you have a larger investment pool or a well-above-average and stable ROI to increase that beyond 35k...
SonicSoul 11y ago
There's a lot of bullshit work assigned in a typical corporate job What jobs don't have that? As if startups magically solved this problem by giving employees nothing but innovative thought provoking problems and everything else is handled by worker elfs. No, every place has its share of bs work. the difference is that a portion (majority?) of corporate folks stopped caring to actually solve problems. Instead they do the minimum to keep their jobs. You can do the same thing every day, waste 30% of time chatting with coworkers, another 30% on the net, and then complain about how boring your job is. I've yet to see corporations that didn't have good problems to solve.
- cobaltblue 11y ago
  Almost every not-typical-big-corporate job has less bullshit work assigned than the lot of BS assigned to typical big corporate job workers. Startups and even mid-size companies don't magically solve the problem of having to do BS work, there's typically just a lot less of it. When what you do or don't do is all up to you, the portion of BS work goes to 0 because you don't want to do it so you don't. Companies fall on a BS scale that correlates to their size and determines how much BS work you don't want to do that you have to do anyway (or rather, you always have a choice, but if you don't do it then you're fired/the company goes out of business/a customer is pissed off and sues you/etc. which makes it not much of a choice at all).
  - SonicSoul 11y ago
    I've worked at larger co's (1k+ employees) where BS work was actively eradicated in order to have breathing space to move forward and innovate. This is possible but requires vigilant management and hiring the kind of people that want to make a difference. There's more red tape at corps which may be part of the BS you're pointing out but even that was actively fought. I see it similar to technical debt. It's easy to accumulate if you're not careful and easy to live with at first but will slowly come back and take you down.
    - cobaltblue 11y ago
      I would describe your experience as atypical, wouldn't you? Just like Valve's nearly-flat management is atypical and requires a certain mesh of personalities and pruning to work at all. Counterexamples exist, it's not a perfect correlation, but unless they're plentiful they don't really change the typical.

jophde 11y ago

Yea, I am sure the percentage of 20-somethings who are actually financially independent is less than .0001%. Everyone else inherited money or gave up all hope of finding a real job.

DINKDINK 11y ago
300e6*.0001/100 = 300 people in the USA. There's probably more than 300, 20 year olds who are living off private incomes.
- cobaltblue 11y ago
  Even worse, he said of 20-somethings (not out of the whole population, and not just 20 year olds) which leaves a start number around 45 million, or a mere 45 people in the USA. It's actually pretty easy to become financially independent before you hit 30 if you finish college on time (while you're 23) and get a 6-figure job out of college, and work for a few years with a small (sub-25k/yr) annual cost of living.
  - pc86 11y ago
    It's also "actually pretty easy to become financially independent" if you hit the lottery. Both our examples aren't really conducive to an actual discussion. 1. The number of fields allowing a new grad to get a six-figure job are very small. 2. The number of places offering the above while also allowing the new grad to live in an area where they can have a sub-$2k/mo footprint are incredibly limited. 3. Of the people who are actually able to take advantage of the above, the majority of them will have no interest in doing so. For every highly-compensated employee at Google living in a van in the parking lot there are several in houses they can't afford with credit card and student loan debt to boot. 4. Gaining financial independence for the sake of gaining financial independence is sort of a pointless goal. My guess is if you collected every person in the US who retired by the age of 30 and removed those who inherited money, won the lottery, and started a business, you could fit them in in a single large room.
    - 11y ago

erroneousfunk 11y ago

John Keynes and the 15 hour work week make the news rounds every now and then: http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-would-be-working-15-hour-weeks-why-was-he-so-wrong http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-... Perhaps we were wrong in predicting that he was entirely wrong. Obviously, companies themselves aren't going to be huge proponents of providing "part time" workers with full time benefits or providing opportunities for occasional employment, but people are finding ways through more creative methods that may not quite register as "in the workforce" according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. People stay in school for much longer because they can afford to (okay, yes, student loans are a problem, but there's also not a critical "you must be in the workforce otherwise your family farm will fail and everyone will starve" motivation), how hard they work is more often seen as an "option" rather than a survival need.

tinalumfoil 11y ago

> When you're in your twenties you should be spending that time really exploring and thinking about the things that give you meaning. Once you start growing up and living a life more you won't be able to do that again. -Digit CEO (from video) I hate the idea that once you leave college and get a job your life of having fun is over. As though fiscal irresponsibility is necessary for finding your life's "meaning" and you can only do that in the four years you spend at college. I really have to question someone that found their life's meaning at a point in their life where they couldn't bother to be financially responsible for themselves.

taurath 11y ago
If you want to make enough income to have financial security in the US in most industries that means taking a salaried job, and ~15 days of personal time off not including weekends and holidays. Its not that having to work 40 hours a week doesn't leave time enough to find your life's meaning, but its damn hard to do more than attend 2 major outside-of-norm events or go on any journeys that aren't majorly bookended by going back to work.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I hate the other end of that idea (reality) - that you have to grow up and be responsible and stop having fun or be spontaneous in your life, because from now on it's career, marriage, career, kids, career, retirement and death.
- eanzenberg 11y ago
  Which are all choices you make.
  - steve-howard 11y ago
    Career is certainly not a choice I make. It's a necessity. Hell, I'd probably enjoy it more if I didn't need it.
    - 11y ago

swagv 11y ago

The article did a poor job of explaining its titular premise, imo

twothamendment 11y ago
Agreed, and the video in the article had some advice that needs updated. What 20-year old is going to spend less because their credit card is frozen in a block of ice? I don't touch mine that often. There are so many ways to pay, service that already have the card number. It isn't a bad idea, just a bit out of date. I think I could freeze mine for most of the month and not change anything and I don't use cash.
LVB 11y ago
Yeah, looking at their graph: "Why are you retiring?" "Because I'm retired." Thanks!
steve-howard 11y ago
Especially since the number jumped from 1% to 2%, and even assuming that's a significant difference it still deserves a lot more qualifiers.

tracker1 11y ago

Grr... autoplay video with a toolbar that auto-hides.

shawn-furyan 11y ago
As a bonus, if you accidentally scroll down far enough to kick off the here's-a-random-unrelated-article misfeature, then you're rewarded with a second autoplay of the video!

marshray 11y ago

Perhaps more are working for under-the-table wages.

