Aseahawkfan wrote:I can't support moving away from social security. I've found there are too many people that don't care about money and don't know how to invest or manage it well. So providing them with a minimum income and teaching them to focus on taking care of shelter needs in old age allows us to maintain a floor for poverty with the elderly. Like I joke about, I don't want to get robbed by senior citizens. Poverty is the primary driver of crime of all sorts. The more impoverished you allow your people to become, the more likely you are to have crime or something worse like violent attempts to force socialism on a nation in an ill-designed attempt to create a better life for everyone that doesn't work. But they people in power don't care once they take power and start deciding who deserves what and trying to maintain a minimum subsistence life with no or very little economic growth or activity.
My parents weren't great with money. No one in my family taught me. I learned I didn't want to be poor when I read a book called The Art of the Deal about our current president when I was 17. I found his story fascinating in how he used leverage in real estate, how he was in bankruptcy owing 4 billion against 2 billion in assets, how he extricated himself from the situation during a severe real estate downturn, and how he lived on a 100,000 a month which he considered living on a budget which blew my mind. I thought after reading this that wealthy people have a completely different view of the world than working people. Then I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Nicely written book also illustrating the difference between how a working person thinks of money and assets and how a wealthy person thinks of money and assets.
After reading these books, I decided to get into investing. I wanted to use my money to buy assets that grew in value rather than spend on consumption. Never got into property as I don't enjoy owning property because I don't care about taking care of it or all the associated expenses, but I like owning companies through stock ownership. Took a huge loss during the Tech Bubble burst, but recovered from it over the years. I imagine everyone learns a hard lesson investing if they do it long enough. I didn't know how to protect myself from a catastrophic loss back then as I do now.
I look at humans and some are very good or at least adequate at managing finances and retirement. Some are great at it and they benefit immensely. Most are pretty bad at money management and burn through cash thinking they're doing a good job because they get something on sale or use coupons. It's pretty sad to watch given America has the most incredible wealth building tools in the history of the world that so few people know how to use.
And credit should be more regulated. Most people can barely calculate what they will owe on a loan to see how much future earnings they are giving up to make a purchase now. They don't understand the idea of compound interest for their benefit must less grasp the power of compound interest against them when they pay for something with a high interest rate. I haven't kept long-term debt for probably 25 years or so now. I cleared my debt out and never touched it again. Debt is stress and negative income. I want nothing to do with it unless I am using it to purchase an asset that will make more than it costs.
I've never been much sure how you manage a nation of humans of differing intelligence and capabilities. Hard place to legislate and regulate for some kind of equity. All I know is right now they are not doing a great job, especially when it comes to property ownership and medical costs. It will be interesting to see if the younger generation can use these new tools available to them to improve things or just get lost in the digital world and forget like some dystopian movies seem to think they will do.
I'm not advocating moving away from Social Security, either. It's too entrenched, would be prohibitively expensive to buy out current retirees, politically unfeasible. I'm just wishing that if we were to design a system from the get-go, that I wouldn't use current workers to support retirees.
I've read a few books prior to my retirement regarding Social Security. The one that I got the most out of was titled
"Get What's Yours". It argued that people shouldn't look at their SS benefit as an accountant would, in other words, trying to figure out how to get the maximum number of dollars over your expected lifetime. Rather, they encouraged people to look at their SS benefit as insurance against a retiree's greatest fear, running out of money before they die. That resonated with me, so I delayed taking my SS benefit until I was 70, which increased my monthly premium by 132% of my FRA, or full retirement amount, the amount I would have collected had I started taking my SS at 66, my FRA date (it's now age 67).
My wife has both MS and Rheumatoid Arthritis, and can't get LTC insurance, and if I die before her, she'll get my benefit amount. I figured that one of us should live long enough to where one of us could take advantage of that higher benefit. It's really paid off now as I've been drawing $4k/month on my SS alone for almost a year now.
In the meantime, not taking my SS kept my income low, which allowed me to transfer funds from my traditional IRA to my Roth and pay tax at 10% vs. 22%, the next highest tax bracket. I heard of that little trick by going to a free SS class a few years before I retired, and the strategy was reinforced by my financial advisor.
I agree completely with credit being more regulated and said so earlier. I hate saying it, but we have to protect the idiots from themselves. There are credit card companies that literally prey on those idiots who spend money they don't have. I keep hearing these advertising slogans that get me upset: "
Good, credit, bad credit, no credit, no problem!" But liberals will argue that in restricting access to credit that you're punishing poor people from obtaining credit that the rich people already have. I don't see it that way.
Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2025 5:39 pm