That sucks my friend. I know the value of mine plummeted and I had very little to spare to contribute in 2009 and 2010.
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That totally assumes an employer match and a continuous job and being young enough that 401ks even existed when you started working and that your employer didnāt screw with it, ā¦
ā¦But sure, itās your own fault youāre not rich.
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Thatās life. Not much I can do about it but just keep on. Both parents gone now and since they were still pretty comfortable my sister and I are a bit better off financially ourselves but not like we would have been. Iāll have to keep working as long as I can, and changes in communication technology forced me to reinvent myself professionally so itās all been very interesting. 
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Iām rolling up on 63. I was 30 before I really started to make enough to invest in retirement savings. Fortunately, my father taught me how to do that and Iāve managed to weather a couple of downturns and poor spending decisions. Iām hoping to retire at 65 and hold out for SS until 70. I live a pretty simple lifestyle. It doesnāt take a lot of money to be me.
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A pretty simple lifestyle is definitely the ticket. If you can cobble together a SS check and some savings, life can be OK. The big challenge is keeping the health costs down (buy the best Medigap you can afford) and trying to hold on to some cash for when you canāt do most things yourself anymore.
ETA Getting old is expensive!
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You pay taxes on your 401(k) withdrawals, as one does with traditional IRA withdrawals. The scandal here is that the Roth IRA allows these individuals to never pay taxes on their investment gains at all.
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The game has always been rigged, but it has never been more obvious than it is now.
Itās like them good olā boys always say, fuck poor people.
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As I recall, when the economy tanked under Bush the Lesser, most companies which were previously offering matches eliminated their matches. I suspect that many of them have never restored their matches, either.
It also assumes that your salary exceeded some specific minimum amount and that you had no need to make early withdrawals from your 401(k).
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May need to set the triggering balance higher- retirement can last a long time so youād expect a large balance just before you retire.
I donāt know the rules for traditional IRAs . Would requiring all Roth balances over $5 million to be converted to traditional IRAs work?
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Oh, me too. I donāt need a sailboat and such. Work or play, itās all about the skillz. Learn to cook, hike and bike, fishing, thereās so many wonderful pastimes that donāt cost anything.
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Iām talking about the gains, not the account total. So if they liquidate $2M worth of stock, they get the first $500k tax-free and the rest is taxed like any other income.
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Not only that. Many, many companies eliminated their non-contributory retirement plans too. Or froze them.
So much for the old argument that employers will take care of their people and government does not need to.
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Whatās going to be interesting is what happens when the boomer and tail end plus generation X estates worth several trillion dollars is dumped into the economy. Expect a rise in the number of foundations as well conspicuous consumption but much of it will probably be eaten up by health care costs, especially for cognitive and long term care.
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That makes sense- weād need good rules for inheritance and using it as collateral for loans
I think a ban on purchasing non-public securities or anything else that doesnāt have an easily verified initial market value is also an important reform
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Covid apparently initiates measurable cognitive decline.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext
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Which is why many people are working longer than they had planned, including me.
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This article is somewhat misleading. It is possible to have a conventional IRA this big without IPO-type stocks available only to a select few insiders. Hereās how: a company-sponsored 401k plan with a good match used fully by a well-paid individual over time OR a self-funded pension plan (such as SEP) used by a biz owner. The keys are beaucoup fundings and 15 to 20 years of smart investment decisions. When you leave the workforce, turn this chunk of change into an IRA because of better inheritance rules. I know of radiologists, as one example of highly paid biz owners, with $5M retirement buckets turning into IRAs on retirement. Taxes are inevitable upon inheritance by non-spousal heirs. ā¢ā¢ā¢ ROTH-IRA-abuse is something else. There should be better rules about how these are funded, of course.
No one has taken advantage of loopholes. The fortunes sheltered in Roth IRAS is a feature not a bug of these vehicles. One does not even a need and attorney or accountant to do what Thiel and others have done. Itās easy. Itās legal. And itās rationale. The mistake Congress and the IRS made was failing to cap the amount that one can hold in an IRA ā be it a traditional or Roth IRA.
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If you hear the words āFinancial innovationā you should reach for your revolver.
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My first point here is that itās not a scandal or abusive when a 401k worked as advertised and expected when it was held up as a perfect replacement for pensions. The scandal is that there are so few people with 401kās that worked as advertised after 30 years, not that a few such people exist.
My second point is that because five million is about where an employee who did what the lawās proponents insisted most middle class workers could and should do over 30 years with employers doing what was then expected to be the bare minimum to help, itās wrong to use that amount as some kind of populist guillotine threshold rather than an amount that would have been impossible absent manipulation. There is such a number. Iāve identified an easy, obvious metric to determine that threshold that ProPublica could and would have found if it had bothered to talk to people who had actual expertise rather than just going with leftist sophomore outrage that there are old people who managed to save a lot of money. Its a mistake consistent with the naĆÆvetĆ© thatās undermined the usefulness of all of of ProPublicaās tax abuse reporting in identifying the change actually needed.
Because yes, the one of the real scandals here isnāt that there are a few people for whom the 401k model worked as advertised but, rather, that there are so few of them. The other scandal, which it chose to bury under leftist puritanical outrage that anyone managed to save a lot of money is that there are people who have more in 401ks than it is possible for them to have absent abusive manipulation of the law to tax shelter senior executive compensation.
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