7 ms·

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 dea

by 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.

by hwstar 11y ago

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.