Monday, April 23, 2012

Quote of the Day

April 23, 2012
How to Beat Wall Street -- With Social Security

But for Social Security to adjust, Congress must act. The plan's current math uses a return assumption that dates to 1983. It assumes investors can easily find risk-free investments that pay 2.9% after inflation.

Welcome to the 21st century!

3 comments:

  1. I'll take the $84,000 in my 60s rather than wait for $800/mo more when I turn 67.

    Break-even on waiting looks like 9 years. Living longer than that would be its own reward : )

    I *do* wonder WTH the yen is going to do. Retiring to some central american weak-currency environment doesn't appeal to me in the slightest, but if the yen is back down to 320 or whatever I'd be all over that in 2030.

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  2. Have I mentioned that in 2030 there will be 80 million medicare beneficiaries? : )

    Currently there are ~50M beneficaries so by numbers alone that's a 60% increase in the support burden by 2030. Japan on the otherhand only has a ~6M increase on a 30M population, or 20%.

    I was looking at SS's GDP "intermediate" growth projections and they don't look too egregious, less than 2% pa annual growth really.

    Pretty easy to get that, just keep virtualizing our daily activities. And to think I was actually working for a VR company back in the day . . . little did I understand how important that was going to be for our economy, tho of course our games *sucked* -- their negative utility didn't help anything.

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  3. Troy,

    Break-even on waiting looks like 9 years. Living longer than that would be its own reward : )

    If I had to choose right now, I'd wait. I'm more of a worst case planner.

    If I die before the 9 years is up then I don't need the money. If I die well after the 9 years then I definitely could use the extra cash flow.

    That's assuming the extra cash flow would be there of course. Sigh.

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