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I'm about to turn 43, and I don't expect to see anything coming from my FICA taxes. I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held f

I'm about to turn 43, and I don't expect to see anything coming from my FICA taxes. I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held for me until I retire, and that unless the working population starts growing significantly larger soon, there won't be enough workers paying into the system when I'm ready to retire. What I expect is going to happen is that the retirement age will keep climbing, and I'll be chasing it up until I die. I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work. I'm disappointed by this, but I accept that it's necessary to keep the system running for the people who need it more than I expect to, and I'm grateful that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to.

hga 13y ago
"I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held for me until I retire...." And this is not even completely true. From 1983 to 2009 the surplus in FICA taxes compared to expenses was just spent (there are filing cabinets with unmarketable IOUs from the government, what Al Gore's "lockbox" was all about); only in 2010 did the main Social Security fund start running a real deficit requiring money from the general fund. I wonder about the retirement age climbing concept. Among other things, it's an even heavier burden on the young, e.g. your not retiring means 1 or 2 of them won't get a job in the first place. How long will they support a system that squeezes them so much? (There's lots more than this, of course, like non-recourse student loans.) What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs? I said "1 or 2" since its quite common to replace more expensive older workers with a couple of young ones. Way too many programmers my age, a decade older, are finding it nearly impossible to stay employed in the field (another reason we don't care for the H-1B, L-1 etc. visa programs); I sincerely hope your optimism "that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to." is well founded. I found it more and more difficult to find work starting sometime after age 35 until I got a clue and hid my age (easy since fortunate genetics makes me look decades younger than I am ... well, until I slip up and e.g. mention PDP-11s, which once got an "How old are you?!?!!" exclamation in an interview :-).
- DougWebb 13y ago
  "What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs?" Blind optimism? I don't really have alternatives. I do think there will be a potential for self-employment as a consultant, using my years of experience (constantly kept up to date) to keep me more productive than a team a younger programmers. I'm also hoping that the biases against older programmers will fade away as I, and the overall population of software developers, gets older. There are always alternate career paths too. My skills and experience cover the entire breadth and depth of developing software products, so I have a pretty wide range of jobs I can handle. That should help me stay employable too.
  - hga 13y ago
    If you have any talent or desire, you might want to add a bit of sysadmin work, especially setting up systems (in my case, I start with building them from "scratch", but I like that sort of thing). I.e. broaden your problem solving scope. In small companies I also generally took over the duty of doing backups, it's something I like to do and its importance cannot be overstated. If you have the aptitude for consulting (I'm too much of an introvert to do that), yep, that's the classic thing to transition to. Other options are embedded and seriously classified work. We're now going on two decades of bias against older programmers ... that hope may be misfounded (well, unless it's some young idiot that makes the first mistake that kills tens of thousands of people, the only thing that will substantially change our field in my opinion). It would be really nice if this changes, though. It would certainly be good for our field, then again, a counterpoint to the embedded recommendation is that device manufacturers have now trained us very well in the art of resetting borked devices....
dragonwriter 13y ago
> I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work. Unless you were working at a near-poverty level income, Social Security has never been intended to come anywhere close to replacing what you could earn by continuing to work if you were physically able to do so. What it was intended to do, from the outset, is provide a minimum level of support to mitigate poverty in those who because of age or infirmity could no longer work. This isn't a result of changes, its all the system was ever built to do. There already are benefit limits in Social Security, and while "means testing" to reduce them further for people with other sources of income is often proposed, it doesn't seem to have much traction (beyond the existing, long-established practice of making SS benefits taxable income to those who have more than a certain amount of other income, which is a weak form of means testing.)

hga 13y ago

"I know that my FICA taxes are funding today's retirees, and not being held for me until I retire...." And this is not even completely true. From 1983 to 2009 the surplus in FICA taxes compared to expenses was just spent (there are filing cabinets with unmarketable IOUs from the government, what Al Gore's "lockbox" was all about); only in 2010 did the main Social Security fund start running a real deficit requiring money from the general fund. I wonder about the retirement age climbing concept. Among other things, it's an even heavier burden on the young, e.g. your not retiring means 1 or 2 of them won't get a job in the first place. How long will they support a system that squeezes them so much? (There's lots more than this, of course, like non-recourse student loans.) What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs? I said "1 or 2" since its quite common to replace more expensive older workers with a couple of young ones. Way too many programmers my age, a decade older, are finding it nearly impossible to stay employed in the field (another reason we don't care for the H-1B, L-1 etc. visa programs); I sincerely hope your optimism "that as a software engineer I'm likely to be able to earn a good income doing work that I enjoy for as long as I want to." is well founded. I found it more and more difficult to find work starting sometime after age 35 until I got a clue and hid my age (easy since fortunate genetics makes me look decades younger than I am ... well, until I slip up and e.g. mention PDP-11s, which once got an "How old are you?!?!!" exclamation in an interview :-).

DougWebb 13y ago
"What makes people your age think you'll be able to keep your jobs?" Blind optimism? I don't really have alternatives. I do think there will be a potential for self-employment as a consultant, using my years of experience (constantly kept up to date) to keep me more productive than a team a younger programmers. I'm also hoping that the biases against older programmers will fade away as I, and the overall population of software developers, gets older. There are always alternate career paths too. My skills and experience cover the entire breadth and depth of developing software products, so I have a pretty wide range of jobs I can handle. That should help me stay employable too.
- hga 13y ago
  If you have any talent or desire, you might want to add a bit of sysadmin work, especially setting up systems (in my case, I start with building them from "scratch", but I like that sort of thing). I.e. broaden your problem solving scope. In small companies I also generally took over the duty of doing backups, it's something I like to do and its importance cannot be overstated. If you have the aptitude for consulting (I'm too much of an introvert to do that), yep, that's the classic thing to transition to. Other options are embedded and seriously classified work. We're now going on two decades of bias against older programmers ... that hope may be misfounded (well, unless it's some young idiot that makes the first mistake that kills tens of thousands of people, the only thing that will substantially change our field in my opinion). It would be really nice if this changes, though. It would certainly be good for our field, then again, a counterpoint to the embedded recommendation is that device manufacturers have now trained us very well in the art of resetting borked devices....

dragonwriter 13y ago

> I also expect that income/wealth-based limits will be imposed which will cap whatever I can get well below the amount I'll need to come anywhere close to replacing what I can earn by continuing to work. Unless you were working at a near-poverty level income, Social Security has never been intended to come anywhere close to replacing what you could earn by continuing to work if you were physically able to do so. What it was intended to do, from the outset, is provide a minimum level of support to mitigate poverty in those who because of age or infirmity could no longer work. This isn't a result of changes, its all the system was ever built to do. There already are benefit limits in Social Security, and while "means testing" to reduce them further for people with other sources of income is often proposed, it doesn't seem to have much traction (beyond the existing, long-established practice of making SS benefits taxable income to those who have more than a certain amount of other income, which is a weak form of means testing.)