It’s Old People Who Are Screwed, Not Millennials

Truth in a three-minute read

I read a depressing article today:

Around 65% of Americans have less than $100,000 saved for retirement… And of that group, more than one-quarter have less than $1,000 socked away…

If you reach retirement age with $100,000 in the bank, just how far will that money go?

I dislike old adages, but if you don’t learn from history, you just might be doomed to repeat it.

There’s only one thing to take out of this oh crap, look at how many old people live in relative poverty in retirement article.

It’s not that you — person who is 20, 30, or 40-something — needs to save and invest more. That’s obvious and often repeated by the old and tired retirement industry. Obvious and often repeated, though not necessarily realistic for a whole host of factors we’ll leave on today’s cutting room floor.

The takeaway — remove the word “retirement” from your vocabulary. Avoid setting target ages and magic nest egg numbers. Forget the 4%, 10% or any other rule about how to draw down your investments. This is all cart before the horse stuff. And we’re talking about a horse that might never leave the barn.

It goes back to my very first Medium article:

Life doesn’t follow a linear trajectory. It happens in fits and starts on a seemingly disjointed path if you subscribe to the notion that school leads to work, work leads to marriage and kids, marriage and kids lead to retirement, and retirement leads to death…

To essentially call your own shots, you need a plan. And that plan has nothing to do with amassing a million dollars. There is no such thing as a traditional retirement plan because, increasingly, for quite a few of us, there’s no such thing as a traditional retirement.

If you’re a millennial, read the writing on the wall.

Learn from your elders’ mistakes.

The biggest mistake they made — the ones with so little to live on — isn’t that they didn’t save or invest enough. They didn’t have a plan to deal with the writing they must have seen on the wall. That they weren’t going to have enough money to live an average, let alone comfortable life in “retirement.”

If you’re a millennial, here’s a rough sketch of the plan these older folks likely didn’t have:

• Focus on your physical health.
• Focus on securing consistent work that endures. That you can do if you find yourself physically unhealthy.
• Focus on your mental health.
• Focus on ensuring you have the mindset to do work that endures for eternity.
• Focus on finding a partner who lives simply, but likes nice things. Who you can just be with. Every outing isn’t a trip to Rome. But, if you’re lucky you can make something like that happen one or more times per year.
• Focus on cash flow.
• Focus on allocating that cash flow amid an insanely low cost of living as to have cash surpluses every month.

If you do these things, you’ll crush your non-linear life and rarely, if ever think about “retirement.”

This article is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.