Author Topic: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"  (Read 5741 times)

mustachecat

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"Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« on: August 26, 2012, 07:23:26 AM »
http://money.msn.com/retirement/6-reasons-youll-never-retire

Ahem.

I'm sure this guy can't really be serious and wrote this solely for the click-throughs, but...

"If you have $10 million saved up, and it yields the typical money market rate of about 0.5%, that means $50,000 a year in income. If you supplement that with Social Security -- the average monthly Social Security benefit for retired workers in December 2010 was $1,175.50 -- you could be fine."

Emphasis mine.

MrSaturday

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Re: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« Reply #1 on: August 26, 2012, 08:37:51 AM »
Quick, move my entire stash to a crappy savings account!

Those $10 millions aren't going to make themselves.

Jamesqf

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Re: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« Reply #2 on: August 26, 2012, 03:41:45 PM »
I think the guy's got some fundamental misconceptions.  From the beginning
Quote
Once upon a time, people stopped working at age 65 and enjoyed years of golf and grandchildren...
seems like an overblown stereotype, even for the conventional retirement.  How many people actually enjoy golf?  Grandchildren might be ok for a couple of weeks a year, and occasional major holidays, but as a permanent fixture?

The there's the old "a rule of thumb is that you need 60% of your pre-retirement income to live comfortably after you retire" canard.  Yeah, maybe, if you lived your pre-retirement life spending every dime of your income.  The rest of us only need to match some fraction of our pre-retirement spending.  In my case, even if the fraction is 100%, that's only a couple of thousand a month, with half going towards a mortgage that'll be paid off around the time I hit standard retirement age.  So I figure I can live comfortable after retirement on about $20K/year, and I'm not going to leave my 'stash in a money market account at 0.5%.

MMM

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Re: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« Reply #3 on: August 26, 2012, 09:58:03 PM »
Wowee - thanks for sharing that, M. Cat.

I knew that Forbes and MSN mostly crank out cheap shit just to keep their pages full, but that one is so bad, it's just.. amazing.

I love the references to the 0.5% money market fund, and quoting a 10-year stock market return as if that's the only time period one would ever want to consider (I'm personally much more excited about the 100% return from the crash in 2008 until today, for example).

We need a new an entirely new set of news media - just package up the whole bundle we've got right now, toss them in the trash, and start anew.

On the positive side, a few people from really big media places have started poking around, asking for interviews relating to this early retirement wave we're talking about here. CBC in Canada, and Yahoo in the US. We'll see if anything comes of that. It could be quite a shock to the system, if it were to catch on and get more coverage for an extended period of time, with lots of happy/normal-seeming people being featured as examples.

mustachecat

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Re: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« Reply #4 on: August 27, 2012, 07:48:21 AM »
Yes, this writer is egregiously, hilariously awful, and again, I really can't imagine how this was written with a straight face--but that doesn't make it any less awful.

MMM, that's super exciting! I hope you'll get a fair shake. I know of a few people who have nonmainstream beliefs/opinions (mostly in the health world, around paleo and calorie restriction) who have sworn off all media requests because while they have a fine experience working with what seem like respectful, curious journalists, the resulting stories end up skewed and sensationalist.

Petruchio

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Re: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« Reply #5 on: August 29, 2012, 04:25:49 PM »
+1 to Jamesqf
Wow, with every paragraph I felt my insides twist itself up from its facile assumptions and dreadful analysis. The example of putting 10 million dollars in a money market account is hilarious. It is almost as if he had never met a retired person who was not a multimillionaire.

It is articles like these which make me appreciate the internet. Once upon a time there were only magazines and newspapers. Now we live in a more civilized world where we have a plethora of blogs and forums which do not lower themselves to churn out cheap writing in order to get new content. Especially content with the message, "You work like a dog, then you die."

mindaugas

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Re: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« Reply #6 on: August 30, 2012, 08:05:44 AM »
lol, u guys are silly. Of course the author wrote this believing every word. Most of the folks out there, dare I say the majority of them, believe early retirement is just a fantasy meant only for frugal hippies. After all, you're advocating more than just early retirement, it's a drastic lifestyle change for most people.

happy

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Re: "Six Reasons You'll Never Retire"
« Reply #7 on: September 21, 2012, 07:19:26 PM »
Maybe things are different in US, but when in the times my grandparents retired, it was normal for "old people" to live on very little: being frugal was the norm. Of course these folks all lived through the depression in the 1930s, and knew how to do it.   Part of the problem is surely people not wishing to reduce expenditure .. My grandmothers lived to 88,89, living frugally on an aged pension for close on 25 years.