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Gonna leave a bit of advice for any young folks that might see this. Something I wish to god someone had told me when I was 20.

Start an annuity plan. They're generally stable, all but guaranteed to accrue money. You can set a percentage of your paycheck to be deposited automatically into the account. If you have the option to do this through your employer, do it, find out if they match the deposit like mine. Put 10% of your paycheck in there. After 10 years, I have $40,000 sitting in a retirement account with a progressive series of bonds set to mature in between now and my retirement age. Those bonds will roll back into shorter term bonds as they mature, and add more value to the account. My projected retirement age is still 72, but at least I know that money is there.

Also, after 4 years, the account matures and you're able to borrow against it, like collateral for a loan. So if I wanted to right now, I could take that money and use it as a down payment on a house. I'll be expected to put it back, but the interest is generally lower than a home owner's loan.

she has about $75,000 saved up for a downpayment

Oh you poor child. That’s not even close to enough. 💀

LOL I'm never retiring. I've already accepted that I'll be working until I'm dead. There are those who get dealt the right cards and will get to retire comfortably. I'm just not one of them.

My wife has a job with an awesome pension and as a result there is basically no situation she will ever leave. I pointed out to her that the golden handcuffs are still golden.

One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don't want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother's corpse to get it.

What am I saying? MBAs learning? Hahaha I love being silly.

Hell. Gen X also are worried about retirement.

Will social security be here in 15 years? My 401k has not kept up at all.... Everything today costs soooooooo much there's no real room for saving.

No.

But one day I will get so desperatly poor that taking out someone in siphoning wealth from the country and ending them might seem like a fitting end.

If we don't change things anyways.

The next forty years will look like absolute hell and the lack of proper services for the explosive number of diseases in the millennial cohort will directly contribute.

1. Milliennials by and large don't have enough money to retire, and they are experiencing in striking numbers high rates of immunodeficiency and cancers. (I was personally diagnosed with cancer at 42. You know, the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything...) This will mean they will need more elder care and sooner... and they won't really be able to afford it.

2. No Child Left Behind has properly fucked US education for the foreseeable future, and US education was abysmal before that already. The elderly are going to be being taken care of by adults who may be functionally illiterate and when you're functionally illiterate, you can become anti-vax even if you got hired as caretaker for the elderly. (Not all will grow up to be functionally illiterate, but if we're to take teachers at their word, the gap between the struggling kids and the smart kids is wider than ever. As in C students functionally don't exist, only A students and F students, and the F students are the larger group who are being passed on to higher grades just to hit numbers.)

3. On top of education being gutted and there being a dangerous future of incapable people being put in these jobs because there's no one else to do them: The collapse in birth rate because nobody can afford to have fucking kids will also make this problem worse as fewer and fewer workers will be available to take care of more and more elderly and infirm people.

4. Most of the places that take care of the elderly are being bought up at rapid pace by investment groups, private equity, hedge funds, and the like, and all they do is cut services, make things worse, and cause more suffering and death so they can wring more money out of people suffering at the end of their lives. How many of these businesses will even still exist in 20 years? Many of them are shutting down constantly because the numbers just don't add up, or because the private equity group that bought it has finished hollowing it out and there's simply no money left.

5. Because of all of this, we will see an absolute explosion of homelessness in the elderly.

6. You can bet your ass fuck-nothing will be done to prevent any of this. Especially if Trump wins in November, then we're dealing with this process outright accelerating at a breakneck pace.

7. Oh and just for "fun" we can expect to see a lot more police violence against poverty-striken old people. "STOP RESISTING OLD MAN!"

EDIT: Oh yeah, and that's not even counting climate change, finite amounts of topsoil left, potential pandemics, and the fact that most of the world doesn't even have access to clean water. I try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.

EDIT II: Get involved in Mutual Aid Groups. We all have skills. No one is coming to save us. No government or political party or corporation. We have to save each other, and that will be very difficult to achieve. I forget the writer, but she said something like "No dictator is ever going to bring about the revolution. It will always have to come from the bottom organizing together." The only thing we can do is help one another. It will not be easy or fair or entirely successful.