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True security is a lie, but "relatively comfortably secure for the foreseeable future" is not. These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't b

True security is a lie, but "relatively comfortably secure for the foreseeable future" is not. These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't be homeless in old age assuming no major surprises or threats from society and the environment changing. I would say most younger people don't earn enough or have enough assets to reach that level of basic confidence. After all, if you've rented all your life so far due to inability to buy a place to live, you probably know, in the back of your mind, that when you retire, you can't see any way to pay the rent unless something changes between now and then. No need for any catastrophic surprises. That's foreseeable.

ActorNightly 5y ago
Thats looking it through the last generations lens where stability = a geographical location to live with a house on it. Ironically, as climate change effects become more and more prominent, going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes.
- iso1210 5y ago
  If you have freedom of movement over a large area, if you don't have breakdown of law and order, if people don't start lynching others when they come into their area.
  - asdff 5y ago
    RV is the perfect vehicle then for making your way to safety at the nearest operating military base.
    - WJW 5y ago
      Why would the military let some rando in a RV into their base?
      - asdff 5y ago
        Historically the U.S. military provides aid to refugees rather than shoot them at the gate so I'm banking on that when I roll up to camp pendelton in 2050
      - iso1210 5y ago
        Because Will Smith has a dead alien in the back
- JTbane 5y ago
  >going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes what's the plan when fuel shortages start happening and your RV can't be kept rolling?
  - FractalHQ 5y ago
    I wonder what the EV RV industry is looking like..
    - samjett 5y ago
      Near nonexistent. Battery size requirements and battery charging rates make EV RVS either really expensive and really impractical for distance travel. You would need to put a huge battery (say, 300 KwH, which would cost $60,000 just for the battery), to get a reasonable range of 200-300 miles between charges, depending upon the efficiency of your RV. And then, even at a level 3 DCFC Charging station (providing 50 KW) you're looking at 6 hrs of charging to fully charge the battery.
      - eddanger 5y ago
        In this post-apocalyptic scenario I think the range would be secondary to using the battery for day-to-day living. The RV could have solar and keep the battery topped off all the time.
      - Kirby64 5y ago
        You know how much new RVs cost right? 200-400k is not unusual for a 'big' RV. Also, with a bigger battery comes higher limits on how fast you can charge. If you have a 300kWh battery you should be able to charge it at 300kW all day long. That said, it doesn't really exist since there is no market for it at the moment. RV sales aren't exactly high, so the niche for EV RVs is even smaller. Plus there's no real infrastructure out for it now. I suspect once EV Semis become more mainstream we'll see that trickle down to RV users. They can charge at the same place a semi would charge at.
      - ActorNightly 5y ago
- athenot 5y ago
  > going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes. That's fine when young and healthy, but when you're older, have several recurring doctor appointments and some mild impairments, a home is a lot better. Not saying it can't be done, after all there are nomad populations with elderly people who live on the road. But they usually have a support system that travels along, too.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Indeed a recent family experience revealed that if you're in a town where you don't have a primary care doctor and you get sick, you're SOL. We ended up having to fly my relative back to his home town so he could be treated.
inglor_cz 5y ago
"These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't be homeless in old age assuming no major surprises or threats from society and the environment changing." Uh, that is quite a pessimistic take from someone debating on HN, which is a forum of IT-related professionals. Maybe your level of required confidence is too high. Vast majority of old people in the developed world do not end up homeless and IT professionals are even better off than an average Western employee. So "assuming no major surprises or threats..." and assuming you are not at risk of becoming alcoholic or drug dependent, you do not really need to fear homelessness.
- jlokier 5y ago
  Here on HN, you might be surprised at the range of backgrounds people come from. There are people from all over the world. It's a startup forum, so it attracts "indie hacker" types, entrepreneurs and bootstrappers of all kinds vaguely tech related, and people whose IT interest is primarily open source, not just well-paid salarymen. By "a lot of assets" I mostly mean "a house", but a decent size pension would count instead. Both are out of reach for many people now. I agree that most old people in the developed world don't end up homeless. On the other hand, there's a growing economic housing crisis affecting a lot of people in almost every developed country. Mostly affecting (current) younger people, and most (current) older people are almost oblivious to it. It's working its way up the age range. This is new. You cannot assume what worked will always work, when there are factors that appear to be changing across generations. Many people are paying >50% of their income in rent, and rents are still rising in most places faster than incomes. Most renters cannot find a way to get on the house buying ladder. If things carry on as they are, many people currently young will retire while renting. If you're paying 50% income on rent now, what are you going to do at pension time, as pensions are typically 1/3 or less of the income prior to retirement. You'll have to carry on working, but that gets harder with age, faster for some people than others. I agree with you most will probably not end up homeless, but the point is, for that to work out, something will have to change. I personally know an IT person who reached retirement age and is dependent on state benefits to pay their ongoing rent, and found those state benefits enough for almost zero properties in the area they lived for decades prior, making it hard to find a place from which to continue looking after their own older parents. They struggle, and have to work on the side. And another, skilled and knowledgable software engineer, currently paid well, who for a period last year was unable to pay for rent or food due to running out of money and access to credit. They needed help from local volunteers just to eat. How can that happen, you may think? This is HN, where not everyone is working for a company. Like many HN readers who are entrepreneurial (it's notionally a startup forum), they were a business bootstrapper, and it's easy for that to become financially precarious when things don't go so well. Add a badly timed pandemic into the mix, government support for everyone except small business owners, and a time where jobs were not proving easy to get, and you have a recipe where homelessness really was realistic for a skilled IT person and, unfortunately, their family. I'm sure they're not the only one around here who's had to seriously face it last year. My own pension is projected to be less than my current rent, which is already low for the area, so I think it's rational to be thinking about that.