PaulHoule 11y ago

Nothing gets in the New York Times unless it interests people over 50. Back when the boomers were young there were huge numbers of article about hippies, drugs and all that stuff because old people like to read about what young people are doing and try it out for themselves. It makes them feel young. Old farts have been obsessed with iTunes, iPhones, iPads, and all that i-stuff for Apple as long as they've been making it. I think people of all ages and social classes are in a bad mood these days. I saw some rich guy on CNBC this morning and he was pissed because we don't appreciate everything rich people do for us and it is not hard to find pissed off poor people. Lots of old people like Trump because they are pissed off about this or that. People are pissed off about health care, obamacare, etc. It is so ungrateful when you consider that 200 years ago people had no idea why infectious diseases made you sick, there were no painkillers, no psych meds, no blood pressure meds, no insulin or thyroid hormone. No antibiotics, antivirals, no heart surgery, warfarin, etc. For almost all of human history faith healing was the first line treatment for everything and now people are pissed. People get pissed off driving and don't think it is a miracle that we have cars, roads, gas, mechanics, etc. Anyway you've got to get over this idea that any generation is special; often it is much more like 10% of the boomers did it, and 30% of X, and 50% of Y and 70% of the Millenials do it -- most generational change is a "diffusion of innovation" situation. If you want to understand the post 2000 period you have to understand the 1960s and 1970s and a good book from that era is http://www.amazon.com/uncommitted-alienated-youth-American-society/dp/B0006BMZYC http://www.amazon.com/uncommitted-alienated-youth-American-s... and it explains a lot of things like the hippie phenomenon and then the cult boom, school shooters and why people who don't have it bad join ISIS, all that. It is also the first academic book to use the word "postmodern". He says "Our age inspires scant enthusiasm." and that is it. People don't really believe anything they are told and just go through the motions. For instance, look at defined contribution pensions. There has been Republican FUD against Social Security since it began, and now we have these private plans which might work if people had money to put in them, and some of us are fortunate enough to do so, but a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck -- personally I still think investing in the stock market is the best massy thing to do, but looking at the chart of the last 20 years I am not going to blame anybody who thinks it is a casino. People are not committed, they are not engaged, they don't feel like stakeholders, they don't feel that they are valued, they see organizations such as schools, colleges, the military, corporations as exploitative, treating people like racehorses, burning them out, throwing them away. At my local startup incubator there was this conversation I just couldn't take from some guy who had all this bullshit and weird ideas about networking and at some point it's like "bud... if you are talking to a VC they want to hear you are working on product and talking to customers" Yet, disengaged people see something like "Y Combinator" and they see it like Harvard Business School, a credential, social proof because if you are disengaged you aren't experiencing the joy of learning, creating, etc.

DickingAround 11y ago

They're not retired. They're probably selling drugs. Not kidding. We have a lot of drug selling inmates (0.5% of Americans are in jail for drugs). It's also an industry people can get jobs in without experience and that booms in a recession. These retired kids are probably being honest in saying they're not just 'staying at home'. They're probably selling drugs. It's a job. Just not one they want to list on a survey.

DickingAround 11y ago
I think this is a possible/probable explanation? Anyone who downvoted it want to explain why the downvote?

Spooky23 11y ago

I know a guy who was an IT generalist making decent money, who met and married a woman who is a physican when she was in med school. Her first gig was to an impoverished rural area (to accelerate payments of med school loans), so he quit and went with her. Now he's a 30-something stay at home dad. He does a few remote consulting gigs, more to stay in touch than for the money.

nickbauman 11y ago

Totally anecdotal: A few months ago a friend was down by the Mississippi river park in downtown Minneapolis where there were a group of young homeless guys drinking under a bridge trestle. Turns out these guys had undergraduate degrees with massive student loan debt. They explained they'd decided to become homeless because they didn't see any way to ever pay it back.

VLM 11y ago

The numbers involved are extremely small. Twice nothing is still roughly nothing. My suspicion is at least some young women married an (older?) guy and are doing the stay at home mom thing. Its not like the economy is booming, they're not missing out on anything. "Maybe when the economy is better, and my kid is in preschool, my art degree will really pay off"

seizethecheese 11y ago

Summary: the percent of people aged 20-24 who answered the survey an employment survey as "retired" changed from 1 to 2%. Bloomberg then finds a narrative and beats it to death.

CountSessine 11y ago

Fewer people willing or able to take a job might eventually cause a shortage of workers, leading to surge in wages and longer-term inflationary pressures, according to Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman. "We're going to be running out of labor as we go through time,'' Blinder said on Bloomberg Television Dec. 31. Oh, my. I hadn't even thought of that. I guess we'll need to expand the availability of slave-labour employer-controlled visas and guest worker programs, won't we? Let's forward this to our lobbyist.