this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
44 points (89.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35810 readers
1853 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It seems to me that the employer will fund it either way. Maybe I'm misremembering stories of pensions being mismanaged and lost. I think the most important thing is that the employer actually does something to fund a retirement, in my way of thinking the 401k approach puts me in control of the money so I don't rely on someone else to not fail.

Whether it's promised bonuses, stocks, or retirement funds, my motto is always "show me the money", and I'll believe it when it's in my hands.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

By the time you retire you should be out of volatile market investments.

[โ€“] frezik@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago

The stock portion is reduced, yes, but there's almost always some kind of mix of stocks in the portfolio. That's not necessarily the main issue.

First, you may not get to choose the timing. A lot of older people got trapped in the 2008 downturn. They were planning on retiring a few years out, but they lost their jobs and never got them back. Not only was their portfolio unprepared just based on when they planned to retire, but also the stock crash killed a chunk of what they had. Double wammy of losing their job and destroying their portfolio.

Second, inflation hits hard. If there's a period of high inflation right when you retire, that can really hurt your savings regardless of how it's distributed. One of the things those forced 2008 retirees had going for them was that we had a period of relatively low inflation for the next decade. If you took out housing (older people often own their home outright), inflation was sometimes negative.

Capitalism, even when it generally makes line go up, does so in a spiky way. Those spikes cause problems that tend to hit the working class the hardest. Sometimes in ways that cannot be recovered.

There are some liberal economists, particularly of a Modern Monetary Theory bent, who do argue for policies that would flatten growth in return for predictability. Capitalism always goes for the sugar rush of high gains, though. For example, the Fed left rates at rock bottom for far too long, thus letting the market continue extremely high gains (over 20% per year of the sp500, when 7% is a typical long term average). Likewise, you have corps chasing high profits and assuming post pandemic pent up demand would continue indefinitely. Which is now leading to layoffs while major stockholders continue to sweep it in. Both of these lead to the recent high inflation.

I think the efforts to flatten it out are doomed. Capitalism can't solve its own problems.