ActorNightly 5y ago

Thats looking it through the last generations lens where stability = a geographical location to live with a house on it. Ironically, as climate change effects become more and more prominent, going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes.

iso1210 5y ago
If you have freedom of movement over a large area, if you don't have breakdown of law and order, if people don't start lynching others when they come into their area.
- asdff 5y ago
  RV is the perfect vehicle then for making your way to safety at the nearest operating military base.
  - WJW 5y ago
    Why would the military let some rando in a RV into their base?
    - asdff 5y ago
      Historically the U.S. military provides aid to refugees rather than shoot them at the gate so I'm banking on that when I roll up to camp pendelton in 2050
    - iso1210 5y ago
      Because Will Smith has a dead alien in the back
JTbane 5y ago
>going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes what's the plan when fuel shortages start happening and your RV can't be kept rolling?
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  I wonder what the EV RV industry is looking like..
  - samjett 5y ago
    Near nonexistent. Battery size requirements and battery charging rates make EV RVS either really expensive and really impractical for distance travel. You would need to put a huge battery (say, 300 KwH, which would cost $60,000 just for the battery), to get a reasonable range of 200-300 miles between charges, depending upon the efficiency of your RV. And then, even at a level 3 DCFC Charging station (providing 50 KW) you're looking at 6 hrs of charging to fully charge the battery.
    - eddanger 5y ago
      In this post-apocalyptic scenario I think the range would be secondary to using the battery for day-to-day living. The RV could have solar and keep the battery topped off all the time.
    - Kirby64 5y ago
      You know how much new RVs cost right? 200-400k is not unusual for a 'big' RV. Also, with a bigger battery comes higher limits on how fast you can charge. If you have a 300kWh battery you should be able to charge it at 300kW all day long. That said, it doesn't really exist since there is no market for it at the moment. RV sales aren't exactly high, so the niche for EV RVs is even smaller. Plus there's no real infrastructure out for it now. I suspect once EV Semis become more mainstream we'll see that trickle down to RV users. They can charge at the same place a semi would charge at.
    - ActorNightly 5y ago
athenot 5y ago
> going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes. That's fine when young and healthy, but when you're older, have several recurring doctor appointments and some mild impairments, a home is a lot better. Not saying it can't be done, after all there are nomad populations with elderly people who live on the road. But they usually have a support system that travels along, too.
- analog31 5y ago
  Indeed a recent family experience revealed that if you're in a town where you don't have a primary care doctor and you get sick, you're SOL. We ended up having to fly my relative back to his home town so he could be treated.

inglor_cz 5y ago

"These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't be homeless in old age assuming no major surprises or threats from society and the environment changing." Uh, that is quite a pessimistic take from someone debating on HN, which is a forum of IT-related professionals. Maybe your level of required confidence is too high. Vast majority of old people in the developed world do not end up homeless and IT professionals are even better off than an average Western employee. So "assuming no major surprises or threats..." and assuming you are not at risk of becoming alcoholic or drug dependent, you do not really need to fear homelessness.

jlokier 5y ago
Here on HN, you might be surprised at the range of backgrounds people come from. There are people from all over the world. It's a startup forum, so it attracts "indie hacker" types, entrepreneurs and bootstrappers of all kinds vaguely tech related, and people whose IT interest is primarily open source, not just well-paid salarymen. By "a lot of assets" I mostly mean "a house", but a decent size pension would count instead. Both are out of reach for many people now. I agree that most old people in the developed world don't end up homeless. On the other hand, there's a growing economic housing crisis affecting a lot of people in almost every developed country. Mostly affecting (current) younger people, and most (current) older people are almost oblivious to it. It's working its way up the age range. This is new. You cannot assume what worked will always work, when there are factors that appear to be changing across generations. Many people are paying >50% of their income in rent, and rents are still rising in most places faster than incomes. Most renters cannot find a way to get on the house buying ladder. If things carry on as they are, many people currently young will retire while renting. If you're paying 50% income on rent now, what are you going to do at pension time, as pensions are typically 1/3 or less of the income prior to retirement. You'll have to carry on working, but that gets harder with age, faster for some people than others. I agree with you most will probably not end up homeless, but the point is, for that to work out, something will have to change. I personally know an IT person who reached retirement age and is dependent on state benefits to pay their ongoing rent, and found those state benefits enough for almost zero properties in the area they lived for decades prior, making it hard to find a place from which to continue looking after their own older parents. They struggle, and have to work on the side. And another, skilled and knowledgable software engineer, currently paid well, who for a period last year was unable to pay for rent or food due to running out of money and access to credit. They needed help from local volunteers just to eat. How can that happen, you may think? This is HN, where not everyone is working for a company. Like many HN readers who are entrepreneurial (it's notionally a startup forum), they were a business bootstrapper, and it's easy for that to become financially precarious when things don't go so well. Add a badly timed pandemic into the mix, government support for everyone except small business owners, and a time where jobs were not proving easy to get, and you have a recipe where homelessness really was realistic for a skilled IT person and, unfortunately, their family. I'm sure they're not the only one around here who's had to seriously face it last year. My own pension is projected to be less than my current rent, which is already low for the area, so I think it's rational to be thinking about that.